Kelly Reichardt On ‘The Mastermind,’ Josh O’Connor

Kelly Reichardt is worried she’s coming off as a grouch during our conversation at the New York Film Festival, where her latest film, The Mastermind, is playing ahead of its release on October 17. “Temper this! Don’t make me sound like such an old crank,” she requests after going on an extensive tangent about how much she hates when people eat during movie screenings — and, yes, that includes popcorn. (“In France, you go sit in a nice beautiful seat and no one’s eating. But then it’s all in French! You don’t know what the hell’s going on.”) Entertaining complaints aside, Reichardt, 61, is far from an old crank, though she maintains a reputation for not suffering fools. The writer-director has spent the last three-plus decades turning out idiosyncratic independent films that portray their characters with such intimacy that it feels like the screen is offering a temporary gift of telepathy. Her work is known for its deliberate pace as well as its tight scale, though it should be just as acclaimed for its capacity to undermine expectations. Her 1994 debut River of Grass, set in her home state of Florida, was about a couple who go on the run, only to never actually manage to leave town. When she made a western, Meek’s Cutoff, in 2010, its most talked-about moment was not its climactic standoff but a scene in which Michelle Williams, playing the bonneted wife of one of a group of pioneers, fires a flintlock rifle in the air, and then goes through the minute-long process of reloading in real time so she can get off another shot.

Reichardt’s ninth film, The Mastermind, is her biggest yet, though what that means in her context is very specific. It’s a heist movie set in an autumnal 1970 Massachusetts, where a family man named James Blaine Mooney (a perfectly frayed Josh O’Connor) plans to steal several paintings from his local museum. In true Reichardt fashion, the driving force of the film is not the crime itself, which takes place in bumbling fashion in the first third, but what happens afterward. It’s a movie whose thrills come from places as unexpected as its humor, and that, like Reichardt’s previous feature Showing Up, plays around with the tension between art and commerce. These are topics that the director, who’s balanced filmmaking with a job teaching film at Bard for years, has had plenty of time to think about when she’s not fretting about the state of the world.

The Mastermind is about an art-school dropout who becomes a noncommittal carpenter, and then, in his 30s, decides to try out a life of crime by stealing some paintings from his local museum. How did you come up with the idea? 

Showing Up was a film about art, and maybe I wasn’t ready to give up the fun research. I came upon this article of these teenagers getting stuck in the midst of a snatch-and-grab, and so that was a good launching point.

Have you ever had the idle thought that seems to first animate Mooney — like, This painting is just hanging here on the wall, what if I took it? 

I’m too chicken. I’ve always been so afraid of jail. Also, what am I going to do with it, put it in my apartment? It would end up in some crappy storage space if I had it. It’s nice shared space, a museum. It’s the one thing you can still do in public that doesn’t involve food.

Given that we don’t know anything about his original aspirations, I’m curious — did you conceive of Mooney as a failed artist?

No, he hasn’t really tried enough to have failed as an artist. I think he feels a rebelliousness toward the middle-class life of his parents that he sees himself falling into, the same trappings of marriage and kids. It’s a time in the country of questioning and disruption and the disillusionment of the ’60s, and so it’s like, is he trying to catch the wave of the revolutionary for his own means? He’s just blowing up his life.

How did you end up casting Josh O’Connor as Mooney?

Our mutual friend, the filmmaker Karim Aïnouz, introduced us, and I grabbed my window of time that I could have with him. I sent him stuff to help with what it would be like to be living in America in that era, because it’s not the ’70s and it’s not the ’60s, it’s 1970, it’s a cusp — what would be on the radio, what records you would have, the Joan Didion essays from the time. He worked with a voice coach to get the region, and Bill Camp lives outside of Worcester, so he and Josh were all Zooming on their own, working on the accents. You get in the clothes and then you get in your house, and all of those things help to take it to the next place. Have you ever met Josh O’Connor?

I haven’t had the pleasure.

Ridiculously charming person.

That definitely comes through onscreen.

There’s a scene where Josh is locked in a car with two really awesome, super-chatty kids playing his sons. He’s got a camera strapped to the top of the car, the driving’s not easy, and he’s responding to the kids constantly. And the kids loved Josh so much. If someone didn’t get their sense of humor or their vibe, it would’ve been a really different experience. A lot of it’s a crapshoot, because you don’t ever really know where the problem will be, but everything was made easier with him. But he’s too busy now, so I want to say that he’s a jerk.

While we’re living through a lot of tumult now, there was a lot of tumult in 1970, too, when The Mastermind takes place. But do you feel like there’s something almost wistful in thinking about the idea of a scandal being able to actually bring down a president?

