Kelly Reichardt looks exactly like you’d expect. She’s apologetically small, like someone trying not to take up too much space, softly spoken but intense, given to making small statements that connect to grand themes in sudden and unexpected ways. In other words: just like her films. Those films, four of them to date spread over 14 years, have barely scraped past the feature-length mark, but each of them has been an intimate gem – a dispatch from a world that looks disconcertingly alien; an unpantomimed, unvarnished reality. Her latest, Wendy and Lucy, the story of a drifter (Michelle Williams) and her dog, deals in alienation, friendship, sacrifice and heartbreak, and offers a vision of an older America that’s withering away.
LWLies: A lot of British people act like America isn’t really a foreign country because it’s so familiar from TV, and obviously the language is the same. But then when you’re over there, it’s actually a real culture shock. Everything is different. Your films feel like they have a kind of stranger’s take on America – they focus on things that are unfamiliar and alienating. Your characters are outside their comfort zone, like strangers in a strange land. Is that something you’re conscious of?
Reichardt: Well, maybe not outside of their comfort zone so much. I mean, it’s funny, I can’t imagine making a film in another country. I’m such an ‘American’, whatever that means.
LWLies: What does that mean to you?
Reichardt: It’s just what I know, you know?
LWLies: Are you a New Yorker?
Reichardt: I was born in Florida, lived in Florida for a long time and it’s where I made my first feature, in Miami. I’ve been in New York for 20 years but I spend a lot of time in Oregon, and that’s where my writer lives. I think it’s more about… I think my characters are very typical for what I know, and it’s more that just a small piece of society is presented in films basically. And I think my characters are, sort of, outsiders but it’s also because the streamlining of American culture, and the corporatisation of American culture, is so widespread and vast that, you know…
Like in Old Joy, the Kurt character, really any of these sorts of people looking for any sort of alternative lifestyle, including River of Grass, my first film, a protagonist just not really believing in motherhood, you know, there is this question of ‘is there a room for this’. And these last two films, Old Joy and Wendy & Lucy, have been made during this time in America where the conservative right has been… The whole country has swung so far to the right, well actually the whole country didn’t – there were many people who felt completely left out – but that whole culture is so unrelatable to me and it’s not the culture…
I mean, I teach at a liberal arts school and I spend time in Portland, Oregon – we’re not the real America. The drive that I do from New York to Oregon every year across country – I’ve been driving across the country, like, I did it with my family when I was a kid and you used to drive across America and every state was really particular. You knew when you were in a certain state from the local food to the local radio station to whatever it was that made it unique. Now I drive across country, it doesn’t matter what state you’re in – as soon as you get off the coast it’s all just chain stores, you’ll be hitting the same chains over and over again. And the media is all Clear Channel so there’s no local radio, and the only local radio you can find going out is Christian radio. So people in my films have the life I know, are who I know, but it’s never going to be mainstream movie-going people because that’s a very homogenised, kind of, corporate culture. We should forget the War on Terror: the war on the corporatisation of America should be worked out a little bit more.
LWLies: With the battle lines drawn between left and right, one of the many points of division seems to be that all the Republicans are shouting about the liberal media bias – I heard a quote from Stephen Colbert the other day who said that ‘reality has a well-known liberal bias’ – but then you’re complaining about corporatisation of the media, a right wing takeover. Both sides seem to think that the other one has taken over.
Reichardt: I mean, the idea that Obama has been sold as this extreme leftist is such a joke. He’s not even really that progressive. It’s only because we’ve gone so far to the right that anything slightly to the left of the far right looks like socialism.
LWLies: Something that sounds really funny, but in a sick way, is that John McCain’s newest criticism of Obama is that he wants to redistribute wealth. Now, to a reasonable person that sounds perfectly sane and sensible, but in the States that makes you a Marxist.
Reichardt: Well I think that McCain has lost the fiscal conservatives that have always been Republican because the Republicans have taken the country so far into debt now, so I think it’s really the wealthy Americans saying… It works on both ends: you scare Middle America with the word ‘socialism’…
LWLies: Why is that? I’ve never understood that long-standing fear of socialism.
