US indie cinema’s most fastidious director Kelly Reichardt talked at length about her love of small things and her “granular” approach to filmmaking during Tuesday’s two and a half hour VdR Masterclass in Nyon (presented in collaboration with Swiss Film Archive, ECAL and the Fondazione Prada).
At first glance, Reichardt (whose credits include westerns like Meek’s Cut Off and art heist movies such as The Mastermind) is an unlikely guest at a documentary festival. However, as she told a packed audience of festival goers, industry guests and film students in Nyon’s Theatre De Marens, she has made a couple of docs along the way, for instance Bronx, New York, November 2019 (2021), her short about artist Michelle Segre at work in her New York City studio.
“It was a way to get to know her so I could use her art in Showing Up,” Reichardt admitted there was an ulterior motive for her brief move into non-fiction. It was part of her preparation for her 2022 movie, starring her regular collaborator Michelle Williams as a sculptor.
As for her 10 minute doc on artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, that too was done to help with Showing Up – she wanted to use Hutchins’ studio in Long Beach in her movie. “I’d like to do more of it because I enjoyed it a lot and it was just nice to do something that didn’t have the heavy weight of a feature on it,” Reichardt said of her forays into documentary.
However, later in the masterclass, the US director acknowledged that documentary remained a near foreign world to her.
“While we were having lunch, Emilie [Bujès, VdR artistic director) was trying to convince me that there is not a difference [between documentary and fiction]. As I said, I don’t know how documentaries are made. It is such a different process. I love watching them…[but] everything I do, it’s all made up!”
Reichardt doesn’t rehearse unless it’s absolutely necessary. That’s a legacy of the earlier part of her career when she could “only afford the actors the day before shooting.”
Budgets on her movies remain tight and she clings to old, frugal habits. “Some people want to rehearse. Jesse Eisenberg [who appeared in Reichardt’s eco-thriller Night Moves] liked to rehearse…He wanted to get there [to shooting] two weeks early to live and work on a farm but he spent one night there and he called me up and said ‘I got it! Send me back to the hotel.’”
Eisenberg, it turned out, didn’t want to sleep in a yurt after all.
Similarly, Michelle Williams asked to sleep in a car for a week in preparation for playing the homeless woman in Wendy And Lucy (2008). After one night, she too decided one night was enough.
Reichardt did agree to a week of “pioneer camp” so the actors could get used to working with oxen, putting up tents, making fire without matches and being on the wagon trail for Meek’s Cut Off. Despite their diminutive size, Michelle Williams and co-star Shirley Henderson turned out to be by far the best among all the cast at dealing with the bulls on that set.
For another of her period movies, 2019’s First Cow, Reichardt sent the actors off to spend a week in their costumes with a survivalist in the woods. “It poured the whole time they were gone. They were really in the Portland rain, learning how to skin a squirrel – a roadkill squirrel – set traps, milk a cow, all those things.”
On some of her films, the very process of making them is itself like deep rehearsal. For instance, on Old Joy, her meditative 2006 drama about old friends going on a hiking trip, the two actors (Daniel London and Will Oldham) “met the day we started but they were locked in a car together for 12 days so it was like they were on a camping trip.”
Reichardt’s films are often about characters “who don’t have a financial net” and are facing scarcity. “We’re kind of working in the same way,” she says of the financial tightrope she herself continues to walk. If anything fucks up, we are doomed because we don’t have any buffer. We are always making more than we have the money to make, stretching ourselves a bit thin.”
Early on during the pre-production for The Mastermind, Reichardt showed cast members documentaries by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines, a filmmaking couple she admires and who met as students at the Massachusetts Institute Of Documentary in the 1970s. Before working together, both had made observational short films about their families – and these helped actors like Hope Davis and Bill Camp refine their performances for Reichardt.
Costumes, she suggests, also help determine how actors behave. For instance, in her western films, when women characters are wearing bonnets, that means they won’t have peripheral vision and will therefore move in a certain way.
Asked about her shooting style with its long takes and tableau-like compositions, the director replied that “nothing ever just happens” in her work. There is a lot of choreographing in advance. She tends to shoot with one camera. Everything is planned – but plans may change once the crew arrive on location.
“I think all of filmmaking, from scriptwriting to planning your shots and shooting and editing, you are building something and then you are deconstructing it, you’re rebuilding it and deconstructing it. I think that is what filmmaking is, always tearing down what you did and re-doing it.”
On the day of shooting, Reichardt always has a strong sense of what she wants. “If you have a lot of limitations budget-wise, you have to plan. And I like to plan my shots and basically know where I’m going next and how things will fit together…I am very rules-based.”
When she appeared on NPR with legendary radio host Terry Gross, Gross called Meek’s Cut Off “slow.” Reichardt demurred at first but then watched the film again herself. “Of course, this is slow,” she eventually agreed. “But I don’t think of slow as a bad thing. More and more as time goes on, I feel so manipulated by the pace of commerce, really, and how much sound and imagery I am supposed to take in in such a short time. It makes me feel often that nobody wants me to look on my own….sometimes it feels almost political to me. I teach every semester and every year I see the students have less attention span than the year before and it’s not their fault. I see it happening with my own attention span.”
That’s why she takes her time. In her films, everything “is a process” and she takes care to observe her characters going about their daily tasks. “I like seeing people do chores. I enjoy a good chore myself,” she notes.
As the session draws to an end, Reichardt repeats that documentary is still a mystery to her. “I don’t think one form is a higher form than the other [but] It is completely unknown to me how documentaries are made – and I have thought a lot about film in my life.”
In Nyon this week, Reichardt got to hang out with Laura Poitras. However, spending time with the Oscar-winning documentary masker only served to reinforce her belief that documentary and fiction are, as she re-emphasises, “just different worlds.”
