With the arrival of Midnight Special, director Jeff Nichols is fulfilling a childhood dream of making big-budget movies with substance. The director of such beloved underseen indies as Take Shelter and Shotgun Stories and the sleeper hit Mud, Nichols now has his biggest opportunity yet to tell personal stories for a mass audience. But unlike other recent indie sensations who have gotten their big breaks by slipping seamlessly into pre-existing franchises, Nichols is making his first studio movie resolutely on his own terms.

A blend of 70s Close Encounters–style sci-fi and a deeply felt family story, Midnight Special flirts with genre while going its own way—more precisely, answering far fewer questions about its supernatural leanings than most studio films dare. Even Nichols admits it’s a bit of a stubborn response to audiences who might have balked at the ambiguity of his previous films. “I was like, ‘Fuck this. Fuck everybody. You don’t like these speeches? You think this is too cute? Well, here’s Midnight Special.’ I’m going to take out every piece of fucking information in this movie and just give you the essence of what this thing is.” He pauses. “Perhaps I overcorrected.”

So how does a guy get handed a studio budget and final cut and turn in a movie that refuses to give an audience what it wants? It’s a story that involves tenacity, long stretches of poverty, a little bit of luck, and a filmmaker who promises, even as he chases that big success, “I am going to make movies about who I am.”

Nichols was always certain of only two things: that he wanted to make movies, and that he needed to leave his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, to make them. In the University of North Carolina School of the Arts film program he had the type of enriching experience that colleges are designed to provide; he was introduced to artists like author Larry Brown (“he just blew the back of my head open”) and his chief filmmaking inspiration, Terrence Malick. These were the halcyon days, says Nichols, “where they didn’t know how to keep us from doing cool stuff.”

One of those “cool” things was his trip to the Cannes Film Festival in 2000, via a Kodak internship, where he wore a tuxedo purchased by his mom at Dillard’s and sat in the nosebleed section, taking it all in. “This is it,” he remembers thinking. “This is how people are supposed to watch movies.”

Without a feature script to sell out of film school, Nichols moved back home with his parents for a year and banged out a script while working for minimum wage at a pizza place. “Life was getting dark fast,” he recalls. As most of his film school friends moved to Los Angeles, Nichols—uninterested in fetching coffee on a studio lot—moved to Austin, Texas, instead, and was hired on Margaret Brown’s film Be Here to Love Me. It was Brown who gifted Nichols a copy of Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles, a title “so cool” it inspired the name of Nichols’s first feature, Shotgun Stories. She’s also the person who set him up with a roommate, Missy; five years later she would become Nichols’s wife.

Nichols spent the bulk of 2003 repeating one line to himself: “Make a movie in September of 2004.” With money inherited from one grandmother, begged from another, and borrowed from everyone else who loved him, Nichols was “desperate to just make something.” That something was Shotgun Stories, a family drama set in rural Arkansas starring Michael Shannon, already an established Chicago theater actor. “We shot the whole movie blind, because I couldn’t afford to pay for dailies,” Nichols says. Each day he and the crew cautiously waded into the unknown as footage stacked up in the office inside his dad’s furniture store.

When Shotgun Stories was submitted to (and promptly rejected by) Sundance, “It broke my heart,” he says. But Nichols and his supportive team rallied. Shotgun Stories was accepted into the Berlinale—the Berlin International Film Festival—and a series of festivals after that, which allowed Nichols to travel “around the world with the movie” penniless. “I was so broke,” he says. “They had these filmmaker receptions, and I’d stick food in my pockets. I was drinking free beer and getting real drunk because I was so hungry.”

Shotgun Stories earned critical acclaim, including a spot on Rogert Ebert’s 2008 list of the best movies of the year, but only led to offers like the one Nichols received shortly after its late 2007 release. Jeff and Missy had just sent out their invitations for their March 29, 2008, wedding. When the job came through and the producer told Nichols, “You’re moving to Louisiana in two weeks,” Nichols protested, “That’s my wedding.”

The producer’s response? “You need to think about what your priorities are.”

Nichols remembers this encounter in painful detail. “She started crying, and I started crying. You know, do we move the wedding date? What do we do about this? And we decided we’re not going to move the wedding date. We’ll figure it out.”

Within the month, the studio went bankrupt. An apologetic phone call from the producer never came. The film will be released this year, though, with a shockingly talentless pop star at its center.

“My wife and I joke about it a lot,” Nichols says now. “Never move the wedding date. Because these movies are thin air until you’re sitting in the theater watching it. They’re all fake.”

Two years after Shotgun Stories—a gap that might as well be two decades in the film industry—Nichols started anew. Inspired by The Hurt Locker, which he believed to be Kathryn Bigelow’s remake of Point Break (“but as an indie film”), “I thought, let me make a genre film like an independent film, which ended up being Take Shelter.”

A story about a father (Shannon) who is convinced the end of the world is nigh, Take Shelter brims with the urgency of someone fighting for his livelihood—which is precisely what Nichols was doing at the time, expecting his first child even as his bank account continued to dwindle.

