Many rural Americans feel the lasting effects of the 2008 recession everyday. Wages have remained stagnant for the past decade, and jobs have returned to cities at a rate 4 times higher than that of rural communities. For many blue-collar workers, this type of financial difficulty can strain all aspects of life, from career opportunities to family relationships.

One of the most iconic stories of economic desperation in film history consists of a father and son’s search for a stolen bike. The depression-wracked city of Rome in the years after World War 2 is the setting for Bicycle Thieves, the 1948 Italian film by Vittorio De Sica. De Sica captures the hardship of a post-war depression not through complex drama but the through daily hardship of losing one’s means of work. Such hardship is familiar to millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans, despite the differing circumstance.

In his new film, The Confirmation, Bob Nelson mirrors De Sica’s classic. He portrays the economic difficulties of rural American life in a simple tale of a father and son searching for stolen tools. Walt (Clive Owen), a recently evicted, out-of-work carpenter, has his antique tools stolen from his truck the same day he’s been tasked with watching his estranged son. Walt and Anthony (Jaeden Lieberher) spend the next few days searching for Walt’s tools, his only source of income and pride.

The Confirmation is the second film written by Bob Nelson about father and son relationships in economically depressed communities. Nelson is a native of Washington state and grew up in a large family dependent on the money his dad made as a mechanic. That relationship inspired his first screenplay, Nebraska, which was directed by Alexander Payne and won great acclaim as one of the best reviewed films of 2013.

Nebraska tells the story of an alcoholic old man named Woody (Bruce Dern) living in Billings, Montana who believes he has won a $1 Million sweepstakes. When his family fails to convince him that this sweepstakes prize is junk-mail only meant to sell magazines, his son (Will Forte) eventually drives him to Nebraska.

In both films, fathers and sons encounter hard-edged Americans—people struggling with unemployment, underemployment, drug abuse, and desperation— and exemplify why complicated relationships between fathers and sons are worth the struggle.

Recently, I spoke with Bob Nelson and asked him about how these fictional fathers and sons reflect his relationship with his own dad, and what it’s like making independent films about blue collar families at a time when blockbuster franchise entertainment rules the cinemas. I discovered that in many ways, Nelson’s cinematic America has as much or more in common with De Sica’s post-war Rome than the American fantasies painted by so many films from Hollywood.

This conversation has been lightly edited.

Christopher Zumski Finke: How much was Bicycle Thieves a part of your writing process for The Confirmation?

Bob Nelson: It was certainly an inspiration. It is one of my favorite films of all time. The other influence was Winter’s Bone, with Jennifer Lawrence. But it all started with my dad, who was a mechanic and would have his tools stolen all the time.

Zumski Finke: Bicycle Thieves is about the ravaged state of post-war Rome. Is that something you were channeling with The Confirmation?

Nelson: Yes. And there is some of that in Nebraska, too, where the only means of becoming rich for certain segments of the population is to win a lottery of some sort. I started thinking about how we’re not too far from the economic downturn. Even if things have started to come back a little bit, we still have a case where blue collar wages are way behind in comparison to the economy and other wages. A working man like Walt is hard pressed, and when he has to go without work for a while he finds himself living paycheck to paycheck.

Christopher Zumski Finke: Both The Confirmation and Nebraska are set in small, western towns running on a blue collar economy. What draws you to those kinds stories?

Nelson: That’s pretty much my background. I started out in a small town south of Seattle, Kent. In those days it was more rural. My dad was a mechanic and we lived on his paycheck. There were five kids, seven of us total. It was a good life in some ways, but as far as money goes it was always a little tight. My mother finally went to work when I was in junior high to help compensate for that.

I worked my way through high school and college as a janitor. That was back in the 70s. By the time I finished college in 1978, I was making 5 dollars an hour as a janitor. And it wasn’t that long ago that janitors were still making 5 dollars an hour, thirty some odd years later. Meanwhile prices have gone up, five or ten times on things. That always sticks with me, and I think that it’s important on film that we reflect that.

Zumski Finke: Do you think there is a lack of films about blue collar workers in Hollywood?

Nelson: I do. You see it more in novels. I don’t even see it that much in television, although we’re seeing more shows in the recent years because of the Netflix and Amazon and we’re getting more diversity there. But films, we’re still catching up.

Zumski Finke: Both the films you’ve written not only focus on small economically depressed communities, but also on fathers and sons.

Nelson: Both films draw heavily from my own life. I learned from Harper Lee, how she took her life and turned it into To Kill a Mockingbird. Some of its true, but you take that truth and turn it into something else. It might seem odd but both fathers in Nebraska and The Confirmation come from my own dad. Bruce Dern and Clive Owen might not seem to have a lot in common but there is a kernel there.

