Roy: I'll always worry about you, Al. I like worrying about you. That's the deal.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2016/03/jeff_nichols_midnight_special_with_michael_shannon_reviewed.html

So let’s dispel with this fiction that Jeff Nichols doesn’t know what he’s doing. Jeff Nichols knows exactly what he’s doing—he always has and he always will. Midnight Special is rather plainly a story about faith. Alton’s road trip really only takes us from one arbitrary point on the map to another, because the only journey that Nichols is interested in chronicling is our own. Taking us from obliviousness, to skepticism, and finally to belief, Midnight Special invites viewers to experience true surrender to the unknown (and, ultimately, the unknowable). The narrative trajectory is like a simulation of what it must be like to encounter a child like Alton, who seems pretty normal until a thick blue tractor beam shoots out of his eyes and offers anyone caught in its light a vision of … something. But all parents see their kid as the second coming; the challenge is in surrendering children to the world at large and trusting that the universe will do right by the next generation (and vice versa).
That’s a fraught emotional process, readying yourself to relinquish your child. The problem is that Nichols fails to dramatize it.

JN: This film is a culmination of a narrative experiment that I started with "Shotgun Stories," to try to remove as much exposition as I possibly could. Which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist; I built character backstories for all these people, and an entire story for this place Alton wants to get to, and then I made a rule – no character can speak about something that the other character already knows about.

http://www.indiewire.com/article/midnight-special-interview-jeff-nichols-michael-shannon-kirsten-dunst-joel-edgerton-20160309

Why do you and Jeff have such a strong bond?
MS: We kind of travel similar paths in life, we have similar points of view and perspectives and experiences that are common. Like our upbringing, where we come from, the South, our experience of being parents. I feel there’s an archetype that Jeff summons me to do, which is the inarticulate man who’s full of thoughts and feelings and emotions and yet not really capable of expressing himself. That’s something that I can recall from growing up, being around people like that.
JN: It’s different with the smaller roles he does for me, like "Mud" and the next film, "Loving." But in these lead roles he allows me to write more efficiently. He carries so much subtext on his face. He’s able to fill in all of the things that I want to purposefully leave blank, he understands the character and the situation and the context, and is somehow able to present all that without saying a word. And that’s a very unique quality. It allows me to write this way, because I know Mike will be there for me.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/jeff-nichols-talks-making-midnight-special-casting-and-why-adam-driver-is-the-most-important-actor-of-our-generation-20160322

And so I had to ask myself, “Why am I around as a father?” And the answer to that question, I think, is just to try to understand who my son is, to try to help him understand who he is, and try to help him become who he’s supposed to be and be happy. That’s what fatherhood is about, that’s what parenthood is about, and that became the trajectory for Mike Shannon’s character and Kirsten Dunst’s character through the film. Then all of a sudden, this kind of silly, sci-fi chase movie starts to feel a little less silly.

Todd Rohal, another indie director, agreed. “If the characters know more than we do, that’s an interesting mystery,” he said. “But if the movie clearly knows more than we do, then we get frustrated.” This is a central issue for Nichols. He is fascinated by an audience’s “threshold for ambiguity.” With less spelled out, viewers become active participants in the unfolding of the story, he said. “And that’s really cool, if you can get people to basically rewatch scenes in your movie in their heads while it’s still going on. What’s really important is the bigger themes and emotions that you’re trying to get people to access.”

http://www.wired.com/2016/03/jeff-nichols-midnight-special/

Nichols knew that there was a limit to how much confusion any audience could take. And he always bumped right up against it. In each of his previous films, he’d omitted an explanatory scene he’d believed was essential. He’d never regretted it. Case in point, Shotgun Stories: Nichols filmed a scene that explains how Shannon’s character got gruesome shotgun scars on his back. “Deleting that scene was the smartest thing I’ve ever done. The story got better, because the audience began building that story for themselves. And it clarified for me what my approach needs to be. Like, OK: no backstory,” he said. He acknowledged, however, that in removing much of the exposition in Midnight Special he’d “taken that concept possibly too far.”

You've cited Close Encounters and Starman as influences, and some of those setpieces have been kind of reinterpreted and recontextualized here. What about those elements was interesting to you? Well, there are a lot of aesthetic parallels and we can talk about those all day long, because I'm into them, obviously. But really it was about the way those movies felt to me when I was growing up. I'm a kid of the '80s, so going to the movies meant going to see a Spielberg film. And before I understood the mechanics, I understood how they made me feel, and I wanted to make a movie that felt like that, I wanted to make a movie that was mysterious and strange that then developed into this sense of awe. The problem is, you take all those original inspirations and you realize, you have to make them your own, you have to subvert them. You have to actually kill the thing you love. I did it in Shotgun Stories, and I did it here. I'll use [a scene from] Midnight Special as the example. They get in the car, the chase scene is about to start, and then they just hit traffic. And it's the dumbest chase scene ever. The most anticlimactic thing in the world, but because of the situation you understand how powerless [Michael Shannon's character Roy] is. Then all of the sudden it's not about "how well can Nichols direct a chase sequence?" It's about all of this tension that Mike Shannon has behind the steering wheel — he can't do anything, he's powerless. To me, it's a much more intense thing to watch than a well executed chase scene.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/13/11209378/midnight-special-jeff-nichols-interview-sxsw

