Kelly Reichardt discusses Showing Up, her most optimistic film to date, and the importance of getting to know locations, creating silences, and throwing out the rulebook.
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Download a FREE excerpt from Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s broken American Dreams
Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s broken American dreams is an ebook that will take you on a journey through Reichardt’s filmography.
It’s also the only place you can find interviews with her and all her collaborators, which together reveal Reichardt’s filmmaking process like never before.
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“Things usually get done eventually. Just…not on time,” sculpturist Lizzy (Michelle Williams) reassures her frenemy Jo (Hong Chau), midway through Kelly Reichardt’s new film Showing Up. It could be the ethos of the film, which is about a lonely woman whose friends and family tend to come through for her, just often too late or not quite in the way that she wants. Splitting its time between Lizzy’s subjective headspace, in the stressful week leading up to her art show, and the artist community around her at the Portland art school where she works as an administrator, Showing Up is the closest Reichardt has come to a single-protagonist film since Wendy and Lucy (2008).
It’s à propos that Showing Up feels like the antithesis of Wendy and Lucy, which was a film about a woman and her dog on a road trip to nowhere. Michelle Williams stars in both, but while Wendy is alone in a cruel world where connection and solidarity are but fleeting (an idea explored brilliantly by Angelo Muredda in his Roads to nowhere essay), people are constantly showing up for Lizzy, though she’s never really sure if they will. That’s partly because she lives in a community of often feigned support. Everyone tells everyone that their art is great, so how do you know when people are lying to you?
Lizzy’s comfortable life
Whereas Wendy could barely afford to feed herself or her dog, let alone fix her broken car to finish her journey to Alaska, Lizzy’s life is pretty comfortable. She has a tiny one-bedroom apartment that she rents from Jo, who lives next door. Their friendship is both enriched and complicated by these close quarters. Lizzy has a job that pays, where she gets to be surrounded by art, if never really part of the art scene there.
Her family is loving if a bit too self-involved to nurture her in the way she’d like. Her brother Sean (John Magaro of First Cow) has mental health issues; her mother (Maryann Plunkett) prefers to compliment Sean than pay attention to Sean’s difficulties or Wendy at all; and her newly retired father (Judd Hirsch) is busy housing drifters rather than checking up on any of them. It’s the life of a more established, settled person — something that Reichardt, who no longer has to wait years between films for funding nor worry if there will be a next paycheck, can probably relate to. Fittingly, this is probably Reichardt’s most optimistic and laid back film.
The stresses of making art in Kelly Reichardt’s film Showing Up
Lizzy spends the film fretting and stressing, but her basic needs at the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy are never in danger of not being met. The film is, nevertheless, still attuned to the details of Lizzy’s frustrations. A broken water heater, an injured pigeon, and an evasive landlord/bestie drive Lizzy to distraction. When at work, we see her walking through the hallways, peering in at the classrooms without ever daring to enter, eating her lunch outdoors removed from the art classes happening in front of her. If you’ve ever worked from home, or had a creative pursuit that didn’t pay the bills, the mounting stress of a thousand paper cuts will hit close to home.
At the centre of the film, though, is the relationship between Lizzy and the more successful Jo. “She’s really figured it out,” Lizzy comments about Jo to a colleague. It’s said in such an off-hand way that her interlocutor is unlikely to notice that this is an all-consuming frustration for Lizzy. Jo has the luxury of time to work on her art, which Lizzy lacks, because Jo’s brother and father (Lizzy’s two most absent family members) helped Jo fix up an apartment building to rent for income. Jo also has two shows opening that week, while Lizzy has only one.
Relationship stories
Reichardt’s last three films, from Certain Women (2016) to First Cow (2019) to Showing Up, have all centered around two people trying to connect. But where Certain Women and First Cow ended with heartbreak and tragedy, respectively, nothing bad happens in Showing Up except for the regular vicissitudes of life and relationships. That makes it sound like a low stakes film, but the sound design, which regularly puts us inside Lizzy’s subjective headspace, can make the buzzing of a bee in the background ratchet up tension in an otherwise seemingly laidback interaction.
