Kelly Reichardt
Everything you ever wanted to know about Kelly Reichardt, the director of Meek’s Cutoff, Certain Women, First Cow, and more.
Kelly Reichardt is an American film director and screenwriter. She has made four feature films: River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Night Moves (2013), Certain Women (2016), and First Cow (2019). Born and raised in Miami-Dade County, Florida, Reichardt now splits her time between New York, where she teaches film at Bard College, and Portland.
The ultimate resource on Kelly Reichardt
Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s broken American dreams
About the book
Roads to nowhere offers the first in-depth, 360-degree look at Kelly Reichardt’s process through interviews with Reichardt herself and her collaborators on First Cow, many of whom have been working with her for years.
Through essays on each of Reichardt’s films, Roads to nowhere explores how her modern westerns are melancholy odes to lonely American lives.
Snag a copy of Roads to nowhere, to discover how this modern master operates, and to read a series of essays about each of Reichardt’s films, which examine her thoughtful, quiet portraits of everyday lives.
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Celebrate your love of Kelly Reichardt every morning with your cup of tea or coffee, as you remember fondly that ‘sorrow is just worn-out joy’.
Original design by Jade Duncan Knight.
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A biography of Kelly Reichardt
Kelly Reichardt was born on March 3rd, 1964 in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Her parents both worked in law enforcement, which likely influenced her Miami-set debut feature, River of Grass, a crime drama in which the main character, Cozy, (Lisa Bowman), is the daughter of a police officer.
Reichardt had an early interest in the arts, particularly film and photography. She earned her MFA at the School of the Museum of the Fine Arts in Boston.
In 1991, Reichardt worked in the art department on Todd Haynes’s film, Poison. The two became fast friends, and to this day, they still share early cuts of their work with each other for feedback. Reichardt is also close friends with filmmaker Gus Van Sant.
After her feature debut, River of Grass, was released in 1994, Reichardt had trouble getting another feature made. She partly credits this to sexism in the film industry, which she faced both institutionally and on set while making River of Grass.
She spent the years between 1994 and 2006, when she made her second feature, Old Joy, working for hire jobs, learning to teach, and making short films on a Super 8 camera. These films, Ode (1999) and Then a Year (2001), are near impossible to find online. As Reichardt told us in Roads to nowhere, “It’s alright; it’s good they are lost. They were just learning tools. I was trying to find ways to keep learning and keep working. I realized that the feature world in the ‘90s was just not a welcoming place. I think you could talk to any of my female contemporaries and find that to be true.”
Reichardt saved the money to make Old Joy partly through working as an Associate Producer on America’s Next Top Model. When she made the film, she was invited by Peter Hutton to teach at Bard College. Teaching at Bard had been an aim of hers for several years, as she admired the artists who worked there, from Ed Halter to Peggy Ahwesh. Her close friend Todd Haynes had also made his film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988) there. Reichardt still works at Bard to this day.
Reichardt’s own dog, Lucy, has appeared in two of her films: Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. Animals feature in most of Reichardt’s films, from dogs to cows to oxen. Lucy passed away before the making of Certain Women. The film was dedicated to her.
Throughout most of her filmmaking career, Reichardt has been based in New York City, where she teaches at Bard College. Shortly before the production of First Cow, Reichardt bought a place in Portland, where many of her collaborators, including Jon Raymond, live, and where several of her films are set and shot. She now splits her time between Portland and New York.
Read more about Kelly Reichardt’s background, in her own words, in Roads to nowhere >>
Kelly Reichardt’s Filmmaking Process
Writing the screenplay with Jon Raymond
Jon Raymond is the reason why Kelly Reichardt, who was born in Miami, has made almost all of her films in Oregon. He started his career writing short stories and novels based in and around his home of Portland, Oregon — Raymond is still a novelist to this day. In fact, it wasn’t until Reichardt read his debut novel, The Half-Life (which they would later adapt into First Cow) shortly after its release in 2004, that Raymond had his first brush with the world of film. Reichardt asked Raymond if she could adapt one of his short stories, Old Joy, into her second feature, which was released in 2006. Reichardt worked on the screenplay for Old Joy on her own, but since then, she and Raymond have co-written the screenplays of all her films, save for Certain Women, which was based on the short stories of Maile Meloy.
Reichardt and Raymond’s collaborative approach has differed from film to film. On Wendy and Lucy, the short story and the film script were written concurrently. Meek’s Cutoff and Night Moves were original screenplays rather than adaptations, and the ideas originated with Raymond. The Meek’s concept came to Raymond when he “was hired back in 2007 during the housing boom to name a golf course out in eastern Oregon, which is where the Meek’s Cutoff story takes place.”1 In Reichardt’s words, “Night Moves all happened around Jon’s and Emily’s [Chenoweth, Raymond’s partner] friend’s farm. Jon started bringing me to this farm because he was really interested in the politics of the farm.”
