kelly reichardt

Meek's Cutoff

Interview

JOURNALIST Why did you choose to make the film in the format that you did [1.33]?

KELLY REICHARDT It was really an idea that in the desert you can see forever and then in the script the characters are being surprised. So we were scouting, and I’d be like, Jon, you can’t be surprised, I can see for forty miles in every direction, which is what happens in the desert. So if you’re traveling 7 to 15 miles a day and you have the widescreen, where you’re going to be tomorrow will be in front of you; and I was also just trying to limit this idea of like, grand vista, where the music builds and you’re like tsssschhh the landscape! I just wanted the landscape to be something they were really working in. And there were moments to pull back and be like, there they are. And it’s quite a lovely shape if you’re dealing with the wagons and the bonnets. So that you don’t see of what’s coming tomorrow, story wise it just keeps you in the space with them and so that was the…

J There is a sense of documentary in your film, like "Nanook of the North…"

KR It’s funny people always say that…I never know how to take that comment “documentary feel” because we’re so planned about everything. Does it look like we’re winging it? We’re not winging it!

Jessica LUX I don’t think it feels like documentary at all. I thought what it was unromanticised which I think is equated with “documentary style” sometimes

KR You know, we looked to Nanook of the North because…just with that I wanted to get across this idea of labour: labour, labour, labour …. Because when you read the diaries from the women, that’s really what you get is this just this monotony of labour, and that’s really what the diaries become. The men write about where they traveled that day and the women will just sometimes write a list of the chores they did.  The diaries start out really romantic and what they’re heading for and commenting on the scenery and then as the traveling goes on its like “built fire, put tent down” it just becomes like a laundry list of chores so we were trying to get that across.

J The conquering of the West is also always associated with a kind of subconscious guilt in American history because the land belonged to other people. Is that history repeating itself? Also nowadays when the army invades this and this country … How do you see that?

KR It’s so optimistic of you to think that there is a subconscious guilt in the Western mind. Because I’m not sure.  American’s still love Ronald Reagan because he’s a cowboy or George Bush and so…I wish… The idea of the story, the whole idea came about when Jon Raymond found this story of Stephen Meek who was an actual guy who led two hundred wagons into the desert basically and didn’t know what to do, then completely reliant on a culture that they don’t understand, they fear…they have so much stories built up about....and it’s their land…and just, how do you get what you need from someone you don’t really respect or have an interest in knowing but you have a need from them, and what do you do when you’re following a leader that you realize has no idea what he’s doing. So, the story of Stephen Meek just seems so contemporary suddenly so that’s how we started to approach the story. I tried to avoid the word “western” as much as possible just to keep expectations with everyone involved you know actors, everyone, of how it would be shot and so in revisiting westerns and all I just started to think what if The Searchers was told from the point of view of the woman making the bread, what does John Wayne look like to her?

LUX How did you avoid cliché sin this film, because I think it’s uncliched. Were you consciously trying to…?

KR Well it’s a very scary thing. You know, I’d set up a shot and it was so cold sometimes when we were shooting and Rod [who plays The Indian], we would keep him inside as long as possible, you know sometimes it was snowing

LUX Did you have any kind of heating out there, a generator or anything?

KR No we did not

LUX Jesus Christ

KR It was very bare bones. But it was like a hundred and ten degrees when we started, and everybody was falling over from heatstroke and then seven days later it started snowing

LUX Did that help? Because clearly that was the conditions they would have been in

KR I don’t know if it helped [laughs]. One of my crew people said to me at one point, while she was coming up the hill with the camera bags, she was like “I’m never not in pain!” I was, like “I know what you mean!” So with Rod, sometimes I’d try and keep him inside and put like my first AC in the frame and be, like, okay he’s about the same height, he looks cool, bring Rod in, and then the Native American, in the bare chest, with the beads, stands in front of the low angle sky and you’re just like oh shit, there’s the movie I saw when I was at my grandmother’s house on TV: “The Indian”…so it wasn’t like it wasn’t a fear but I really felt like when I found Rod that he is just such a particular person, like he’s so…lie, he’s a stunt man and he’s very involved with wild horses and he speaks five Native American languages and he learned a language for this movie, he’s this bizarre guy that knows now six Native American languages but can’t have a conversation without a lasso in his hand. He’s so particular, it did help me. And I knew that I was going to portray him in a way that left room for a lot of projection because it’s told from the white people’s point of view.  But I just felt like he is so particular in and of himself that that put me in a zone of being slightly less nervous about cliché, but in fact of course it’s a worry in any genre: it’s like am I commenting on the cliché or am I being the cliché? And it’s hard to know sometimes, after a while

J To make that possible, did you overdo it at some point or did you allow certain cheatings, for example with clothing, did you really force them to wear all the layers)?

KR No, I mean his outfit is built by a Native American

J I mean all of them…

KR Every stitch of clothing is hand sewn, by the tailor and the designer, she was so concerned with anything looking like it was made on sewing machine, they made all those dresses, pants everything is sewn by hand and it was an early idea that everything you saw would be hand made (unless it was cast iron or something) to be as much…the wagons are form the period, we got wagons from the year. So we will tried to stay, in that way, true to what would be going on in the period. But you look at the Edward Curtis still photos of the West and I’ve heard when “The Exiles” came out and the commentary – did you see “The Exiles” about the Native Americans in the sixties? The film, they reissued it. It’s like this incredible movie of Native American life, in L.A., I think, but the commentary is Native American directors who are saying, every time you see a movie with a Native American in it, you are afraid that their only reference is Edward Curtis, and I’m sitting there with my stack of Edward Curtis books, like yeeaaaah, it’s me! But you know, like, he is the guy who was out there with his camera and there isn’t like a shit load else to go on. So all you can really do is talk to historians and talk to Native Americans, and try to figure out.  But the cliché is based on something.

