Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to the much-acclaimed Old Joy, stars Michelle Williams as Wendy, a young woman traveling across the continent in search of a canning job in Alaska. Wendy has little to her name but a car, some pocket money and Lucy, her dog. When problems arise with one pole on that trinity, the others follow, as Reichardt takes us through an intimate procedural examination of how quickly a life can unravel when balanced on a precipice.
With Wendy and Lucy opening in New York tomorrow, I sat down with Riechardt to discuss Michelle Williams’ desire for invisibility, smashing the indie film glass cieling, and the “ever-evolving American Dream.”
Karina: I saw the movie in Cannes, and obviously every month it seems like a movie about economic despair is becoming more and more relevant.
Kelly: Give it a week.
Karina: [laughs] When you think about some of these economic problems, so many of them seem to stem from people being in denial, and just sort of a general unwillingness to talk about the how the way that we live has consequences.
Kelly: Yeah. The consequences are like the guy who got trampled at the Wal-Mart.
Karina: Yeah. So when you think about getting the film out there, what audience are you hoping it will speak to?
Kelly: I don’t really have a plan for the audience, just questions. Like, are we related and do we owe each other anything? Are we supposed to take care of each other to any degree?
And we know we’re connected. Because I didn’t run up my credit card, and now my 401K is disappearing. So, we’re clearly connected. I guess, it’s just that question of are strangers… Are we supposed to do anything for each other, or is it each man for himself? What is the American Dream?
Karina: Do you think that the American Dream is something that even exists anymore? This idea of being able to go West, and if you work hard enough you’ll be fine?
Kelly: I think it’s an ever-evolving thing. I once heard a show about this guy who coined the phrase “The American Dream.” Do you know who he is?
Karina: No. I’ll look him up. [Ed: it's this guy]
Kelly: Yeah. I need to look him up. Because I believe that what it was all about was that it was like a frontier kind of idea. And the American Dream at that time was, let’s say it was a really harsh winter, but my crop survived. Your crop died, but my crop is enough to feed both of us. That was the American Dream.
But, that guy never foresaw class. Like he didn’t imagine that there would be class divides in this country. He didn’t anticipate that there would be such a vast divide.
I guess that the idea of the American Dream is an evolving thing, or devolving thing. Has it really just come to my TV is bigger than your TV? What is it? What do we want this country to be - the great experiment? What’s it supposed to be? We just lived through such incredibly dark days. And even though the economy’s crashing now, there is like at least there’s hope. We’re living in the days of hope. [laughs]
Karina: Just because of Obama?
Kelly: I think, he is redefining - he talks about us being connected. He doesn’t talk about poverty a lot, I’ll admit that. But, just to change the conversation from something other than, “Go out and shop.” Or to give the impression that opportunity is just at everybody’s feet and all you have to do is bend down and lift it up. You know, it’s not the same for someone who grows up with an education to someone who doesn’t. At least he’s more aware of that. To not have a total elitist asshole running the country, I think will be somewhat better.
Karina: It should be interesting.
Kelly: Yeah. It’s already so interesting.
Karina: To make a really smooth segue here, talking about class…you’ve got a movie star in your movie, which is unusual for a film that was made with so little money, on such a small scale. How did Michelle get involved, and were you thinking of her when you started planning this idea?
Kelly: Not when I was first planning it. We were always talking about her as an example, but I didn’t think we would get her in the movie.
Karina: What was interesting about her?
Kelly: I would like to say that I was somehow out ahead of the curve, but I don’t think I was. I saw “Brokeback Mountain” like everyone else and I thought, “Who the **** is she? She’s really great.” She blew my mind. And then, I went back and looked at all her films.
I remember I went and met Todd Haynes right after I saw Brokeback Mountain. We were both like, “Ooh…” I said, “Every filmmaker is at a table right now talking about that.” And then, he worked with her in “I’m Not There,” and became friends with Heath. And he was just like, “You shouldn’t count her out. Let me give her the script. I think, she’d be great for it, and I think she’s up for something like this.”