In our interview with Raymond, which features as chapter 15 of our ebook Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s broken American dreams, he recounts how they collaborated on the pair’s fifth feature together, First Cow, an adaptation of The Half-Life that they had been circling ever since Reichardt read the novel. “The Half-Life had always seemed too large for us to really place,” he told us. “The novel has a 160-year scope and double storylines [set over multiple continents]. There’s a largeness to the scope that’s beyond our resources normally.” As Reichardt put it to us, “When we are working together, we are drinking a lot of coffee and brainstorming and maybe even taking some day trips to places, sketching out the story. Meanwhile, Jon walks around the city looking like he’s just spacing out, but really, he does a lot of building in his head before he sits down to write.” Raymond then takes the lead by writing the first draft: “I basically write a draft that lays out the characters and the scenes.” For First Cow, the decision was to stick to a single timeline, to limit the story’s time frame to a few months, and to limit its setting to a small Oregon frontier town.
“After that initial [draft that] established structure, characters, and scenes,” Raymond continued, “it kind of enters into her [Kelly’s] world and her computer. There’s more detail of side characters that will come in [when the script is in Kelly’s hands]. It also enters into the realm of her conversations with the various department heads, and so it fills out more and more.” Reichardt clarified from her perspective, “When I got Jon’s first pass of First Cow, he handed me a full world — not just with the voices of Cookie and King-Lu, but textures of a place, a tone, a vibe, themes big and small, a lot of subtle ambiguity. To my mind, it’s a world only Jon could create. And in these worlds, I find a lot of room to be creative and invent.”
“When I get the first pass of the script, I immediately break it all down, going back to note cards,” Reichardt continued, filling in the details of her scripting process. “Film is really all about time and space, so I have to figure things out beat to beat. Making a film, from beginning to end, it’s building things up and breaking them down, and building it up again.” She will pick out or create new, supporting characters by finding a scene in which they play a crucial role, and then she will “go back to the beginning of the script and sketch them into different scenes, try building them into the fabric of the script so we’re not just using them when that one scene [happens].” When Raymond returns to the screenwriting process, beyond the constant casual dialogue between him and Reichardt, it is to “give these [newly fleshed out] characters a voice.”
How Kelly Reichardt devises the film’s aesthetic in pre-production
As Kelly Reichardt and Jon Raymond make progress with their screenplay, Reichardt starts to invite her heads of department into the process. In costume designer April Napier’s words, “She was in LA, we had dinner, and she gave me a 56-page script. It was just the beginnings of [First Cow]. She said, “There’s the script; then, watch Ugetsu [Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953].”
Recommending films as reference points to her crew is a crucial starting point in Reichardt’s process, one that almost all of her collaborators mentioned when we interviewed them. There are a few films, often classic world cinema, that she’ll share in order to communicate her intentions for a film’s atmosphere. In the case of First Cow, the primary reference points were Ugetsu and Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy (Pather Panchali, 1995; Aparajito, 1956; and The World of Apu, 1959). She will also share photography and art as reference for a film’s visuals; for First Cow, she presented her heads of department with a book of Frederic Remington paintings, The Color of Night.2
Over the years, Reichardt has built a crew of trusted repeat collaborators, many of whom described themselves to us as a “family.” Thus, at the start of a project, most of her key collaborators are already on the same page because they understand her work, her style, and what she requires of them. They also understand how the rest of the team works. We interviewed three production department heads on First Cow in Roads to nowhere: cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, who has worked with Reichardt since Meek’s Cutoff; costume designer April Napier; and production designer Anthony Gasparro, the latter two of whom have both worked on the most recent two Reichardt films, Certain Women and First Cow.
In Blauvelt’s words, “Kelly is very visual, but we have always started with conversations about the story and what it is trying to convey. For example, on First Cow, the script wasn’t ready to be sent over email when I first came on board, so we found time to take some walks; Kelly would break down the story as it was at that point. She is very descriptive, and I am lucky to have her personally describe these things to me. Her vision for a film starts early on. Because she’s written and co-written these films, the aesthetics are an integral part of her stories. We figure out the aspect ratios, lenses, film stocks, and processes by starting with her visual references and her descriptions of what it’s to become.”
Blauvelt and Reichardt’s collaborations on a film’s aesthetic are extremely thorough in the pre-production stage. “She makes these folders that relate to every scene accompanied with visual references, and her notes are all over them. We spend a lot of time together watching films.” While the two of them do not storyboard, they prepare extensive shot lists, although when it comes to actually shooting the film, “She doesn’t like to use the shot list. It’s mostly an exercise to keep our minds on the same page about our approach. Sometimes, I am the only one using it for reference, just so my crew knows roughly what’s going on.”
Because of Reichardt’s own thorough preparation, all of her heads of department are on the same page from the start. Beyond her film and art recommendations, it’s a key part of Reichardt’s process to visit the locations where her film will be shot well in advance in order to compile visual references. Blauvelt describes it as “a long process and a huge reason why Kelly’s films are so distinct, in my opinion. She will research an environment and take pictures to start this process with our production designers and costume designers to create the palette that the film calls for.”
He cites an example: “For Meek’s Cutoff, Kelly went out to southern Oregon to see the actual spaces these people would have traveled through. She photographed it with production designer Dave Doernberg and costume designer Vicki Farrell. They took into consideration the colours of the ground, the dirt, the cloud, and the sky. They went to work and made the canvases for the wagons and hand-made the dresses and suits to work in simpatico with the world in which they were to move.”