With pressure mounting from all angles, Nichols describes how he nearly fell apart one day on set, when a tricky special effect involving water went awry. “I try not to yell, but this was fucked,” he recalls. It was cinematographer Adam Stone, who has worked on all of Nichols’s movies, who stepped forward with a solution. “Not to get cheesy about it, but that was the beginning of understanding what it means to have a family of people help make your movie,” he says. “They were babies. We were all babies back then.”

Accepted into Sundance, Take Shelter, like Shotgun Stories, met with critical acclaim but not much else. With a six-month old child to feed, a big studio “offered me a million dollars” to remake an 80s horror classic, Nichols remembers. He passed.

“You’re tested with doing one for them, or doing one for you,” says Nichols.

The next one for him? Mud, which had potential producers immediately vexed: “Why would you ever want to go make this obscure indie film with an actor that no one likes anymore?” The actor was Matthew McConaughey, who would star in Mud one year before winning the Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club.

“And then Mud comes out,” says Nichols, still exasperated, “and that whole saga happens where nobody wants to buy it.” The film premiered at Cannes to a “terrible buyers’ screening.” “Harvey Weinstein walked out an hour in, apparently. I didn’t know it, but my film was tanking. It was dying.”

This triggered Nichols’s depression, which had remained dormant since his days as a pizza delivery boy. “I was questioning my sanity,” he says. “I was like, Mud’s good. Maybe it’s not as intellectual as Take Shelter, but it’s really good.”

Sitting in distribution purgatory, Roadside Attractions teamed with Lionsgate to put the film in theaters. “Not only are they not buying the film, we actually paid them to release it.” With limited promotional support from Lionsgate, Mud beat the odds, going on to gross $32 million worldwide. Until Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine was released, the movie was the highest-grossing independent film of 2013.

That success catapulted Nichols into another stratosphere, at least mentally. He was no longer entirely comfortable operating in the indie world. His heart was set on Warner Bros., “the studio for filmmakers,” he believes. “They have Clint Eastwood, Christopher Nolan, Ben Affleck,” he explains. “They did smart fan boy stuff really well, which is the way I saw the marketing aspect for my movie.” He made an impassioned case, but the exalted studio politely passed. And then the phone rang. “My agent rang and said, ‘The head of Warner Bros. just saw Mud and flipped out. He wants to meet you.’ ”

There was one condition that Nichols had to put on the table from the start. “There’s a problem,” Nichols told Warner Bros. production executive Jeff Robinov. “I only work with final cut. I know you guys are a studio, and I’m a young guy, and you don’t know me. But that’s what I require.”

Robinov sat back in his chair, silent, as Nichols tells it. “How much were you going to make this movie for?” he asked. Nichols blurted out “$18 million.”

“I tell you what. You make this movie here for $18 million. I’ll even give you wiggle room up to $20 million. You can have final cut.”

The script for Midnight Special was written while Mud was foundering on the festival circuit. “I was really questioning myself that summer,” Nichols says, which led to the “fuck everybody” attitude that makes Midnight Special far more ambiguous than your average sci-fi adventure. The story of a father (Shannon) and son (Jaeden Lieberher) with extraordinary powers on the run from authorities in search of an uncertain destiny, Midnight Special is unapologetically ambitious and laconic.

And it’s not for everyone. At test screenings, Nichols admits, “They weren’t too keen on it.” Audiences longed for exposition and answers. Nichols insists it’s all there. “It’s real easy to not pay attention to that film and miss a lot.,” he says. “I did the work. You just gotta pay attention.”

In the YouTube comments section for the Midnight Special trailer, which Nichols has been masochistically reading/tracking since its release, someone asks, “Is it too early to call Jeff Nichols the next Steven Spielberg?” For Nichols, that kind of expectation is as jarring as bad reviews. “People want you to be something,” he says. “They see one of your movies and like it, and they want something from you that has nothing to do with what you are.”

Plenty of filmmakers have seen their careers dictated by the whims of the general public. Nichols is the antithesis of that. He hears what you want. He just doesn’t really give a damn.

“Like the movies, don’t like the movies, like this [one] better than that one. I don’t give a shit,” he declares. “I know how to make a fucking movie. Let’s take that question off the table, which, for me, has been on the table through all of this.”

Coming up later this year is Loving, also starring Midnight Specials Joel Edgerton and Shannon, about the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage. Picked up by Focus Features at the Berlin International Film Festival, the same place where Shotgun Stories first launched his career, it’s Nichols’s first shot at a very different kind of mainstream success—the awards, a hopeful prestige picture. But for now Nichols, a decade into making films that challenge the very audiences they target, is staying realistic about what might happen. He calls Loving “the best crafted film I’ve ever made. Which isn’t to say it’s the best film. I know how to write a movie. I know how to direct a movie. It doesn’t mean I know how to write and direct a movie anybody will like and pay money to see.”