My childhood was chaotic, so I think of that time in the country as chaotic. Which it was: The draft was still full on, you’re in that hangover of disillusionment with the ’60s, your president lies to you, and you as a citizen don’t necessarily know what’s going on. My first political memory is swimming in the pool in Miami, where I’m from, and we all had to get out of the pool to watch Nixon resign. I was in third grade, and my teacher went around the room and we had to all say what Watergate was. I just knew something was on TV every day, and I knew it had to do with bugs, which I really don’t like. But anything Watergate in my adult life, I’m like, Lay it on me. I watched the hearings over and over again when I lived in New York. Smoke a joint, walk up to the Museum of Television, and watch some Watergate? Yes, please. That’s my reality TV show. I watched all of Iran-Contra. I like a hearing, for sure.

The Mastermind has been described as a heist film, albeit not the typical kind. Are you a fan of the genre?

It depends who does them. I love Jean-Pierre Melville’s; those are probably my favorite. But I think that this is also a coming-apart film in the tradition of New Hollywood. I shouldn’t keep calling it a heist movie, because people will go with certain expectations. I showed a cut of the film to a friend and afterwards, the first thing she says, “Don’t tell me I’m coming to see a heist film when it’s this.”

You’ve worked with some actors, like Michelle Williams and John Magaro, repeatedly. When you’re working with someone new, what helps you know, Okay, we can do this?

I had a crazy meeting with an actor a long time ago. I met him at his hotel, and there was a line getting up to the desk, and he started yelling at the lady behind it, though it wasn’t her fault. I was like, Wow, he’s going to be yelling at me like that at some point. And, in fact, that was true! So now I know enough to respond to the tea leaves early. Not everyone is up for this level of filmmaking. The Masterpiece was by far our most comfortable film, but still … Most people are really into it or they’re really not into it, and it’s important to find the right people. You get very spoiled if you work with Michelle Williams a lot because she’s a really easy person to work with and she’s so all in.

Something interesting that you’ve said in interviews is that people would respond very harshly to Wendy, the young woman Michelle Williams plays in Wendy and Lucy, for the choices she makes and what she abandons. Mooney makes a similar choice; he’s been coasting for a long time on that charm, and you watch him basically exhaust it.

Oh my God, good point! A woman walking away from her life, even in River of Grass, where the Lisa Bowman character leaves her kids — much harder critique than a dude leaving his kids (though some of my female friends have pretty hard critiques on the character too). He obviously knows how to work it, to get money from his mom, so he’s aware, he’s counting on his charm.

After you made River of Grass in 1994, you spent ten years struggling to get funding for your next feature. Has that process gotten easier for you, financing?

It’s hard to make small stories, it really is. This budget is more than I’ve had before, but in the scheme of things, it’s still small. When I think about it, I’m like, Wow, someone gave me money for a film about a guy who steals milk and a woman with a hurt bird and a broken ceramic piece. It’s amazing that they’ve even been able to happen.

It’s always felt precarious, but now everything feels precarious. The franchise films and all that have their own precariousness, but they’ll carry on. It’s certainly way easier than it used to be, but there is always a sense, when we’re making a film, where we go, Well, clearly this is the last one we’re going to do, the plug’s going to be pulled. So … I don’t give up my teaching job.

Do you have a project in the back of your head that you would do if someone came around offering $80 million, no questions asked?

I don’t think there is $80 million, no questions asked. But I want to collaborate with cinematographer Chris Blauvelt and production designer Tony Gasparro. I do not want to collaborate with a team of studio people, nothing against studio people. I don’t have the temperament for it. From the moment we’re talking about a script, I’m always thinking in an economical sense. The main thing you want more money for is time. We used to shoot six-day weeks and you’re scouting on the seventh day and you have no time to think. Just being able to shoot a five-day week is a huge gift.

So no one’s come calling to pitch you on some franchise film yourself?

There were some … but it didn’t even go that far to my agent. Some people can maneuver, it’s not like they aren’t making the films they want to make on big budgets. I always think, What if it was the last thing you did? Whatever. I’m fortunate; I have a good setup.

You’ve had projects you weren’t able to get made, like The Royal Court, the crime movie you were working on after River of Grass. Do you ever revisit or try to revive them?

Oh, God! That’s so long ago. That point in my life was when everyone would tell you, “Make films about what you know.” Then I realized making films about things you don’t know is way more interesting. You get out of your head, and it’s just fun to investigate and discover other worlds. And of course, you’re going to find things that you have in common with who you are and what makes you up and what your experiences have been.

More recently, I tried to get something made that I was going to shoot in Europe, but a lot of my research for it got moved into First Cow. I got some of what I wanted to do in that film. And time changes so much now that I don’t know. Yeah.

I think about you as such an American filmmaker.