Both Napier and Gasparro describe an immense level of trust shared with Reichardt, who, in Gasparro’s words, “has this encyclopaedia of references, and she’s like, ‘Look at all this, take it in, then come back and show me.’” Working from that starting point, he collaborates with his own creative department on the film’s sets. “Once we had our office, I made sure that we had a decent printer, and I printed every single thing out and separated it in terms of the different set pieces. Then I started pulling things away. My art director, prop master, set decorator, and I brought Kelly over. Each one of us had our own moodboards. For example, Vanessa [Knoll], the set decorator, would have her [own moodboard for] furniture and fabrics. Kelly would be there, and we’d bring her through, and we’d watch her react to stuff. It was very tactile. I didn’t want anything on a computer. Everything was there for all of us to look at.”
Through regular email, phone, and video call conversations with her heads of department, Reichardt begins to pull together the film’s aesthetic. While her trusted collaborators do their individual work, Reichardt oversees and comments on their choices in order to gradually refine her overall vision and ensure every piece is falling into place. In Napier’s words, “Kelly can allow everyone to have complete freedom, although certainly, she’s the captain, and she gives us the tome, the one book that’s going to be our palette and our bible through the whole thing. On First Cow, I put outfits together in Los Angeles while she was already scouting in Portland. I would send her pictures. I would do a lot of references and send her moodboards. She would see the ones that she liked, and we would have long Skype discussions every week about it. She’s also so trusting. Once she’s found her collaborator, she 100% believes in you. It’s a really special, special family to be a part of.”
When it comes to pre-planning the blocking in a particular location, Reichardt told us, “I don’t like figuring things out with everyone standing around, waiting. I like to go in with a plan to work from.” “She definitely knows the blocking,” Gasparro agreed. “With some scenes, it looked like she was waiting until a bit later in the process to block out, but she always knows the blocking.” Location scouting ahead of time is a key part of the process to work out that blocking. “A lot of the time, she’ll walk ahead and think about the blocking, or have someone act it out, and then a few more of us are invited into the space.” Reichardt herself concurred, “On First Cow, because we were shooting five-day weeks, Chris Blauvelt and Assistant Director Chris Carroll and I would go to our locations on the down days. They would sit in for me, one of them playing Cookie and the other King-Lu. Blauvelt makes lists and Carroll draws maps.”
Shooting the film
On set, Kelly Reichardt’s approach is a mixture of precision and openness to other people’s ideas. While she prefers the wording of the screenplay remain intact, and her blocking is somewhat precise, she also throws out her preplanned shot list and allows room for her actors to make their own choices. “Anything can change on the day,” she told us. “The day and hour brings its own vibe, and weather and the actors move how they move. It’s this thing of building things and taking them apart to rebuild them … The blocking is somewhat precise, sure, but no one has to hit a mark or anything like that. Not usually. The actors have room to move, and be creative in the space … Sometimes, the actors work it out, and Chris and I work off what they are doing, and sometimes, I spend time alone in the space with the finder, and I have it more mapped out.”
Reichardt decidedly does not work on the edit or dwell much on reviewing the footage while she’s shooting, although she has a constant awareness of the edit as she acts as her own editor. “I don’t even look at footage unless there’s a problem. It’s just a totally different head.” On First Cow, her assistant editor, Ben Mercer, was also on set throughout the shoot as the script supervisor, and he helped keep an eye on practicalities that would make the edit easier. “If there was a long scene,” Mercer told us, “and there were a lot of setups and not every setup is covering every line of dialogue, it might be a question like, ‘Where have we covered this line of dialogue from?’ And I’d be able to look down at my script and be like, ‘All right, we’ve got this from the medium on Cookie; we’ve got this from the Chief Factor.’ That would help her figure out if she had what she needed to get. It felt, to me, like she had a really good idea of how she was going to make it come together.”
How Kelly Reichardt works with actors
Kelly Reichardt expects her actors to independently do their own research and preparation work; she doesn’t like to rehearse with them. However, the actors are encouraged to take a hands-on approach to prep where possible, especially when it comes to working with the department heads on the film. Gasparro recalled working with Lily Gladstone on Certain Women as particularly rewarding: “She was very excited to walk into that space [the set for her character’s home]. I remember I had this one little owl ornament, and she was like, ‘That wouldn’t be something, as a Native American, that I would have.’ I just love that she noticed this one little small thing. That’s honestly one of my favourite times, when an actor or actress settles into your space.”
On working with Reichardt as an actor, Gladstone, who also features in First Cow, put it: “She’s really, really specific with what she wants in the frame. She’s not controlling about how she goes about it, if that makes sense. Specificity is important in a really strong artist’s voice like Kelly’s, but she only really gets that magic because she’s also able to let go. I wouldn’t even call that hands off, because she’s always invested. She’s just constantly living with the reality of what’s happening in the moment, not necessarily just the take, but with the flow of the set. So if something’s not working, or if she knows she’s not going to use it in the edit, she would skip over it. But it never felt like, ‘Ugh, this isn’t working. Let’s just move on.’”
On the specificity of Reichardt’s specific directions, Gladstone continued, “She would typically give me the first take, and a lot of times, she would just want to secure it or give minor adjustments. There were a couple of times where she would defer, which was great. A lot of the directions, I guess you would say, would feel kind of cosmetic, but those tiny, seemingly cosmetic directions just change the whole internal life [of the character]: how fast you’re walking, or how heavy that sigh is, things like that.”