Reichardt: It’s just propaganda. It just has to do with… I mean, the thing that really works for the right wing in America is that so much of the population is so under-educated. And moreso all the time with the attack on science in schools, and the reality that if you go to certain states they teach creationism in school, like in Kansas, then you can’t go anywhere and get into college. A good education is such an elitist thing – or the whole idea of ideas, not just education but any kind of deep thinking, ideas… Even the right wing journalist David Brooks, the op-ed guy in The New York Times, even he, you know, acknowledges the Republicans’ complete assault on thinking. He uses the elite term all the time too. Anyone with higher education, except for all the Republicans who run for higher office and have higher education, are referred to as ‘elitists’. Elitism is anybody that’s reading about any other culture; that’s travelling anywhere. Something like 80 per cent of Americans will never leave America. So Socialism is just connected with some, weird, you know, it’s like saying ‘Marxism’. It’s not an in-depth thought it’s just a flash of something that isn’t ‘American’.
LWLies: I love it when they call it ‘European-style’ socialism. Is it? There are socialists in Europe?
Reichardt: Or the idea that medicine will be ‘socialised’, and what better thing could really happen?
LWLies: Exactly. Are there really people in America who think it’s wrong to have universal healthcare?
Reichardt: Yeah because… Listen, it’s the people that are most hurt by the Republican party. The middle of America votes for the party that works against them all the time, you know? They keep them under-educated, they keep them going into the military, keep them afraid of the government. It goes back to this idea of ‘the government’s going to come and take your farmland, or take your guns.’ So the idea that government’s going to provide you with medicine could also mean that the government… You’re going to lose your… It’s just propaganda really. There’s no room for in-depth conversations in the public square.
LWLies: Wendy, in the film… There’s this idea that she’s off the grid, which in a way taps into the classic American idea of libertarianism – this stand on your own two feet, do things your own way. She’s kind of connected to that old American archetype, isn’t she?
Reichardt: It’s funny: there’s so many contradictions in it because that was the romantic idea of the pioneer spirit – the West, go West and you’ll find your fortune, there’s gold out West; California and Oregon were described to people in the East almost like Eden, you know, and that’s how people made the trek across the country. That’s always embraced in everything, but, like, the kids in the beginning of the film, these gutter punks, they’re homeless and they travel across the country by train, hopping trains, and it’s quite a dangerous life to be hopping trains in a post-9/11 world in America, and they live a very rough life but they do live off the grid, whether by choice or by just not being able to make the world work for them, you know? There is this big community of young people who are just choosing to live outside the system, which I guess there probably always has been, and it is really strong, but it is a throwback to the depression-era times. I think your choices… If you don’t have a family, if you don’t have a net of family support, financial and social, then your options are really quite limited, and I think these kids say, instead of having a proper job and getting money to pay rent, to just exist – and there’s tons of working poor in America – they say, you know, ‘I’ll choose this other, alternative lifestyle’. And I think it’s anybody that… Obviously welfare gets exploited like it gets exploited anywhere, but there’s also people that use welfare for a while to improve their lives. But all of that, it all gets sold… Anything that’s slightly alternative, it all gets sold as, it’s just like a drain on society. If you’re not, you know, I guess that’s the question, that’s the question of neo-realism, like Italian neo-realism – what’s your value to society? What’s your value if you’re retired? Or what’s your value to society if you’re not generating money.
LWLies: The very world ‘alternative’ is anathema to mainstream America. This is not a country that seems to want there to be alternatives. There is only one way. Have you seen the films of the Dardenne brothers?
Reichardt: Yeah some of them I have, they keep coming up.
LWLies: The idea that you explore – of economic forces dehumanising and working against the people they’re supposed to serve – that’s in their films too. It’s very European. Are you inspired by European social realism?
Reichardt: Yeah. They did The Promise, which is a very beautiful film. I never really thought of being influenced by them, but I enjoyed that movie very much. And The Child… But I teach film and of course I’m just, you know, showing… I’m picking up on a lot of the New German Cinema; Fassbinder’s films often dealt with the economy, as did De Sica or even Bresson. I do probably see more European cinema than I do American current films. But it’s funny: it’s harder at my age to know exactly what’s influencing you because I’ve been teaching for 10 years and we’re always deconstructing narrative and it’s just, sort of, hard to know. When I was younger I knew exactly who was inspiring me.