Roads to nowhere?
When First Cow was released in 2020, we at Seventh Row published a book on all of Reichardt’s films up to and including First Cow — Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s broken American Dreams. While it was true of all of Reichardt’s films to date in 2020 that the characters were all obviously on roads to nowhere. They were all either hampered especially by the lack of social safety net in American life, the false promises of the American Dream, or their own self-sabotaging behaviour — often several at once. But Showing Up doesn’t fit this pattern.
Showing Up is about a settled woman who is happy-ish where she is, who accomplishes what she needs to, can support herself, has friends and family, and yet feels dissatisfied nonetheless. On the other hand, she’s let down by the American Dream that she can have what she works for. Labouring at her art and her boring job keep her afloat, but it’s not not quite the life she envisioned, while Jo seems to be living the dream. Lizzy’s pessimistic outlook makes her feel like she’s on a ‘road to nowhere’ even if it seems she’s arrived compared to Reichardt’s other protagonists. Even Gina (Michelle Williams) and Laura (Laura Dern) in Certain Women are more adrift thanks to their own self-destructive behaviour.
Building on conversations in Roads to nowhere
Roads to nowhere also featured in-depth interviews with both Reichardt and her long-time collaborators, many of which have returned for Showing Up: costume designer April Napier, production designer Anthony Gasparro, cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, and actor John Magaro. Orla Smith’s interview with Reichardt on her career and First Cow are the two best interviews I’ve ever found with Reichardt, and my interview with her picks up from where Orla left off.
Our conversation also builds on the discussions both Orla and I had with Reichardt’s team (in the book) about their perceptions of how Reichardt edits in her head and how much she cares about sound and blocking. Reichardt discusses finding the aesthetic for the film with Christopher Blauvelt, getting to know the locations intimately, and creating the soundscape of Lizzy’s world.
Seventh Row (7R): When Roads to nowhere co-editor Orla Smith talked to you for our book, one of the things that you had said was that when you’re thinking about the aesthetic for a film, you often take inspiration from different movies, or photographs or paintings for everything from sound design or colour or a mood or framing. What were the inspirations for Showing Up?
Kelly Reichardt: We had such a big pool of images from different places. I had been collecting images for a lot of the artists from Black Mountain College for a long time. Those came into play.
But we didn’t have like one sort of spirit guide as far as a visual colour tone this time. I built some books, but they were really images from all over the place. We didn’t really have one. Trying to think. It’s funny because there were so many artists involved, so much artwork we looked at, it’s hard to say. With some of the films, we’ll have like, one sort of colour lord or something, but we didn’t really have that on this film.
7R: You also mentioned you’re always collecting images for thinking about like, how to place people in a frame. Is that something that you did here?
Kelly Reichardt: I mean, it’s funny. That’s sort of something I maybe say to my students.
I had done a couple of short films: I had filmed Michelle Segre, who does the Jo [sculpture] work in the movie, in her art studio. I also shot some 16 mm of Jessica Jackson Hutchins in a studio at Cal State. It was sort of wading in, in that kind of respect, just figuring out how I wanted to shoot people.
But no, I knew the locations I was going to shoot at. So I could kind of figure out my shooting scheme there. I had the school for a long time before we shot there. And I knew the apartments and who lived there before we shot in those apartments. I spent a lot of time in the locations mapping out my plans beforehand.
7R: That seems like a unique situation that you got to have those spaces for so long and that you could build them out really for all the characters specifically. We get to see inside the homes of all the main characters, as well as all around the school.