“It’s not this total freedom,” First Cow star Orion Lee said of collaborating with Reichardt and Blauvelt on set and navigating their preplanned blocking. “It’s not like they’ve come to the set, and then they say, ‘Actors! What do you want to do?’ They set up the shot, and they’ll be like, “Okay, so you’re walking from here. Then you walk around this tree, and then you walk around that tree, and then you come back out, and you walk through the bushes over here.” And they would set that up. But then, within that, whether we pause here, whether we go, [all the smaller choices within that blocking] is all up to us … I think it’s always best when there are limitations and there are freedoms. You work within the limitations, and you’re also given the freedom to contribute and to collaborate.”
Picture and sound in post-production
On the post-production side of things, Kelly Reichardt maintains control by acting as her own editor. “When directing a film, I’m communicating so many things through other people who do the hands-on work,” she explained to us. “Editing allows me to have a direct relationship to the filmmaking … Production involves so many people. I find it’s nice to be in a room alone with the movie after the shooting process has been so collaborative. The assistant [editor] on First Cow was the indispensable Ben Mercer. Whoever is assisting me is a young person that can keep up on all the technology.”
Mercer’s first job on the edit was to organise the footage as it was being captured. He told us, “I would go on the weekends or off days and organize the project file and make sure that it was in an okay place. I was building the edit project while we were shooting. When we got done, Kelly wanted to review footage over Christmas, and so we just got right into it.” Then, when they officially got into the edit, “What I [Mercer] wanted for her was to be able to come in every morning and not even have to touch a computer. I’d get there half an hour earlier than her, make sure it was all good to go, then she just gets to sit down and it’s all open and ready. It’s basically where she left it the night before.”
As Mercer describes it, Reichardt’s editing process is a series of passes, the first being the rough initial assembly cut. From there, each pass gets more and more detailed until she’s just finessing individual scenes. “There are a couple of big days that you build up to. The first assembly review is sort of the first D-day where we sat down with [screenwriter] Jon [Raymond] and watched it in Portland … Once she’d done about her third pass, there were sections of it that were starting to feel good, like they were working. Then, it might be that she would spend more time in one area rather than just keep on working through [chronologically]. I’d say the first assembly took three weeks, the second cut probably two. Then she started showing people after about two months or after about the third pass. After that, she would focus on a scene for a day or something like that.”
“It gets to a point,” Mercer continued, “where you might review it [the film] twice a week with people in the room. [During these screenings,] I would make four pages of sound notes, stuff that I thought sounded shit, and pacing notes. I would make pages of notes, and she would make pages of notes. At the end of it, we would quiz the people in the room as to what makes sense and did you get this?”
When Reichardt gets down to the finer details of the picture edit, she might work on a scene a day, for example, and keep refining the details of said scene until, after multiple passes, she’s happy with it. Mercer told us, “She would work on [a scene], and she’d get it to a point, and then keep moving. You know it’s not quite there yet, but then she’ll come back to it. She can’t just stay there forever and make it perfect in one round. You do your passes again and again. It’s not about making every edit perfect. It’s a case of just working the material again and again until it’s working as well as it can work because it’s so complex. It’s both a case of literally building and rebuilding scenes but also just going through the whole thing and being like, ‘Oh, do you need that line of dialogue?’”
Reichardt said of Mercer’s role in the edit, “We build a very detailed soundscape in the edit, and that’s an area that the edit assistant can get very involved in. Ben was a very creative force in this area. He just got really into sound. He found that he really loved it, which was great for me, because he was being really particular and diving deep for new sounds.” Mercer described his process for working on the sound: “When we were in New York, I had an office next to hers. She would cut, and then behind her, I would usually build sound. I would be working a day or so behind her … At the end of the day, say [Kelly has] cut six minutes that day, which would be kind of a lot, I would grab that sequence and bring it into my project. Then, the next day, I would be working with that. My mission was to get through that six minutes that day so that I could take whatever she did the next day and build on that.”
Sound design is essential to Reichardt’s vision of a film and the way she creates a sense of place. “It’s the difference between being distracted by the sounds as opposed to being lost in the world with the sounds,” Reichardt explained. “You know you’re there when you aren’t hearing the sounds anymore, which is hard because when you’re mixing, all you’re doing is listening for those particular sounds. Especially with the crickets, they’re so rhythmic that their sound can take you out of the movie … It’s really about putting stuff in and then taking stuff out. Instead of having a bird track that has randomness to it, you place a bird here and there, where you want it, and set it enough in the background so that it becomes part of the world.”
Of the sound mix, Mercer said, “I built the initial sound, and then it was taken from me [by sound designer Leslie Shatz, who has worked with Reichardt since Wendy and Lucy,] and went from there. We set up a really detailed map of where [the sound design] needed to go, but there was also no real mixing. It was a good rough cut audio mix, but it wasn’t [anything close to the final mix]. Then, Leslie would come in and watch the film. He watched the film a couple of times. He was awesome and would work with me to make sure, technically, that the hand-off was going to be fine. He would take my work and just make it better. He worked on top of it and added a bunch of great shit to it. Leslie is the man. He’s mixing this thing perfectly. The [decisions made in the] mix are huge: where you want it, how loud do you want voices to register versus background… It had a distinct sound to it that Leslie brought.”
