Kel­ly Reichardt: ​‘Film­mak­ing is not as care­free a thing as it once was’

Kel­ly Reichardt is a film­mak­er for whom the mechan­ics of a character’s dai­ly exis­tence are as impor­tant as any­thing that could be termed ​‘plot’. ​“We drop in with them,” she says, ​“we get a lit­tle glimpse of their life for a small peri­od of time, and then they move on – there’s not a lot of wrap­ping up. Cer­tain Women is a lit­tle more wrapped up. I’ve had DVDs sent back to me from Meek’s Cut­off that say, ​‘We didn’t get the end­ing.’” Reichardt laughs, invit­ing us to join in. It’s hard not to be charmed by her warmth – emo­tion­al­ly and lit­er­al­ly, as she is swad­dled up in a huge blan­ket, like a child recov­er­ing from a fall in an icy lake.

The minu­ti­ae she presents of her character’s lives are the cream of long and atten­tive study ses­sions spent in care­ful­ly-scout­ed rur­al loca­tions. To give cre­dence to the third sto­ry in Cer­tain Women, Reichardt spent four months shad­ow­ing the own­er of the horse ranch in Mon­tana fea­tured in the film. Reflect­ing on that expe­ri­ence, she reveals some­thing of her obses­sive atten­tion to detail: ​“Each horse and each cor­ral seemed incred­i­bly impor­tant, but my assis­tant direc­tor kept say­ing, ​‘It’s just hors­es and hay. All anyone’s ever going to see is hors­es and hay.’ Then you get into the edit­ing room and you start cut­ting. I remem­ber get­ting Todd Haynes in for a screen­ing and he said, ​‘Why does she keep feed­ing that one horse? How much can a horse eat?’ I said, ​‘Todd! There’s 20 horses!’”

LWLies: Why is it impor­tant to you to get all these small details correct?

Reichardt: I like the Rifi­fi way of going in and the film stops for 40 min­utes while every detail of the break-in hap­pens. It’s like watch­ing Nanook of the North and think­ing, ​‘If I ever have to build an igloo, I’ve seen Nanook of the North and I can.’ I like watch­ing peo­ple do labour, so the idea would be that some­one who ranch­es would see the movie and it would make sense to them. You can feel some­times, when some­one has a job or a pro­fes­sion in a film… If there’s a phone and there’s a com­put­er and they have a job, I want the details of what the job is.

Are you loca­tion scout­ing while you’re writing?

It depends who I’m writ­ing with. With Jon Ray­mond, usu­al­ly there’s a short sto­ry to begin with and he has a loca­tion in mind. With Old Joy I scout­ed for months at hot springs all across Amer­i­ca and end­ed up shoot­ing at the hot springs that he wrote the sto­ries for in Ore­gon. Or in Wendy and Lucy, he wrote in the Wal­greens park­ing lot that you can see out his win­dow in Port­land. I drove around 39 states, sit­ting in Wal­greens park­ing lots and then, final­ly, wore myself down and end­ed up shoot­ing in the park­ing lot that he wrote for.

But you get oth­er infor­ma­tion while you’re scout­ing. You run into things. You find things out by loca­tions that aren’t right. For Meek’s Cut­off, I scout­ed Texas and Utah and Ari­zona, and then came back to Ore­gon. It’s a long kind of wear­ing your­self out and return­ing to a space, or some­thing that lives with you and you keep going back to that space, and then you tight­en the cir­cle and it becomes based around the dam in Night Moves, or the farm in Night Moves, or the ranch in Cer­tain Women, which was the hard­est location.

For Cer­tain Women I scout­ed Ore­gon and Ida­ho and then Mon­tana and back to Ida­ho and then back to Mon­tana, and then where in Mon­tana? Montana’s a huge state, so it’s a long process with a lot of infor­ma­tion and then it brings infor­ma­tion back to your script. Then you start to sto­ry­board and some­times the painter that I sto­ry­board with goes on scouts with me. You’re col­lect­ing images, things that are ref­er­ences for light, or frames, or cos­tumes, or pro­duc­tion design. You’re work­ing with all of these peo­ple for a long time, usu­al­ly a pro­duc­tion design­er and a cos­tume design­er first.