JN: My son wasn’t old enough when I was writing this for us to have that conversation, but I imagined how heartbreaking it must be to hear your child say you don’t have to worry about me. In a way, it’s what we all want to hear, but I think, in that particular moment, the boy is trying to help his father, because the boy knows how hard this is on him. So the boy is trying to be the parent. And Mike’s character kind of takes that back. It just felt like something I would say to my son. It’s like, well, I know you’re trying to comfort me, I appreciate that, but here’s the deal: I don’t have a choice in this.
AVC: Did the movie start from that feeling? JN: No. This was a unique case in that it started on the genre side of things. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to say about parenthood. I knew I was feeling these intense things. When my son was 8 months old he had a febrile seizure. You know if you’re in the first year—my wife and I refer to it as the “darkness.” You’re just underwater. Your whole life is changed with that first child. Your social behaviors are all turned upside down, you’re sleep deprived, but eight months in my son had this seizure and it just woke me up to the idea that, oh no, this can end. And it can end in a way that will destroy you forever. I think that is when I felt an emotion palpable enough to insert into a film. It was odd that at the time I had a sci-fi chase movie built. But I’ve made enough of these things now that that’s how I roll. You take a genre structure and then you just dismantle it by making it specific and personal.

AVC: It takes a very long time before we learn the relationship between Roy and Lucas, the Joel Edgerton character—why they’re even traveling together or how they know each other. So if you’re thinking about character the whole time, are you giving the actors more than you’re showing? JN: Of course, yeah. You sit there and you tell everybody, this is where you’ve been. This is how you know each other. They need to know those things. The audience doesn’t need to know them. The characters need to know them because it has to exist in all the subtext of the scenes that come before. You need to know the relationship. Lucas needs to know his relationship to this boy, and to Mike Shannon’s character. All that stuff is built. The lack of talking about it just comes from a creative choice on my part as a writer. Something I’ve been dabbling with in all my films for a long time. This was kind of the extreme version of it, which is to just treat dialogue as behavior. In a film script, you have lines of dialogue, you have lines of action. “He crosses the room, he picks up the coffee mug.” You’re not going to say, “He picks up the coffee mug because his mother abandoned him when he was 3.” No writer would ever think to do that because it would be stupid. But for some reason writers think it’s okay to do that in the lines of dialogue. You have to treat the dialogue as behavior, the way you would treat the lines of action. So in that car, moving, they know why they’re there. There’s no need for them to stop and explain that to each other. And you have to create situations that make sense when people do talk. It made sense for me that Kirsten Dunst’s character would come outside and just say, “Who are you?” That felt like an organic moment in the film. But there was this great scene between Mike, Kirsten, and Sam Shepard’s character on the Ranch, when Sam Shepard’s character—before all this started, several years ago—came to them and told them that he was actually the real father of the boy and he was going to take the boy away from them. It’s a killer scene. But I could never find an appropriate place to have people talk about it. It always felt forced. AVC: And you weren’t going to do a flashback. JN: Never. I had to live with the rule. We just don’t get to talk about that. But you’ve got these really great actors, and you tell them that, and I think when they first meet you feel that there’s this sorrow between these two characters. Like they want to hug each other, they want to be together but they can’t be together because of this thing that happened. And they both obviously love the son, so it just makes you wonder what happened. And if I’m going to play by these rules as a writer, I have to be okay with being as much as you get. Maybe a better writer would find an organic way, but I didn’t.

AVC: Don’t sell yourself short there. I was leaving the screening with a colleague who also really liked it, and—speaking of the relationship between the Dunst and Shannon characters—that he thought that it was about the loss of a child. JN: That’s why Kirsten’s character is so important. Because she’s the stronger of the two. Mike is the one that’s kind of the relentless protector, but he’s not capable of one very important thing, which is understanding what ultimately has to happen—and Kirsten’s character does. Partly because of what has happened in their past, but also because she’s a mother. They’re the ones that bring these children into the world, and she understands where he needs to go maybe better than the father does. And it’s a weird narrative structure. It’s a weird thing to spend all this time with the father—it’s a father-son movie, and the mother doesn’t come in until 30 minutes in—and then you do this handoff for these final scenes. I felt like I could get away with it, though. Partly because it felt necessary, because it just didn’t feel like Mike Shannon was the one to do it. So you have this narrative gesture of him leading everybody away from the boy. And from that point on, his life doesn’t matter anymore. And I liked that idea. And that’s what made me feel like I could get away with this, you know, handoff, in the final moments.

http://www.avclub.com/article/midnight-special-director-jeff-nichols-keeping-sci-233781