LWLies: I guess eventually you find your own style. I think of you as a cinematic short story teller making very self-contained, intimate films. Would you agree with that?
Reichardt: Yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean, they’re based on short stories and Jon Raymond… Just writing with him, his stories are very open, they give a lot of room for people, and I like that about his writing – it’s what makes me want to make films about these stories. Yeah, I mean, my films barely get over the feature length, they crawl over the line. They are self-contained and, you know, some of it is the economics – they’re small stories. And it’s hard to separate because in the beginning, Jon and I are coming up with stories that will work for what I can get together, you know, with small crews, we’re shooting all exteriors for the most part because we don’t have lights. The apparatus is very small, and so it’s a minimalism from beginning to end. That’s what I have to work with and that fits my story-telling mode anyway.
LWLies: But then Old Joy had a budget of $30,000, and Wendy & Lucy had a budget of $300,000. Can you get your hands on $3,000,000 for the next one?
Reichardt: No, I don’t think I can. Well, not… Once you get over, I think the SAG minimum is, like, $600,000, once you get over that, your expenses go way up because of your SAG expenses. The thing about keeping it small is that nobody is paying attention, you know? There’s nobody giving me script notes, except for my friends that I go to – my peers that I want notes from. There’s no one… I’m editing in my house for six months; I cut this film over six months. I kept shooting with a different local cinematographer in Portland during that time, you know? We were still making the film while I was editing, and there was no one… I live in an apartment building and have a friend upstairs who’s a producer and he says, ‘Oh, you’re still editing?! Eleven weeks you should be done!’ It’s a long time, but there’s nobody telling me to be done for a certain festival, there’s no test screenings – the films are all just made very privately and nobody is getting paid, including myself, so it’s exhausting when nobody gets paid. I teach for a living. But I don’t think I could make a film without the amount of privacy that I make these films if I took $3,000,000.
LWLies: Is it tough for you to bring them out to the festivals and suddenly go very public?
Reichardt: It’s interesting. When I took the film to Cannes we had just finished it; I didn’t even know we applied to Cannes – the investor sent a cut, it wasn’t a finished cut, then suddenly we were going to Cannes. I really didn’t have any distance from the film at that point – I had no idea what anybody would think of it. I really had no idea. And it’s such a spectacle there, you know? So it wasn’t really like any film opening I’ve had before either. Yeah, it was pretty nerve wracking.
LWLies: My publisher was watching it at Cannes but said he couldn’t concentrate because Michelle Williams was sat behind him.
Reichardt: That was nerve wracking too, that she was seeing the film like that. I was like, ‘Is Michelle going to like the film?’ Plus the print got a little fucked up, so it was very scratched the first reel. Anyway, it was really hard for me to know how that film was… Even watching it at that point, I can remember watching it and only still being able to see it in parts and not having an idea of what it was as a whole. So, yeah, really disconcerting.
LWLies: Going into Toronto, a lot of the hype was about the death of the US indie. What’s your take on that? Will it be good for independent cinema, maybe, because independent cinema will become independent again?
Reichardt: Well with all the companies closing and so many distributors folded, I don’t really think that’s good for independent films. I think it’s just less people to put out… You know, it’s all going to change. It feels like it’s all in the middle of a big change and no one knows which way it’s going to go. Are people going to start self-distributing? What’s going to happen? I mean, I have no interest in self-distributing, but it’s also now, like, even with these really small companies you have to sign your film away for 20 years, it’s in your contract. That’s quite a frightening thing to do because these companies just don’t last, and you’re signing your film away. But the options are limited. I really don’t know much about the film business so I couldn’t even answer your question. I just work in such a little… And there’s 13 years between my first two films, which could happen again at any point, you know? That’s why I don’t leave my teaching job.
Wendy & Lucy is released in cinemas on March 6, and is also screening as part of the Birds Eye View film festival.