J Michelle is becoming almost a reference in your cinema. Is that a friendship or is…?

KR What, casting Michelle? It’s just that she’s such a good actress and she also happens to be up for the things we’ll put her through and she’s up for adventure and she likes doing physical things. You can tell her: “you’re going to learn to drive oxen,” and you can get her, because she likes to do stuff, she’s up for it. So that’s great, because she’s also great. You can’t really do this films with people who aren’t up for what you are going to put them through cos there’s no thrills at all: you know Bruce Greenwood is living in the exact same hotel room as our intern is living in. You know, there’s no class system, there can’t be because we just don’t have the resources, so they really need to be game and Michelle’s so game, she’s so up for it.

J You know that she can fill up a character and you don’t need to worry that much about it?

KR Yup.

J How did you prepare?

KR We talk about it a lot, you know she’s usually coming off another movie and she started reading the diaries really early and I think the diaries helped her a lot and she likes a lot of stuff: images, stuff that she can go study. And then he'll come to you with her questions. She wants her homework to dive into. You know, that’s an easy task on a film like this. And watching people sew her dress and just getting out there, I mean those bulls are bulls; you have to learn how to drive them or they will kill you. So you’re dealing with that and you have this bonnet on so you have no peripheral vision and it’s a hundred and ten degrees and you’re in that dress and we have to have someone come and get the rattlesnakes out of the area before Michelle can walk into it and the sage and everything is really sharp, everything is very prickly, very sharp and you’re wearing shoes from 1845 – there’s not even a right foot and a left foot. There’s a lot to draw from I would think. That is how I am always selling the discomfort to the actors, “it will help you” and they are like, “no we’re actors we can PRETEND!” “But I’m giving you something to react off, this is helping…”

LUX What was the biggest crisis or mistake in the film? If you want to say

KR The biggest crisis really won’t talk about. Getting the right crew out there did not happen immediately. So just making adjustments.

J Did you have any problems with the modern world interfering into your set?

KR There’s no world out there. We were in a two street town. I did have to take an airplane trail out. The one airplane was from Rod, who is a stuntman and had a day off and went to the airport, he has a pilots license, none of us knew, and he came down buzzing over us like a maniac, we thought we’d be killed and then later in the day we find out it’s Rod. But there is no phone signals. It takes so long to get there every day. When we first went there, we were like you cant shoot a film here, you’d never be able to get vehicles here, the sage is like razor blades, it just cuts your tyres and the dust is so thin

LUX How did you protect your cameras?

KR It was a huge job, that was probably the camera team’s hardest thing to do. We thought the wagons would be by far the most fragile thing because they were from 1845, but they were the most sturdy thing that could handle…the cars couldn’t…you could see why they took the wagons. There’s no phone signal or internet. I could see my two producers on far away mountaintops trying to get signal, it’s like you’re really out there and really dealing with the elements and weather

LUX What was that like psychologically for you?

KR It was good it didn’t go on any longer. It’s funny, because everything that was good about it was so wrapped up in what was hard about it, everyone was really testing themselves physically. We dug a road so that we could lay down track.

J It’s like the furthest you can get from 3D and studio

KR Yup. I’m sure there would be other ways of doing it without actually doing it, but these weren’t our resources. But at the end of the day, you’re exhausted and in the back of the van and driving through the desert and there is this insane sunset coming down on you and you get back to this motel and everyone – not me but the crew – is having their fire with the actors that they had every night, having their cocktails

LUX Did you not have that too?

KR No. I’m working for the next day. But it is like, that end of the day thing is beautiful because of the exhaustion of the day

J Would you say that this conquering of the West is something that the nation draws pride from? And what do you think that a president like Barack Obama means to these people?

KR Well, we have retold our past in this really heroic way that avoids the discussion of a genocide. When we started the script Bush was president and when  we were editing and show some rough cuts, by then Obama was president, and people were like, oh, Obama’s The Indian, this is the tea party. I was like whooah okay. And it’s weird that while I was cutting whatever was happening in the news, I was able ton get in an editing room and just project onto my movie: I could look at it is this way or that way. And that’s not us, that’s the mythology that lends itself to that. It’s conquering and taking over…it’s like the mythology leaves the door open for all those things to be seen in the film. So it was interesting to see how we thought we were making references to one thing and then the country shifts and that’s in there as well…. One I really felt making this movie, it was like being in sixth grade and studying things I should have studied at school, is how short a time it is from going out to land that had never been walked on, to where we are now, just already running out of resources. Just the amount of golf courses and housing projects, just how fast we’ve eaten it up and done shit to our air and how reliant we are on things when people could clearly get along with so much less, how in such a short amount of time we went from beans on a fire to the selection of fifteen kinds of almonds in Wholefoods the grocery store. It’s just such a short amount of time and it does make you think. I don’t have kids, but imagine people with kids would feel like, where’s this all heading? The theme of water also feels quite contemporary to me.

LUX What do you think a good film should do? What do you think a successful film does?

KR Well, I mean for me, my approach to teaching is very much, I teach visual storytelling and the hope is that you don’t use any dialogue. And then the dream for me…well, sometimes what I will show at the beginning of my class is, I’ll show a scene when we start to bring dialogue in, where two actors will each make a point and fight that point, and the filmmaking totally undermines everything that has been said and gives a totally different view of what the truth of the film is, than anything that has been spoken, and to me that is really the beauty of film, when the filmmaking and how people are moving through a scene or where you are putting your camera is telling a different story to what the actors are saying.  So to me, that’s the dream of what film can be. 

06:09:2010