Kelly Reichardt: Having a big empty school when we started was great, because we got to make up the school. We filled it up. Tony Gasparro, the production designer, hired a bunch of young artists to come in and make work for the school. All the rooms started coming into play. We borrowed a bunch of looms. The ceramics place at the school was still working. There were people still making work there. The kids who were playing the parts of the students in the film were hanging around a lot. So they started making stuff. Things were being made in every room. It became this beehive of activity where I could walk around and watch how people did things. We could arrange everything as we wanted it to be, as one does in a film, when you have space.
7R: You really save your two-shots and closeups in the film.
Kelly Reichardt: I don’t know if I really think about it like that. One shot is only related to the shot that comes next to it. It’s just whatever each scene calls for, or each little moment.
But some of the spaces are close. Those apartments we’re shooting in are really tiny. We don’t have any moveable walls or anything. In other spaces, you have more room, and you can have more options. But the apartments, especially Lizzy’s apartment was a little tiny apartment. So things were a little limited in there. Yeah.
7R: In Roads to nowhere, Chris Blauvelt told me that you’re always editing in your head on set because you edit your own films. What does that look like for you?
Kelly Reichardt: Chris and I talk about the cut a lot when we’re on set. It’s kind of like making a puzzle. You know what you want for, you know, shots 1–3, and you know what you want number 5 to be, but you don’t know what number 4 is. You’re figuring out how you can make these things fit together, how you’re going to get from here to there. That’s really the fun part of working with Chris, figuring out these sequences in the space. Sometimes, it feels like math. I don’t know.
That’s what filmmaking is: figuring those things out. We talk about the cut a lot when we’re talking about the sequence because we don’t shoot a ton of film. You’re sometimes locking yourself in somewhat when you’re shooting, which is not great thing to do, necessarily, because it’s nice to have options in the editing room. I’ve made so many films with Chris at this point that it’s all sort of one ongoing conversation.
7R: I know some filmmakers, like Andrew Haigh, who think a lot about the editing when they’re shooting, will think about how the camera might move to turn one shot from a wide into a closeup. Or they’re thinking about how they want to cut between a closeup in one scene and a wide in the next for some space, so that will determine what gets shot and the sequence.
Kelly Reichardt: Everything has to do with what the character is up to, what the mindset is of whose perspective you’re getting across. I try to stay with the character. The main thing is, what is the character up to? And how do you get it across, visually? Or you may want to contradict that, sometimes.
Sometimes, we have little patterns we go through. But on this one, I don’t know that we had that many. It was such a different process, because we were shooting during COVID. Things were different than the way we usually work. but some of it was the same.
It really depends if you’re working with two people or a room full of 15, and what the spirit of the scene is.
7R: There is one key scene in the film where you do have a room full of many more than 15 people. Those are always the hardest scenes to shoot, so I’m wondering how you approached that.
Kelly Reichardt: I think we had a couple of cameras working that day, in a scene where there’s a lot of people. The film has a kind of a structure, like, if you think of a film like Jonathan Demme’s Citizens Band (1997), where you’re meeting characters, and then, they’re all going to, at some point, come together. We had that location for quite a while. We were there for quite a few days. It was done in bits and bobs. Because we were all in such a bubble, and all the kids at the school, we spent so much time with the kids that were playing the students, everybody really did come to know each other quite well. The time we were shooting in the other location [the school] where people come together, people had been used to hanging out with each other for quite a while. That helps the scene. That was a complicated scene for me.
7R: There are lots of characters, lots of little small interactions and in a tiny little space.
Kelly Reichardt: You break it down and do it in parts.
When we’re doing the blocking, we’d map everything out on the floor with different coloured pieces of tape. Rodrigo, in our camera department, would give everybody a coloured piece of tape for where they moved. I remember looking at the floor and going like, Oh my God, I hope Rodrigo knows what this means. It just looks like some kind of Cy Twombly painting to me right now. I’m not sure. But you break it up. You do it in parts. And then you pray that it’s all going to come together in the editing room.
7R: There are a lot of scenes in the film where you see (or hear) someone invading someone else’s (usually Lizzy’s) frame. It’s something I thought a lot about in Certain Women, too. (I wrote an essay on this in Roads to nowhere.) Lizzy spends a lot of time standing in doorways or at thresholds.
