After announcing herself in trademark minimalist style at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival with her Grand Jury Prize-nominated debut, River of Grass, Kelly Reichardt went quiet. After a decade spent working on several doomed features and a few mildly received shorts, the Florida-born filmmaker returned to the indie fray in triumphant fashion with Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy in quick succession. And that’s where she’s set to stay, with her slow-burning western Meeks’ Cutoff – her third film in five years and fourth to date – having picked up a healthy buzz on the festival circuit. LWLies stole Reichardt away from her busy schedule recently to talk cowboys, pigeonholes and reuniting with old friends.
LWLies: Meek’s Cutoff is your third collaboration with Jon Raymond. How did this project come about?
Reichardt: We had started driving around and exploring the eastern coast of Oregon when I was scouting for Wendy and Lucy. I drive from New York to Oregon every year and go through that area and we were always interested in doing something out there. And then John found this story of Stephen Meek who was a real guy who led a wagon train – 200 wagons – through the Oregon desert. We were both really taken aback by this story; this guy guided a thousand people into the desert and had no plan of getting them out. So the themes felt relevant; this is idea of needing information from someone who is culturally different from you, someone that you don’t trust. All these issues felt so present day. So we started exploring the character and reading a bunch of diaries of the period and a lot of the women’s diaries of the time, which gave a whole new perspective on what it was like at that time in the West, it’s a very different image to how American cinema has traditionally portrayed the West. And so we started incorporating some of those stories into the Stephen Meek story.
The contemporary element that you mention… This idea of wandering through the desert in search of greener pastures, is that a metaphor for how you see America’s current socio-political climate?
There are themes that are contemporary, but we were trying to let go of that allegory and really focus on the characters in the film. The main thing that I wanted to emphasise was this trance like state of walking for days through the desert that the women described at length in their diaries. Just that, being such a contrast to conventional western cinema, which is all about these high moment, these moments of extreme activity, gunfire and fighting and manhood being tested at every turn. And also, what I found fascinating is that this was 1845, which is not that long ago and yet everything was so unimmediate. Everything took so much time, whether it’s baking bread and fetching water or whatever. It’s astonishing when your reading these firsthand accounts and you might be flying somewhere and your flight’s 15 minutes late and people go crazy, you know? Paul Dano said that the most intense thing for him on this shoot was that after a month of filming he and Zoe [Kazan] got on a plane a just flew over the whole area in two minutes…
Did it feel like you were stepping back in time and into those peoples’ shoes?
Well we really were because we shot where they were actually lost and we stayed in this town, which I think is the least populated town in America – it’s two streets, I think. And we would go off into the desert from that town and we were finding lids of barrels and arrowheads and other things that probably were from them, or from other people who took that route. Nothing’s really changed since then, and we used things that were actually of the period, the wagons and the oxen, the cloths and the bonnets that the women wore… all those things really did put you in the moment and make you think about what those people must have been going through. It’s pretty incredible. And the weather is just crazy; it’s either 110 degrees or it’s snowing, and we didn’t really have a tonne of shelter out there, so we were often all huddled round a campfire or squeezed into tents. We really lived it. The desert’s beautiful, but the whole cast and crew were completely covered in dust and everything you touch out there is prickly, it certainly doesn’t make things easy.
Did that isolation and those extreme conditions help achieve a sense of authenticity?
I retrospect, yeah. It was hard, the actors have told me it was the hardest film they ever worked on. But it was nice because even when we were in these motels the biggest named actor would be sharing living space with the person doing cross services, so there was a sense of community and there was a leveling that I think was really beneficial. There becomes a point where there’s not a lot of separation between cast and crew, which is nice because you’re all in it together. I’m sure there are some people who would have liked more comfort, but from and acting point of view it was really tough, but it would be hard not to be in the moment because in many ways they were living this, learning to drive these wagons and handling these wild animals… There’s not a lot of time to be off in your head, you had to be thinking about not tripping over your dress and making sure you watch out for snakes. So I was at least pitching the idea that all these hardships were helping us!
All your films deal with the harsh realities of life, how do you relate to that?
Well, I mean I’m not living on the streets but I think John Raymond and I are very much connected to the big black hole of survival. It’s funny though because to me… Everyone uses this word ‘independent’, but to me independent cinema now just has to do with technicalities, whether the money came from a studio or from a wealthy investor who is not connected to a studio. But I think independent cinema is really about representing the part of the population that’s not represented through mainstream media. In America we rarely look beyond the middle classes, and I think we’re really not the sort of people, as a nation, to talk to about poor people. To me, that’s what the heart of alternative art and independent cinema was born from, giving a voice to other parts of the population.
Meek’s Cutoff has been described as a feminist western, how do you respond to that?
Well on the western front I was not really using the term when we were shooting just to keep actors away from any preconceived notions about how the film should be shot. Because often the person getting the close up is not the person with the most lines on the page and that can be tricky. But as far as the feminist angle goes, I think it comes down to if you’re not showing things from the white male point of view then you somehow have to give it some different title. Just by the nature of showing a female point of view it equals a feminist point of view, and I’m not sure why that is. It’s out of my hands.
Something that seems to be very much in your hands now is your career. You’ve made three features in five years, but you had quite a gap between your first and your second, do you feel like you have more momentum now?
Filmmaking is really hard to learn, and you can teach it and learn it but you can’t substitute the experience and knowledge that comes with making a film. To be honest I’m scared to take a break in fear that I’ll end up taking another decade break. I’m really grateful for the chance to make films and I also enjoy teaching, and I feel like making films helps me to be a better teacher and teaching helps strengthen my films.
What do you love about movies?
Wow, big question! Let me see… Well, I grew up in Miami in the ‘70s, which was sort of a cultural black hole. I got very into photography around sixth grade and I wanted to travel around the world taking pictures, but then I moved up to Boston and there was all this activity that really blew my mind. I was 18 at that point and I was seeing so many things that I’d never seen before. So it was then that I realised I wanted a film camera not a photo camera. It’s that discovery which I love and which had stuck with me, every time I see a kid shooting their first piece of film or kids that have grown up with video. Being able to make something with a bunch of other people that you like is a pretty good feeling.
Kelly Reichardt (text) by Adam Woodward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