When I wrote Nebraska I used a lot of my family stories, a lot of it coming from my uncles. My dad lost his teeth at the railroad tracks, and he was shot down in WWII, which I didn’t know about until I was an adult.

Zumski Finke: Do you have a son, or children of your own?

Nelson: No I don’t. This is all based on my recollections of being the son. I can take a sidelong glance at my friends and relatives who have kids, but I mainly am drawing on my own relationship with my dad.

Zumski Finke: Religion plays an important role in the film.Can you talk a little about how that that is influenced by your relationship with the Catholic church and with your parents?

Nelson: My dad, I don’t think he was real religious. He just went along. My mom was a devout Catholic and still is. She’s 88 years old now. I started out Catholic and drifted away in my teens.

Anthony’s confessional scenes are pretty close to reality for me. Confession was always a little scary. Unlike Anthony who is so honest he can’t tell any sins to the priest, I didn’t do that. If I couldn’t think of any I would make them up.

Zumski Finke: In the film, church and economics do seem related. Do you think that your mom’s relationship with the church related to your family’s economic situation?

Nelson: At the time, in the 1960s and early 70s when I was going to church, there certainly was a community feel. Where I grew up, I don’t think the economic divide was that large. We all felt part of the community in that we were all in this together. We didn’t have people living in mansions, and we didn’t have a lot of poverty around us. We were all lower-middle class.

Zumski Finke: I like what Walt says to his son about religion, essentially, church is something you can do that makes your mother happy, and it’s not difficult or burdensome.

Nelson: Walt’s trying to make a case for his son to be good, and do good. One example of that in the movie is that doesn’t ever occur to Walt to steal somebody else’s tools.

As many times as my dad watched his tools stolen, I could never imagine him, even with his troubles, stealing someone else’s tools. I think Walt is finding a moral course of his own but finds the church is unnecessary for him.

Zumski Finke: The way that Walt handles the situation that unfolds, they drive around town and see all these characters in various states of unemployment, drug-addiction, alcoholism. You have a film full of people who are struggling to make it as best they can.

Nelson: It’s true, even when you finally come up on the true thief. A lot of decisions come out of desperation,. There does seem to be a case that when the people who are doing this kind of work, when their wages are low, they can get desperate and feed off each other and lash out amongst the people around them.

Zumski Finke: You might not know from this conversation but The Confirmation is actually very funny. But it’s always complicated humor. The scene when Tim Blake Nelson is talking to his sons about how the guns he gives them are not toys is just hysterical. But it comes from Anthony’s real desire not to cause pain, even to an insect. Can you tell me why you wrote that scene?

Nelson: That scene was a bit of satire, a throwback to my sketch days, but it shows Anthony has a real strong sense of right and wrong, whether that’s from religion or just inherent, that, when he kills the bug he automatically feels awful. Then when the kid gets out the gun and talks about shooting the rabbit, I thought it was important at some point to show Anthony growing up this weekend, and in this scene he’s starting to take a stand against things and make his own choices. Even if it’s difficult for him. That was the thinking behind it and also, when Walt comes out and sees him with the gun Walt has a new perspective on his son, and is wondering what’s going on.

Zumski Finke: Alcoholism is a part of both this film and Nebraska, but I was fairly shocked by how scary the withdrawal scene became: to find your father in that state would be terrifying. Can you talk about the decision to make that scene quite as intense as it was?

Nelson: My dad was a lifelong alcoholic, a functioning alcoholic like the fathers in Nebraska and The Confirmation. But he did at one point give up drinking, and I was probably a little older than Anthony at the time but he went through withdrawal that was pretty close to what you see there. And I didn’t know what was happening, that something like this could happen when you stop drinking. I’m not sure when I wrote it that I figured it would get that intense. But I was okay with it when we got into shooting, when I saw what Clive Owen did with the scene. It is scary for a kid.

Zumski Finke: Nebraska and The Confirmation are both atypical films at a time when Hollywood franchises rule the box office. Did you find there was a lack of interest in this kind of small film when you were starting with it, especially as a first time director?

Nelson: When I saw Winter’s Bone I decided that if I was going to be a director I had to keep it simple. We could have a low budget (Nelson had $2.5M to make the film) and I can still say the things I want to say.

I think it is tough. These are definitely independent films. But in the last few years there’s a new model that is not entirely based on making your money back in theaters. If you have a small budget, they can sell to foreign territories and they can look to make money on downloading and streaming. And that’s fair enough for a film maker. You get your chance to see your film in a theater, but you want to make sure you do right for the people who are going out on a limb for a small story like this that is not necessarily an easy sell in today’s movie marketplace. I want to do right by those people, and make sure there film is talked about and make a case for it, and make sure people get out to see a small film that’s really about two people.

A version of this article originally appeared at Yes Magazine.

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