Shatz explained to us that when he takes over on the sound mix, “It’s really [about] just trying to pare things down and get to the heart of it.” He was given the script for First Cow before shooting began, and then he was involved sporadically during production; Reichardt occasionally sent him sections of the sound captured on set in order to ask for feedback and to prepare him for his role in the sound mix later on. “When she came back to New York for post, I was really lucky because I got to be there right when they set up and looked at cuts. Kelly would invite me. And then I got a little bit involved with the music. Kelly relied on my opinion and my skill [when creating the score] in a way that I don’t always get a chance to do. It really felt great and very exciting for me.”
When Shatz came on board, he built on the sound work done by Reichardt and Mercer during the picture edit using sounds from his own library. “She does a lot of sound work when she’s doing her cut, so I end up having this great template to work from. She’s the editor, she teaches film, so she knows all the nuts and bolts and mechanics of how to make it work … I have a library [of sounds]. I go to the library, and I have a lot of birds, a lot of wind, and a lot of water. It’s time consuming: you have to listen. There’s a program called Soundminer, where I can put in key words like ‘Wind.’ If I put in wind, I come up with 1,000 [results], so I’ve got to try and narrow it down and listen and make a lot of snap judgments: ‘That’s phony; that sounds like a loop; that’s too busy.’ Then you come up, hopefully, with something really beautiful.”
While Reichardt was working on the picture and the sound edit of First Cow, she was also liaising with composer William Tyler remotely. Tyler, a first time film composer, had one face-to-face meeting with Reichardt in New York, during the edit, before he had to fly off to London for a tour date. “When I got to New York, I brought a dulcimer, I brought this little banjo-ukulele thing, and I brought a guitar. I sat down in the editing room with her. She was just like, ‘Okay, play to this thing now.’ She told me what she liked and didn’t like, and we narrowed it down from there. When I went back to California, I spent a couple of days in a studio with a friend of mine who’s an engineer and has done a lot of film work. She [Kelly] was far enough along in the process where she wanted to be pretty decisive about where cues were sitting. The total amount of time I spent in the studio was maybe a week, spread out over two months.”
“Apart from that initial meeting with Kelly in the editing room in New York, most of it was done remotely,” Tyler continued. “A little bit of it was done when I was on tour in Europe. I booked a day off in a studio because she was like, ‘I don’t think this is working here.’ So I sent her a bunch of ideas for this specific cue. It was back and forth.” Reichardt wanted Tyler’s score to be in close conversation with the film’s sound design. Tyler explained, “When she was giving me references, I think the reason they were more about sound design and less about the actual music was because the density of the sound design in her films is so specific. So much of it involves radios and background noise and nature sounds … Any cut of the film that we were working with already had all the dialogue and the sound design in, even if it wasn’t totally finished yet. There were a couple of things where I just remember there being a direction of like, ‘When this footstep lands, don’t play there. We want to hear that [footstep] rather than a note.’”
The final stage of the edit, which took place in Portland on First Cow, after the official edit in New York is over, is mostly for Reichardt to tweak elements of sound design that she didn’t get to finesse during her collaboration with Shatz, such as the specific placement of insect and bird sounds. Often she’ll do this with Shatz himself, although he wasn’t able to do so for First Cow. Shatz told us, “I know from having worked with her on all these other films that once the mix is finished, I’m going to get a call, and she’s going to be like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to fix something, we’ve got to change this, we’ve got to change that.’ So, when we made the plan, I told [producer] Neil [Kopp], ‘Okay, I want to leave one day of mixing for weeks after we’re finished.’ Just because I know this is going to happen weeks after.” Reichardt elaborated, “In a main mix there’s no time. You just have so much to think about. Everyone’s thinking about the main actors’ voices, the music, all important stuff, and the worldscape of the film is being set. There legitimately is just not enough time to get into the nitty gritty of insect [sounds]. But I’ve gotten in the habit of doing a second mix, just tweaking the backgrounds. When doing the second mix (if you should be so lucky to find a person and place that will give you the time), you can make each little bug and every bird have a life and a world that you can concentrate on, and place the sounds very specifically.”
On First Cow, because Shatz wasn’t available for this final stage of sound work, Reichardt brought Mercer back to Portland as a sounding board, since he had been involved in the sound process since the beginning of the edit. Mercer explained how that final stage of the process worked: “Because we’d been going back and forth on the sound for so long, she’d be like, ‘What do you think of the background here?’ No one had been as close to the bloody edit than me and her. When she had a screening and made a bunch of final, final sound notes, I came in with her on that just so she could bounce it off me and be like, ‘This is still too loud.’ Or I’m like, ‘That background feels a bit loud, right?’ And sometimes she’s like, ‘Yeah, it’s fine.’ And other times she’s like, ‘Yeah, let’s bring it down a touch.’”
Kelly Reichardt’s films
River of Grass (1994)
Kelly Reichardt’s first feature film, River of Grass, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994, where it contended in the US Dramatic Competition. It later screened at the Berlin International Film Festival and was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards.
The film follows Cozy (Lisa Bowman), a wife and stay-at-home mother living a lonely life in the Florida Everglades. One day, she wanders to a bar in a neighbouring town and meets Lee (Larry Fessenden, a longtime friend of Reichardt’s who also edited the film). Lee is a deadbeat slacker who feels as aimless and unsatisfied as Cozy. During a drunken night of mild debauchery, they accidentally fire a gun at a man whose house they’ve broken into. Believing (incorrectly) that they killed him, they go on the run.
