Actor Michael Shannon can still remember the exact moment writer-director Jeff Nichols told him about their new movie, Midnight Special. They were making Take Shelter, Nichols's 2011 breakthrough movie and their second collaboration after his debut, Shotgun Stories.
“He said he had an idea for a chase movie: just you and an old car going real fast,” says Shannon. “That’s about it. That was the pitch.”
While that seed of an idea remained, Midnight Special grew into something far more than a simple "chase movie".
A science-fiction adventure, in the mould of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind or John Carpenter's Starman, it stars Shannon as Roy, a blue-collar dad whose 8-year-old son, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), displays unearthly powers that no one understands.
“I don’t honestly think Roy knows what the hell’s going on,” says Shannon, 41. “All Roy knows is that he loves his son.”
That initial chase element comes into play as Roy and his friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) go on the run, taking Alton from Texas to Florida with the government in hot pursuit. The film also stars Kirsten Dust and Star Wars – Episode VII: The Force Awakens villain Adam Driver.
Nichols, too, remembers making that first pitch to Shannon.
“I knew there was probably a kid with superpowers in the back seat.”
For Shannon, it is another intriguing role in a two-decade career that began in 1993 with a bit part opposite Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.
Since then, he has appeared with Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky, Eminem in 8 Mile and, in one of his less illustrious roles, some CGI marsupials in Kangaroo Jack. But it is only recently that he's begun to emerge from the shadows of other stars.
After being Oscar-nominated for his turn in director Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road in 2008, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, Shannon had a prominent role as a troubled prohibition agent in the Martin Scorsese-produced HBO hit Boardwalk Empire, which ran for five seasons from 2010.
He then shifted into blockbuster territory, playing Superman's nemesis General Zod in 2013's Man of Steel, reprising the role briefly in this year's Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. He also gave a memorable performance alongside Andrew Garfield and Laura Dern in the 2014 housin-crisis drama 99 Homes.
“I’m a bit surprised by all this, really,” say the Kentucky-born actor. “When I was a little boy, this was not what I imagined my life would be.”
It is with Nichols that Shannon has the most symbiotic filmmaking relationship. He has appeared in all of the director's films so far, with cameos in Mud (2012) and Loving, which will have its world premiere in Cannes next month.
"If you take Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter and Midnight Special, it seems to be a trilogy of sorts," says Nichols, "and it seems to be my development as an adult, as played by Mike Shannon."
The way Shannon sees it, Nichols's theme of parents and children runs deep, notably in Take Shelter, in which he plays a man torn apart by a desire to protect his family.
“This notion of being a man, being a father and the difficulties that come along with that – me and Jeff both became fathers around the same time – and I think that’s really affected us as people and as artists,” says Shannon.
Shannon lives in Brooklyn, New York, and has two daughters with his partner, actor Kate Arrington, while Nichols has a young son.
"What's interesting is ... in Take Shelter, that was before my son was born," says Nichols, "and [Midnight Special] was very much written after my son was out of the womb. And so it really became a film not about two guys in a car moving through back roads in the American South at night, it became about my relationship with my son."
In addition to his appearance in Loving – a real-life story of an interracial relationship in 1950s America, starring Midnight Special's Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga – Shannon has no fewer than seven films in the works, including Elvis and Nixon and Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals. He must have a good team behind him, scheduling all those movies?
“Yeah,” he says. “But at the end of the day, I’m the one who has to get out of bed when the alarm goes off, put the make-up on and say the lines.”
Midnight Special is in cinemas on Thursday, April 28