I guess everyone did, because I couldn’t get the money to make it over there. It had a fantasy element to it, so everyone kept telling me it wasn’t a Kelly film. It’s true; I’m not really a fantasy person. But it could have been interesting.

Your work does sometimes get called “slow cinema,” which is not a framing I find useful, but it does make me think about your love for showing how long certain actions actually take. Which is rare! Movies cut around things all the time!

Filmmaking is all just time — how you mess with time and space, that’s really all it is. Commerce wants everything to be faster and does not want us to look at anything. It does not want us to think, to take the time to see. It just wants to show, look at this and look at this and look at this, and it only gets faster. Now if you have a shot, it is 10 seconds, 20 seconds. It’s actually fucked-up. People don’t want to live the pace of their own day anymore. That’s why everyone’s looking at their phone.

I like watching people do stuff. If you park a kid in a stroller in front of someone who’s tarring a road, they’re completely pleased to be watching that. It’s fun to watch people figure things out. Otherwise, you just cut and it’s already done. Sometimes when people say, “Oh, check out this actor in this film,” I’ll go to look, and I can’t even find a moment that the camera stops on them, much less see the performance. I’m not on other movie sets, but I think one of the reasons I’ve been lucky enough to work with the actors I worked with is they like to be able to have the space to play something out.

In your job as a professor at Bard, you’re teaching film to students who’ve had the internet around for their entire lives, a thing that has atomized our attention spans down to the smallest possible units. What’s it like to work with people who’ve grown up with it?    

Fighting against YouTube is a losing battle, but that’s what I’m doing in life, apparently. One thing that’s different is there’s lots of women in class now. When I started teaching at NYU, some revered little man used to come into each class and say, “Women will never ever, ever be directors.” You’re telling a room of guys, one female student, and myself — thanks for stopping by! My frequent collaborator Jon Raymond says, “It proves cinema is dead because the classes are all women now,” but now there’s a lot of women and it’s mixed and it’s cool.

I’m at Bard now, so maybe it’s different — it’s not all narrative-driven. The harder thing is to talk people into not hand-holding a camera; that’s a bigger battle than pacing. They’re so used to seeing handheld footage. If the horizon is moving, it doesn’t drive them crazy the way it drives me crazy. But generally, the students want to see something that they’re not seeing on their phone. They’ve grown up in a faster world, and there’s novelty to seeing something that’s a little slower.

It does feel like the pressure to figure out how to make money is weighing on people who are coming up a lot more. 

It’s funny, I was talking to my friend the other day about how in our day, if you had a trust fund or wealth, you hid it. Now, talking to these kids, they were like, “Everyone just wants to be rich.” That was not part of the working criteria for the people that I knew in bands or making films or making art. Everyone hoped that you’d be able to keep doing it somehow, but the idea that you would even be able to make a living off it, I don’t remember that being in our psyche at all. But people now are paying a lot more to go to school, and they’re paying a lot more for rent. I worry that young people don’t have enough time to just hang out, to talk about art-making and to see art because of the amount they have to hustle to get the rent paid and what are the jobs. The corporate world has a much more of a stranglehold on everything. How do you navigate any of it with any clean hands?

To come back to YouTube, online videos are also so up-front about sponsorships and monetization.

Yesterday, at New York Film Festival, there was a moment where the actors and I went back to have a Polaroid taken, and someone filmed us back there. I’m not on social media, but someone sent the video to me and I was like, “Oh, I didn’t know I was being filmed. And now it’s on the internet.” When I started doing this stuff, even when you did a Q&A, you signed if they could film, and there was another thing you signed if it was going to go on the internet. That piece of paper doesn’t exist anymore.

Speaking of releases, you did some work in reality TV at one point in your career, is that right?

I did one season of a reality TV show when I was trying to make Old Joy. I had written the script and wanted to get the money to buy some film. My friend Richard, he’d been doing reality TV since Judge Wapner on The People’s Court, and he got me a job on America’s Next Top Model for a season as a “writer,” which is basically listening to hours and hours of tapes of young girls fighting and putting it in a formula. I tried to skirt the formula, and it was a complete failure. You have to stick to the formula, but it was an experience. I was teaching at NYU at that point, and more than anything, I just wanted a semester off. I was an adjunct there. It was brutal. People were nicer on the Top Model show.

Do you ever wish you didn’t need the job? In Showing Up, you sense the ways in which Michelle Williams’s character has her admin position at the college, and it’s part of her life, but also she looks enviously at fellow sculptor Hong Chau, who’s just floating free to focus on her art.

I’m not a good free-floater. I need something to do during the day, and I like health insurance, and I don’t like production enough to be in it all the time. On the same token, I don’t want to be an adjunct again. But, no, I don’t like having big open days in front of me, and I just never thought of it that way.