Kelly Reichardt: Lizzy’s apartment is so small, she has to be in a doorway or at a window. One thing that apartment had, and that was the draw to using that place, was it has the balcony where she could talk up and down to Jo. That was a good space for up and down interactions. And they can see each other through their balcony spaces.
I knew that apartment very well because I’ve stayed there before. A lot of friends have lived in those apartments. During the shoot, Tony Gasparro was living in one of them, and Chris Blauvelt was living in the other one. We really could spend a lot of time there. I already had spent a lot of time in and knew those apartments. That’s why we picked them.
Thank God for the doors that open onto the balcony. She can be inside and outside all at the same time. Even when she’s in the privacy of her house, she has the sounds of her neighbour. She always knows when she’s coming home. The garage doors of the studio open leaves you open to the street into Jo stopping by.
The space that connects them is great on a good day because they can flow in and out of each other’s lives. On a bad day, they can’t escape each other. Their lives are right sort of in front of each other. Those apartments were great for putting them on top of each other.
7R: How did you think about the sound design? Lizzy’s world is so quiet. Jo’s world is much louder and more boisterous, and so is the school.
Kelly Reichardt: Jo always has music playing in her car and in her studio. She’s making big vibrant work that takes up a lot of space. She’s more physically active with her art. Lizzie is kind of hunched over her table, listening to the voices in her head as she works, or the street sounds at all. Those were suburban sounds that I know quite well, because I lived there. It’s the recycling truck, the skateboarders, and the crows.
You would think the school was in the middle of nowhere. But it’s actually situated between between these two very busy roads. There is a traffic hum in that world, but also just the world of art-making, rooms next door, and hallways. It’s just life in a place with a lot of people doing different things. Those rooms were fun to build and distinguish. You had what was there, and then you have what you’re trying to make be there, the life outside the room: the other rooms and the hallway and stuff in the school. I’ve spent enough time schools to know what that kind of echoey hallway hammer down the hall sounds like.
7R: There’s also the sounds of insects. When Lizzy visits her dad’s garage, you can hear an insect buzzing around in that whole scene.
Kelly Reichardt: The bees! Good eye. That workshop the dad’s in had beehives everywhere inside there. We got a lot of bees out of there before we started shooting, but there were just so many bees. They’re big bumblebees. So they’re in the shot. There is this whole swarming bee sound, which was just actually the sound of that space. That had to be played upon. There’s a giant bumble bee floating around that scene.
7R: When I talked to sound designer Leslie Shatz (who did all of Reichardt’s films starting with Wendy and Lucy up to First Cow), he mentioned that he kept reusing the train sound from Wendy and Lucy. It shows up in First Cow. There are a lot of train sounds in Showing Up, and I wondered if that same sound made a reappearance.
Kelly Reichardt: Portland is a sound of trains. You are always are hearing trains in Portland. If you’re shooting in Portland, trains will be in your audio tracks. So you have to keep playing with with trains when you’re building the tracks. They’re beautiful sounds, so why not?
But I didn’t use any trains that were used in other movies, just to be clear. I’m sure it sounds like it because if you stick a microphone up in Portland, you’ll be recording a train. But Leslie has a lot of great train recordings, a good train library.
7R: Although the trains kind of disappear partway through the film.
Kelly Reichardt: I don’t know if that’s so. I think there’s some. They’re in the mix. The film kind of ends with highway sounds. It depends on if you’re further downtown or closer to downtown, where they might be. But I think they’re in there. I think, later on, there’s also more traffic, so maybe they’re a bit buried.
Download a FREE excerpt from Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s broken American Dreams
Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s broken American dreams is an ebook that will take you on a journey through Reichardt’s filmography.
It’s also the only place you can find interviews with her and all her collaborators, which together reveal Reichardt’s filmmaking process like never before.