Then when your DP comes on… I have a shoot­ing scheme in my mind and on paper, and then I go to the loca­tions with Chris [Blau­velt], and hope­ful­ly Chris makes all those frames sweet­er and bet­ter and fig­ures out how to light them. You might be sit­ting in the desert with a viewfind­er for a real­ly long time plan­ning what your shot looks like, but until the day you shoot you’re not going to have a car­riage, and oxen, and your actors there, so that’s going to change things. That’s a real process.

This whole labo­ri­ous process, what does it mean to you? What urge are you try­ing to grat­i­fy with your filmmaking?

I’m grat­i­fy­ing the urge to get up and have some­thing to do every­day that is inter­est­ing to me. It’s real­ly just that. I want a project to work on that will lead me to trav­el places and get to know places that I wouldn’t oth­er­wise know. It’ll send you in the direc­tion of find­ing, study­ing painters that you didn’t know as deeply before, or read­ing stuff for inspi­ra­tion or research and it turns you on to lit­er­a­ture you might not have oth­er­wise known, or pho­tog­ra­phy. It gives you a path. Instead of going to the Lou­vre and being like, ​‘I’ll look at every­thing,’ you go, ​‘Oh, I’m going to go find the Bruegel.’ Then you go and you have a mis­sion but you take in a lot along your way, a lot of things influ­ence you along the way. I like to know, ​‘This is what I’m doing,’ oth­er­wise you wake up and it’s just emails and busi­ness or just the crap of life. The good things in life too! But it’s nice to have… Don’t you like to have a project to work on?

So much so. How do you cope in between things when you’re fig­ur­ing out what to do next?

Well, I’m get­ting bet­ter at learn­ing how to have time off, but I would rather know that I’m work­ing on some­thing, but maybe not feel like I have to move it along. Like, in the last decade I’ve made a lot of films because I had not been able to get a film made for the decade pri­or. And now that urgency is a lit­tle bit… I’m a lit­tle worn out. I still want to wake up and know that I have some­thing to work on but I also want to go sit on a porch and hang out with my friends’ kids and just have some time when I’m not work­ing when I can just think. But I still don’t want the wide-open­ness of noth­ing. That would dri­ve me crazy. And I still teach.

You’ve basi­cal­ly reached a point in your career where you’ve earned a break?

I have earned a lit­tle break.

What is it about Michelle Williams that leads you to repeat­ed­ly want to col­lab­o­rate with her?

I actu­al­ly find act­ing a real­ly mys­te­ri­ous thing, and how you work with each actor is so indi­vid­ual. Every­body is so dif­fer­ent. You try to find what actors need and get what you want at the same time. But with Michelle, because I’ve worked with her so often, it’s just a sort of short­cut. She’s very trust­ing of me, which is the biggest gift you can get from an actor. Doesn’t mean she’s not think­ing and mak­ing deci­sions, but I don’t have to elab­o­rate so much. I’ll just be, ​‘What don’t you like?’ We can just cut to it. So there’s that, the famil­iar­i­ty. She’s just easy. She’s an unde­mand­ing per­son and she’s game for this kind of film­mak­ing – which not every­body is. I’ve been real­ly lucky with actors. They’re kind of an exten­sion of the crew. They’re not off wait­ing to be called on set, they’re in it. Some actors real­ly enjoy that and Michelle is one of those actors.

What do you love about movies?

That changes over years. I grew up in Flori­da. Grow­ing up in Mia­mi in the ​’70s, it was kind of a cul­tur­al void. So when I got to Boston and found the rep house and I took a class on Fass­binder, who I didn’t even know, at first it just blew my mind. It was so excit­ing and I con­sumed a huge amount of cin­e­ma in the next 20 years. Then, you know, I’ve been teach­ing film for 20 years now, and then mak­ing films. Those are all real­ly dif­fer­ent film expe­ri­ences. I would say the years of pure­ly lov­ing to go to the movies to watch films from dif­fer­ent places and dif­fer­ent gen­res and peri­ods of film­mak­ing, that, I wish I could get back to that. I can’t get back there because it’s hard for me not to take films apart when I’m watch­ing them so it’s eas­i­er for me to not watch con­tem­po­rary films. It’s still a great thing to get lost in a film. It’s just that film­mak­ing is not as care­free a thing as it once was.