Rock Candy

Nichols is a graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts, also home to the film’s co-producer, David Gordon Green (director of George Washington and the recent Snow Angels), and Shotgun Stories is broadly in the category of what we sniggering urbanites used to call “deadbeat regionalism” (before the indie movement was kicked into the mainstream by Quentin Tarantino and Harvey Weinstein). But the sensibility here is more subversive, more attuned to the South’s subliminal violence. Adam Stone’s wide-screen cinematography captures the heat and the corrosive moisture, the lush green of the cotton fields and the rust of the pickup trucks, the natural beauty juxtaposed with the unnatural human debris. The place is breathtaking—and utterly indifferent to the people who inhabit it.

"If there's one below-the-radar American movie of the past year that has caused film buffs, on their way out of festival screenings, to call their friends and demand, 'Why the hell haven't we heard more about this one?' - that movie is Shotgun Stories... I honestly believe that in another era Shotgun Stories might have become a huge hit."