On the surface, River of Grass seems like an outlier in Reichardt’s filmography. It’s the only one of her films to be set in Reichardt’s home state of Florida. It uses more genre tropes than any of her films that followed (although Night Moves and First Cow both use elements of crime drama). It also features some quick-cut montage scenes and stylised sequences that would feel out of place in the more subdued Reichardt films that followed. However, River of Grass still tackles themes that are present throughout Reichardt’s filmography: loneliness, disenfranchised Americans, and life’s disappointments.
River of Grass had quite a fraught production and release. The ultra-low-budget production kept getting halted because of improper shooting permits. “Miami wasn’t a good city to be shooting a low-budget film in,” remarks Reichardt in Roads to nowhere. She also describes experiencing an unexpected amount of “overt sexism” on set. “The ‘you must be on the rag’ kind of sexism of the time was so shocking. I didn’t see it coming, and it took me a long time to get over it.”
An unfavourable distribution deal and a small release also meant that the film didn’t get widely seen. Reichardt didn’t make another film for twelve years. River of Grass was eventually restored and re-released in 2015 by Oscilloscope Laboratories.
Read more about River of Grass’ connections to Reichardt’s other films in Roads to nowhere >
Old Joy (2006)
Old Joy premiered at the Sundance Film Festival before going on to screen at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it won the Tiger Award, and the New Directors/New Films festival. Old Joy was nominated for the Film Independent Spirit Awards’ John Cassavetes award for low-budget films, and the Gotham Award for Best Feature Film.
Old Joy follows Mark (Daniel London), a man living in Portland who is settling down with his pregnant wife. Mark gets an unexpected phone call from Kurt (Will Oldham), an estranged friend from his wilder days. Kurt suggests they go on a camping trip in the Oregon woodlands, and Mark agrees. Over two days, they reconnect.
Old Joy marked Kelly Reichardt’s first collaboration with long-time creative partner Jon Raymond. She approached him to adapt his short story into the film. They didn’t write the script together, as they would do with future films.
Reichardt made Old Joy after a twelve-year feature filmmaking hiatus. During that time, she was earning money with for-hire jobs, learning to teach (she would eventually become a professor of film at Bard College), and making short films. She saved up the money to make Old Joy. She wasn’t sure if it would be a feature film or a short until she made it. The film’s critical success gave her a small leg up to make her next feature, Wendy and Lucy, with a more well-known actor, Michelle Williams.
Read the essay “Into the woods: Escaping from yourself in Old Joy” in Roads to nowhere >>
Listen to our podcast on Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy and Night Moves
Wendy and Lucy (2008)
Wendy and Lucy premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film’s co-star, Lucy (Kelly Reichardt’s real-life dog) won the Palme Dog. The film went on to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. The AFI named it the movie of the year. It was nominated for Film Independent Spirit Awards for Best Feature and Best Female Lead for Michelle Williams.
Wendy and Lucy follows Wendy (Michelle Williams), a homeless drifter travelling up through America in her car, hoping to make it to Alaska where she can find work. Her only company is her beloved dog, Lucy. Wendy runs into trouble when he car breaks down on the outskirts of Portland, leaving her floundering to cover the repair costs while also feeding herself and Lucy. Things gets worse when Wendy is caught shoplifting dog food, and while she’s at the police station, Lucy goes missing.
Reichardt worked with Jon Raymond to adapt his short story Train Choir into Wendy and Lucy. Michelle Williams, who had recently been Oscar-nominated for Brokeback Mountain, had seen Old Joy and wanted to work with Reichardt. She decided to work on Wendy and Lucy out of a desire to take a break from larger film productions. This was the start of a long-standing collaboration between Reichardt and Williams.
Oscilloscope distributed Wendy and Lucy, which was a huge boost for the film. As Reichardt describes in Roads to nowhere, “The people at Oscilloscope would pick up only a few films a year and put all their love into them. It was so weird after feeling so locked out for so long to have this person [producer Adam Yauch] take his resources and wrap them around you and your film, to get these difficult films into the world with such care. The whole team there is great. They’d go to Summer Stage with t-shirts. They found alternative ways to market a film, because we couldn’t compete with commercials or anything like that.” Oscilloscope also released Reichardt’s followup film, Meek’s Cutoff.
Read the essay “No fixed address: Ephemeral connections in Wendy and Lucy” in Roads to nowhere >>
Meek’s Cutoff (2010)
Meek’s Cutoff premiered to rave reviews at the Venice International Film Festival, where it won the SIGNIS Award. The film went on to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. It was nominated for Best Feature at the Gotham Awards and won the Producing Award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards, which went to Anish Savjani. Savjani’s production company, Filmscience, has produced all of Kelly Reichardt’s features since Old Joy.
Meek’s Cutoff is Reichardt’s first period piece. It is set in the Oregon desert in 1845 and follows a group of settlers traversing harsh conditions in search of better land in the American West. We meet them as they’re running out of water supplies and struggling to find a water source in the dry landscape. The film focuses specifically on the women who perform manual labour tasks as their husbands, and unhinged guide, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), make ill-advised plans as to what direction to head in next. The lead character is Emily (Michelle Williams). The film also stars Shirley Henderson, Zoe Kazan, Will Patton, Paul Dano, Neal Huff, and Rod Rondeaux.