And we had other mutual friends. We had Kim Gordon in common, and anther one of my producers, Phil Morrison. We had people in each others’ worlds. And she saw Old Joy and liked the space the actors had to work. And really, she was just looking to do something outside of L.A. or New York. She said she was really drawn to the idea of playing a character who feels really invisible, which was really different from how she was feeling, so watched. No one recognized Michelle when we were shooting. She looked really different and she was just really on the low down.
Karina: I had a conversation with a friend the other day actually about the way she looks in the movie. His theory is that she’s basically gender neutral. That was really different from the way I read the movie. There’s obviously the scene where it seems like there’s a threat to her, but I wonder if watching it, I imposed what I would feel, as a woman in those situations, on the character. Is it relevant to you that she’s a woman, and so she’s in a different kind of danger?
Kelly: She is in a different kind of danger, I mean, like just going out and conquering the West and going up to work in the canneries. All those gutter punk kids who are in the beginning of the film…the girls, I don’t know that they travel alone too much, but there are like some really petite, beautiful girls, and they seem way more vulnerable to me than the guys. They all seem vulnerable just because of the way those kids live. They’re all over the country and they live really off the grid and just travel around on the trains. It seems crazy. But, when you see a woman doing it you just say, “Wow, she is more vulnerable.”
Karina: Talking about this film in short hand people have called it a story about a girl and her dog.
Kelly: Yeah, and I think the dog gives her some kind of false sense of security. Which, I travel around the country all the time with her and it does. Like I’ll stay places I wouldn’t stay alone because I have Lucy. But Lucy, she wouldn’t really help out. [laughs] She’d be like no help at all. But yeah… Plus, people in their 20s do a lot of crazy shit, you know? They just do. Did, I did. People do.
Karina: So, are any of the situations autobiographical?
Kelly: No, no. Only that I travel with her a lot. No, I mean, I’ve lived in New York for five years without an apartment, couch hopping. But, I was never in her situation. I’ve been really broke, but I’ve always had more of a social net than she did. And she just doesn’t really have the social skills, so she doesn’t have a community of friends. I mean, even the gutter punk kids have a community of friends and that she doesn’t have.
Karina: Right. It seems some of her interactions are so tentative. And obviously, in her situation, it wouldn’t be safe for her to trust everyone, but there’s a question with everybody that she meets of what is this relationship going to be like.
Kelly: Yeah. Michelle and I were designing her to be just someone who’s really narrowly focused on the task in front of her. So, she’s not taking in a lot of what’s happening around her. She’s just like her whole life is just a to do list. She’s trying to manage something. And she just has a narrow scope because a broader scope would just sort of be overwhelming, to look at her situation in a bigger sense.
Karina: I want to talk a little bit about the indie film world in general right now. You went to Sundance with a feature in the mid-90s, and then came back again with Old Joy in 2006. Do you see any major differences, with the way something like Sundance has changed?
Kelly: I don’t feel like I have a handle on the independent film scene. You know, I’m in my forties and I teach for a living. I get interviewed all the time and it’s always like, “Is this film going to help you make it?” I’m not 20. I’m interested in making small films with people that I know in sort of private ways, and I really like teaching. Like Old Joy, we didn’t even know if there was going to be a feature, it was just an art project to go off and do a film. And that’s sort of what my film making had become was very small and private and it’s just that that one was shot on Super 16.
I’ve been going to festivals during all that time with my shorter films. It’s just that they were more avant-garde and there isn’t all those pressures and there’s no work to do because no one’s interviewing you. So, you just go travel and see places and you’re sort of so off the grid that you just have the pleasure of going and hanging out and seeing movies. Like now, I’m going to festivals and I don’t see the films. So, it’s much more work.
But I mean, I just don’t approach it like somehow I’m going to like…I just don’t buy into the whole myth. One of my best film making experiences and life experiences was making a 50-minute, Super8 film, Ode. I made that, I shot with a friend and we made it with two actors. I couldn’t even get any more out of filmmaking than I got out of that experience. Old Joy is probably the next closest thing to that. So, it’s about, for me the goal is like, how can I set up the next experience so that it’s one that’s interesting and challenging? And make a good film and get better as a film maker.
