Hamptons International Film Festival Opens With Jeff Nichols’s ‘Loving’

There’s was a moment in the last minutes of the U.S. premiere screening of Jeff Nichols’s “Loving”—in East Hampton on Thursday as the opening night film of the Hamptons International Film Festival—when it became clear that the movie had an invisible grip on the audience.

The film’s epilogue reveals that eight years after the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia—deeming prohibitions on interracial marriage as unconstitutional after Richard and Mildred Loving were arrested in 1958 for being married—Richard Loving was killed by a drunk driver. When that text faded into the screen, the entire audience that packed Guild Hall collectively gasped, like they all lost a loved one.

“Loving,” which he both wrote and directed, is Mr. Nichols’s second film to be released this year and a far cry from his first film of 2016, the sci-fi drama “Midnight Special,” released back in March. While his previous films have ranged from a father protecting his son and his extraordinary abilities (“Midnight Special”), to boyhood maturity through a friendship with an escaped convict (2012’s “Mud”), “Loving” appeared to be both his most straightforward and most challenging film to date.

It’s the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga), a white man and a black woman in Virginia who, despite getting legally married in Washington, D.C., were arrested and exiled from their home state due to racial prejudice. Their story turned into the Loving v. Virginia case, a landmark moment for civil rights in America.

Mr. Nichols’s film focuses on the relationship between Richard and Mildred as they deal with raising a family away from where they once called home, and the long struggle they went through to have the wrongs done to them righted.

“I think that the social relevance today is massive,” Mr. Nichols said. “On one hand, you have all of its connections to race and how frequently it’s used in debates on race and marriage equality. But what you really have is an example of two people who loved each other very much. You have something that’s almost apolitical in its nature, because they were apolitical in nature. And why that is relevant is because we have all of these discussions and debates on equality, marriage equality, racial equality, and I think it’s very easy for us as a society to forget the humanity of all of those things. The Lovings show us the humanity in all of those things.”

Mr. Nichols is the sole writer of the script, though he gives credit for the inspiration and background research for the film to Nancy Buirski’s 2011 documentary, “The Loving Story.” Ms. Buirski serves as a producer on “Loving” and joined Mr. Nichols onstage for the Q&A after the screening. Mr. Nichols was asked to do a narrative version of the documentary and, while hesitant at first, he earned some extra motivation from his wife.

“She told me that if I didn’t do it, she’d divorce me,” he said, which garnered laughs from the audience.

“It’s almost a miracle, how well this all came together,” Ms. Buirski said. “Even when I got the first draft of the script, it was almost perfect.”

Mr. Nichols said the hardest part of writing the movie was filling in the unknowns about how the Lovings lived their lives from their marriage in 1958 to the 1967 court decision.

“That was the hardest creative decision to make with the movie, but that sent me down this path of making a movie that was strictly from their point of view. As a standard rule, I like to find the main characters and stick with them.”

Mr. Nichols was approached to write and direct the film in the summer of 2012 and finished the script in August 2013. But due to the long production of “Midnight Special,” which took nearly a year to make after starting in January 2014, Mr. Nichols didn’t get to start shooting “Loving” on location in Virginia until last fall.

Part of Mr. Nichols’ research was talking to the Lovings’ youngest daughter, Peggy, who is the last surviving child of Richard and Mildred.

“I remember when I first showed the script to Peggy. She flipped through it for about 15 minutes, looked up with tears in her eyes and said, ‘They’re all gone,’” Mr. Nichols said. “It reminded me how serious this project was.”

“When we had the first screening, Peggy walked out at the end of it and looked pretty stern,” Ms. Buirski said. “She came up to me and said, ‘I really have a problem,’ and it was so scary. But then she said, ‘Gotcha!’ She loved it.”

The film festival loved it as well. So much so that Mr. Nichols was presented with the Victor Rabinowitz & Joanne Grant Award for Social Justice on behalf of the festival by Marc Rabinowitz, the son of the award’s namesakes.