Meek’s Cutoff is based partly on a true story. The characters and specifics are mostly fictionalised, although Stephen Meek was a real man who survived into old age. The story and characters were devised through historical research and reading the diaries of settlers like the ones in the film. Jon Raymond, who is the sole credited writer on the screenplay, came up with the idea for the film when he was asked to name a golf course in Oregon. During his research, he came across the story of Stephen Meek.
Meek’s Cutoff was Reichardt’s largest production to date at that point, although it was still a low-budget film. It also marked her first collaboration with cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, with whom she has worked on every film since.
Read the essay “Invisible labour made visible in Meek’s Cutoff” in Roads to nowhere >>
Listen to our podcast on Meek’s Cutoff and modern westerns
Night Moves (2014)
Night Moves premiered at the Venice Film Festival and went on to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival. It received less critical acclaim than many of Kelly Reichardt’s previous films, although as discussed on our podcast on the film and in Roads to nowhere, we think it’s due for a reassessment.
Night Moves is a dark crime thriller about three environmental activists on a mission to blow up a hydroelectric dam in Oregon. Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) lives in a community of activists who aim to live as sustainably as possible. He teams up with two environmentalists from outside the community, Harmon (Peter Sarsgard) and rich benefactor Dena (Dakota Fanning), to blow up the dam.
Reichardt co-wrote the screenplay with Jon Raymond. Raymond came up with the idea for the story after spending time with friends who lived on a farm similar to the one where Jesse Eisenberg’s character lives in the film. He became interested in the politics surrounding the farm and the community that lived there, and wanted to explore that through a fictional story.
Night Moves was the first of Reichardt’s films to be shot on digital instead of on film. The second was First Cow.
Read the essay “The morality of crime in Night Moves and First Cow” in Roads to nowhere >>
Certain Women (2016)
Certain Women premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016 and went on to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, and the London Film Festival, where it won Best Film. The film was nominated for Best Director and Best Supporting Female (Lily Gladstone) at the Film Independent Spirit Awards. It was nominated for Best Film, Breakthrough Actor (Gladstone), and the Audience Award at the Gotham Awards.
The film tells a series of three Montana-set short stories. In the first, a lawyer (Laura Dern) deals with a difficult, and ultimately violent, client (Jared Harris). In the second, a woman (Michelle Williams) tries to buy sandstone from an elderly friend in order to build a home for her family. In the third and final story, a lonely rancher (Lily Gladstone) falls for a young lawyer (Kristen Stewart) who teaches at a night school in a nearby town.
Certain Women was the first film Kelly Reichardt had worked on without Jon Raymond since River of Grass. The film was adapted from three short stories by writer Maile Meloy. Reichardt is the sole credited screenwriter.
The film launched the career of Lily Gladstone, who is interviewed in Roads to nowhere, and later acted in a supporting role in Reichardt’s First Cow. Gladstone won several critics awards for supporting and breakthrough actress.
Read a case study on Certain Women in Roads to nowhere >>
Watch a discussion on acting with Lily Gladstone on Lockdown Film School
Lily Gladstone discusses her approach to acting, her career, and working with Kelly Reichardt in conversation with fellow actor Frank Mosley, with whom she worked in Freeland.
First Cow (2019)
First Cow premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 2019 and went on to screen at the New York Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020. It was briefly released in North America in March 2020 before being pulled from theatres as a result of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. It was released digitally in the summer. The film was nominated for Film Independent Spirit awards for Best Feature, Best Director, and Best Supporting Male (Orion Lee). It was nominated for five Gotham Awards, including Best Feature. The New York Film Critics Circle named it the best film of 2020.
First Cow follows Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro), a gentle cook who arrives at a small town in Oregon in the 1820s. He befriends King-Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant who lives in a small hut near the town. Together, they start an illicit baking business: they steal milk from the rich Chief Factor’s (Toby Jones) cow, Cookie bakes “oily cakes”, and they sell the cakes back to the townspeople for a profit.
First Cow was adapted by Kelly Reichardt and Jon Raymond from Raymond’s novel, The Half-Life. The Half-Life was the first novel or short story of Raymond’s that Reichardt ever read, and it’s what made her want to work with him in the first place. Over fifteen years later, they finally adapted it.
The film was Reichardt’s first collaboration with A24, who produced and distributed the film. With their support, she secured the biggest budget she’s ever had for a film, although it was still relatively small. It was also the first union shoot she’d run, which meant shorter days and weekends off. In Roads to nowhere, Reichardt told us, “It wasn’t sixteen to eighteen hours; it was more reasonable. It was like twelve-hour days, because it was union. It wasn’t like you had four hours to go home and decide if you were either going to sleep, eat, or maybe take a bath. I could come home and work and think. We had these two days in the week to work because we weren’t shooting every day. Just having time to think was the biggest gift.”
First Cow was Reichardt’s final collaboration with actor René Auberjonois, who died shortly after shooting wrapped. Auberjonois also had a supporting role in Certain Women.
Read a case study on First Cow in Roads to nowhere >>
Coming soon: Showing Up (2022)
Kelly Reichardt and Jon Raymond are soon set to reunite for their fourth collaboration with Showing Up. The film was produced and distributed by A24, and was shot in the summer of 2021. Reichardt co-wrote the script with Jon Raymond. The film stars Michelle Williams, André 3000, and Hong Chau. Previous Reichardt collaborators John Magaro and James Le Gros also appear.
Showing Up reunites the First Cow production team, which includes cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, costume designer April Napier, and production designer Anthony Gasparro — all of whom are interviewed in-depth in Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s broken American dreams
According to Deadline, “Reichardt’s latest film is a vibrant and sharply funny portrait of an artist on the verge of a career-changing exhibition. As she navigates family, friends, and colleagues in the lead up to her show, the chaos of life becomes the inspiration for great art.”
Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s broken American dreams
About the book
Roads to nowhere offers the first in-depth, 360-degree look at Kelly Reichardt’s process through interviews with Reichardt herself and her collaborators on First Cow, many of whom have been working with her for years.
Through essays on each of Reichardt’s films, Roads to nowhere explores how her modern westerns are melancholy odes to lonely American lives.
Snag a copy of Roads to nowhere, to discover how this modern master operates, and to read a series of essays about each of Reichardt’s films, which examine her thoughtful, quiet portraits of everyday lives.
Excerpts from Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s broken American dreams
Recommended reading and viewing on Kelly Reichardt
Sign up to our Kelly Reichardt challenge and get a series of emails that guide you through watching each of Reichardt’s films, including a detailed further reading list for each film.
More recommended reading and viewing…
- LISTEN: The Seventh Row Podcast discusses the writing of Roads to nowhere and what they learned about Kelly Reichardt’s films
- LISTEN: The Seventh Row Podcast compares Wendy and Lucy and First Cow, Kelly Reichardt’s films about animals
- LISTEN: The Seventh Row Podcast discusses Meek’s Cutoff and modern westerns
- LISTEN: The Seventh Row Podcast discusses Old Joy and Night Moves, Kelly Reichardt’s films about men
- LISTEN: Seventh Row’s Orla Smith guests on The Film Stage’s Intermission podcast to discuss Certain Women
- LISTEN: Kelly Reichardt’s announces her new film, Showing Up, on the A24 Podcast, in conversation with Kenneth Lonergan
- WATCH: A masterclass with costume designers April Napier (Certain Women, First Cow) and Grace Snell (The Souvenir)
- WATCH: A masterclass with actors Lily Gladstone (Certain Women, First Cow) and Frank Mosley (Some Beasts)
- READ: Jon Raymond on his collaboration and friendship with Kelly Reichardt
- READ: Kelly Reichardt and Andrew Haigh are modernising the western
- READ: Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow and dreamers thwarted by capitalism (Seventh Row review)
- READ: Kelly Reichardt interviewed by Todd Haynes
- READ: Kelly Reichardt interviewed by Gus Van Sant
FAQ about Kelly Reichardt
Kelly Reichardt and Jon Raymond are soon set to reunite for their fourth collaboration with Showing Up. The film was produced and will be distributed by A24, and it is set to go into production in the summer of 2021. Reichardt co-wrote the script with Jon Raymond.
According to Deadline, “Reichardt’s latest film is a vibrant and sharply funny portrait of an artist on the verge of a career-changing exhibition. As she navigates family, friends, and colleagues in the lead up to her show, the chaos of life becomes the inspiration for great art.” Showing Up will have its world premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival in the Official Competition.
Kelly Reichardt hails from Miami-Dade County, Florida, where her first feature, River of Grass, was set. She is currently based between Portland and New York City. Most of her films after River of Grass have been set in Oregon.
River of Grass (1994), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Night Moves (2013), Certain Women (2016), and First Cow (2019). In between River of Grass and Old Joy she directed two short films, Ode (1999) and Then a Year (2001), which are currently unavailable. Her eighth feature, Showing Up (2022) is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the Official Competition in May 2022.
Kelly Reichardt has directed seven feature films. The upcoming Showing Up will be her eighth feature.
Kelly Reichardt’s first film was River of Grass (1994), her only film set in Miami, where Reichardt is from.
Kelly Reichardt has worked with author and screenwriter Jon Raymond on all of her films save for River of Grass and Certain Women. She has collaborated with cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt on all her films since Meek’s Cutoff, and sound designer Leslie Shatz on all her films since Wendy and Lucy, save for Night Moves. Costume designer April Napier and production designer Anthony Gasparro have worked on both Certain Women and First Cow.
In terms of actors, Michelle Williams has starred in three of Reichardt’s films (Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Certain Women), soon to be four with Showing Up. Reichardt has also featured several character actors in supporting roles across several of her films, such as Lily Gladstone, Will Patton, James Le Gros, Alia Shawkat, and more.
As explored in Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s broken American dreams, Kelly Reichardt’s films often explore themes of disenfranchisement in America, mostly on the grounds of class and gender. Her films deal with lonely characters whose dreams for life have disappointed them. Her characters often live in quite isolated parts of America, such as Miami-Dade County, small town Montana, and various parts of Oregon.
Kelly Reichardt’s third feature, Wendy and Lucy, premiered in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes 2008. She sat on the jury for the Official Competition in 2019 when the Palme d’Or was awarded to Parasite. Showing Up is the first Kelly Reichardt film to be selected for the Cannes Competition. In 2022, she will also be awarded the Carrosse d’Or from the Director’s Fortnight sidebar, where she will also be giving a masterclass.