But I don’t think that these films are supposed to be getting me somewhere.You know? I find life interesting and I like my life. So, I guess, I don’t go to the festivals with those expectations. I’m certainly here talking to you and doing the work I can do to help Oscilloscope get my film out because it’s great that the Film Forum wants to show it and it’s nice for it to be seen.
Karina: My impression of your filmmaking is that you don’t see one film as a stepping stone to something bigger.
Kelly: No.
Karina: Which makes you very different from many other filmmakers at a place like Sundance or Cannes.
Kelly: It’s all just life experience, you know? And trying to become a better filmmaker to become a better filmmaker to become a better teacher. And be a better teacher and learn in teaching how to become a better filmmaker so that the films are good. But, I think, they’re for small audiences.
You know, I can look at some men and say, “Well, that looks like a good career.”
Karina: Like who?
Kelly: You know, Jim Jarmusch gets to live up in the woods and make a film every X amount of years. I don’t know any of the details of his life, this is all superficial. Or, I mean, Todd Haynes still kills himself to make films but you know, he has a beautiful life in Portland and he makes his films with people he likes. Or Gus Van Sant. There aren’t female examples of that. There aren’t women that have the life of where they’re making the films that they want to make that are personal films, and that’s their life and they can also buy a house.
Karina: Why do you think that is?
Kelly: I think, for the next generation of women behind me that that will be the case, but…It’s certainly better now than when I made “River of Grass.” The door didn’t seem open at all for all those years.
Karina: Was it easier to get money and everything for Wendy than it was for Old Joy?
Kelly: Old Joy I made with my own money and it was shot for almost nothing. Then, after I had a cut of it and got into Sundance, I got the finishing funds. Then that same investor gave me money for this movie.
I feel for me personally that I’ve found a way. You know, I want to be able to keep making films and the budget should just be whatever it has to be to get it done. The payoff of not having money is that nobody touches your film. Nobody reads my scripts. Nobody that I don’t want to. Nobody looks at cuts of my movies or tells me, “Time’s up, we have to be ready for a festival.” It’s all just integrated into my life.
It’s just that I think that it’s OK to be connected to that big black hole of work and that it gives you information for what you’re making films about. But, I do think, at a point, there will be women that have the careers that men have.
Karina: Would you give any advice to girls who are maybe in film school right now who look at your work and wonder, “How is she able to do this so independently?”
Kelly: Have a day job.
Karina: Really?
Kelly: Yeah. So that you don’t have all your eggs in having to make a career off films - because these films don’t really make anybody any money. But, I also don’t have this expectation that I should be able to live off it. I don’t necessarily think everyone gets to live off their art and that that is a given. And at the same time, there is the story going on that women don’t have the same opportunities as men and that’s true. But, it is certainly better than when I made River of Grass.
But then, I tell any film students to study other things so that you can be an informed maker. And you know, I think what happens to a lot of women in film school is they end up becoming producers because there’s so many fewer of them in the classes that they get herded into just working on guys projects and being the organizers. I mean, that was certainly how it was when I taught at NYU. But, at Bard, it’s an environment that’s all very nurturing I’d say to women, so it’s quite nice.
Karina: But, in a way, you’re able to teach because you make art. So, you are in a way making a living off your art.
Kelly: Yes. Completely true. I had my eye on Bard for a long time and I didn’t get to Bard until I made Old Joy. I’m completely undereducated to be teaching - as far as academia goes.
Karina: But, people want to learn from you because you’ve made these films.
Kelly: Yeah. It’s complicated, because it’s hard to talk about it and not sound like… Because I do feel like I’ve been really lucky. The time in between when I wasn’t making films, it’s not like I never had any bitter moment about it. But, that was really a time where I learned how to make films. No one was watching and I went back to Super8 and I could just really figure things out.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth