THE SOCIAL ANIMAL
Although still busy with her teaching duties at Bard, Kelly Reichardt made time to discuss her latest film on a grey morning in early December. We met outside the Walter Reade Theater in New York.
You open First Cow with a wonderful quote by William Blake: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” Friendship has remained a major theme of your work since the very beginning. Strangers often become fleetingly intimate companions, while seemingly close friends and loved ones drift toward estrangement.
Sometimes the ultimate friend is a dog or other animal. And yes, sometimes it’s a stranger. Maybe the main question that appears throughout all the movies has to do with a certain idea of community and what we owe each other as neighbors, or Americans, or in a larger sense, humans sharing a planet. Actually, we never get that large—these films are more on the scale of: you might own the car, but I own the parking lot, so I can kick you off the property, or, if I choose, give you a spot to rest in.
My films have been shaped by the happy luck of a network of friendships. One of the most important friendships has been with Jonathan Raymond [author of the novel The Half-Life, which First Cow is based on], who is specifically interested in the dynamics of small communities and the politics that run through them. We spend a lot of time obsessing over the minutiae of relationships in a work space or at the ceramics studio or local gym. The early ’90s indie film scene wasn’t all that welcoming to women filmmakers, so after River of Grass I went back to shooting Super 8 and making films with a couple of friends. I was able to shoot Old Joy on 16mm, and little by little began building working relationships that included Jon, producers Neil Kopp and Anish Savjani, and eventually cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt and assistant director Chris Carroll.
David Doernberg, the production designer on used to tell me, “You treat every film like you’re curating a dinner party.” He’d say, “That’s not your job!” But really it was my job because I couldn’t work well around all the macho guys-with-gear energy that happens on a lot of film sets. And I most especially needed a good vibe with the person at the camera. Friction at the
