In a 2024 interview with A. Frame,
Jeff Nichols detailed what longtime collaborator
Michael Shannon brought to a key scene in the film: "I knew I wanted Mike to play Zipco, because I had heard some of the original audio of
Danny Lyon's interviews with Zipco and he sounded like Michael Shannon. I also knew I had these two great monologues for Zipco, and I just couldn't wait to see Mike deliver those. I knew that he would make them even better, because he makes everything better. But his casting ended up being really impactful to the overall film.
I remember, specifically, when we shot his second monologue, which we did during the first week of filming; it's this scene where he's sitting around a campfire talking about his experience with the draft board. Mike and I don't really rehearse. We don't talk a lot before we start shooting, because he's so damn smart that he always has everything pretty well figured out on his own. He doesn't really need to hear anything from me. But before we started filming that scene, Mike came up to me and he said, 'Nichols, you think this is pretty funny, don't you?' I said, 'Yeah, I do. Your mom gets you out of bed and drags you to the draft board, and you fail all the tests and you yell at the draft guys. It seems pretty funny to me.' The way Mike curses in that scene is, for the record, incredible. But I said that to Mike and he responded, 'Yeah, I don't think it's funny at all.' I was taken aback a bit, but I said, 'Well, all right, Mike. Show me what you think this really should look like.'
So he delivers this monologue, and everyone's sitting around the campfire with him... The whole gang's literally there, and they all get to listen to Mike Shannon do this amazing thing where he starts to tell a joke and he gets everybody laughing, and then he flips it and says, 'They told me, 'You're an undesirable character. We don't want you.'' All of a sudden, everybody stopped laughing, because of the way Mike delivered that line. I never interpreted that line the way he says it. I didn't even write it. It came directly from Danny's book, and Mike could have thrown it away before we shot it. If he had, the scene would carry a lot less weight. But what he was doing in that scene was really building out the psychology of all of these guys. They felt undesirable. They felt unwanted. And that's why they ended up together."