First Cow Director Kelly Reichardt on Making Quiet Art and the Failure of American Individualism

In early March, Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, a moving portrait of an unlikely friendship between two outsiders in 1820s Oregon territory—forged through a dairy cow and some entrepreneurial baking—debuted in limited release. The A24 movie was critically beloved and had the highest opening of Reichardt’s career but, before it could expand nationwide, theaters across the country shut down.

“That was disappointing, but in the scheme of things, I can't complain about it. Only to my closest comrades,” Reichardt says now, as First Cow comes to streaming services. “But as I'm doing press again, I will say I am starting to feel really resentful. I'm talking to people in other countries who have their lives back and I'm resentful of the time we're going to lose going forward just based on stupidity.”

Throughout this period of isolation, I’ve found myself drawn to revisiting Reichardt’s work. Her catalogue of contemplative modern Westerns fits the moment: quiet meditations on lonely people, failed by American capitalism, often in communion with nature. The pace is slow and steadily observant, the plots are minimal. Reichardt jokingly distills First Cow, for instance, down to “a film about someone who steals a basket of milk.” But in a strange and unprecedented year for cinema, an independent film about someone who steals a basket of milk very well may end up being an Oscars contender. (Reichardt recently said of the awards show: “I just don’t give a shit about the Oscars. I just can’t bring myself to watch. I find them a little embarrassing—the strutting of money and everything.”)

A Miami native and high school dropout, Reichardt debuted her first feature film in 1994, when she turned her eye to her home state for River of Grass. Her next feature-length release, 2006’s Old Joy, was set in Oregon, and the landscape of the Pacific Northwest would come to dominate most of her later work, including 2008’s Wendy and Lucy. Reichardt spoke to me over Zoom from a sunny room in her house in Portland, Oregon, where she relocated a few years ago after three decades in New York City. She’s currently working on another project with her frequent collaborator, the novelist and screenwriter Jonathan Raymond.

Kelly Reichardt: I don't know where the days go. A lot of time in this room that I'm sitting in. I can get out for a walk here, and Jonathan Raymond lives up the street. I have friends right in the neighborhood, so there's a lot of porch sitting. Napping. My days are a blur. I'm just like, "Wow, How could it be Friday again?" I have a victory garden going in the house, which is like, four plants.

GQ: First Cow is based on Jonathan Raymond’s novel The Half-Life, which is an epic, sprawling book—but there’s no cow in it. How did you and Jonathan end up inventing what would end up being the central character?

The cow was sort of the key that unlocked the whole thing. The novel spans four decades, there's a trip to China, King Lu is really two different characters in the novel. For a decade, I’d been saying, "Oh, don't give The Half-Life to anyone else, but I have no idea how I could ever make that movie.” The revelation of the cow was the thing that opened the door to being able to keep all the themes and characters from the novel, and be able to do it in this passage of time that works for my filmmaking.

We had been brainstorming about it and I think it kind of worked backwards. We had this idea of this chase scene, but we didn't really have the thing that they were running from. And then, one day, John had this idea about the cow. It was reversed engineered.

You went 12 years between making your debut feature, River of Grass, and your next feature, Old Joy. I know you made some short films, but what were those 12 years like? What was happening for you?

What was not happening was getting a film made. Independent filmmaking, or any kind of filming, was really not open and generous to women in any way. It was really like beating your head against a brick wall. People who somehow managed out of a fluke to get a first film made—trying to get a second film made was just really an impossible venture it seemed.

I spent a decade trying to get another film made and then I sort of gave up on feature filmmaking and I went back to Super 8 and tried my hand at less narrative approaches to filmmaking though I don't have a brain for it at all.

In that time I started teaching and I just thought I would teach and make films for personal gratification or whatever. And then I saved up enough money to shoot Old Joy—I did a season of a reality TV show and was able to buy a used car to come out West.

What was the reality show you worked on?

[America’s Next] Top Model. Richard Glatzer, the director, he'd been working on reality shows since the very first reality show—I don’t know what it’s called, it’ll come to me. Richard got me the job and I went out to L.A. and while I was working on it, I was working on the script Old Joy at the same time.

Wow. That must’ve been an intense mental switch every day. In a New York Times profile of you in 2016, you were candid about the reality of making low-budget films, saying, “it also just means that I’m not getting paid, and I’m in my 50s.” What did the financial situation look like by the time you got to First Cow? Are you able to share how much that one cost to get made?

Oh, no, I can't tell much anything. It was a low-budget film, obviously, but bigger for me. Still, as my male filmmaking colleague said—I asked him how much he was getting for his film and he goes, "Oh, it's really low-budget. I mean, way more than you." [Laughs]

But, all things considered, I'm making a film about someone who steals a basket of milk. I don't consider that biases are gone by any measure. But I think a lot of it has to do with the stories that I'm interested in telling. And I do have complete autonomy when I'm making these films. I mean, it is true for everybody: the more money you take, the more people you have to answer to and the more voices there are. This was not like that at all. I cast who I wanted to cast and I finished my cut and said, “Here's the movie.” You take less money, you get more of that.

I rewatched Old Joy recently and, as with First Cow, was struck by the way you depict tenderness between male friends. How do you go about establishing that intimacy?

Those guys in Old Joy, they're basically on a camping trip together while making the film. The films have this intimate setting in the making of them and so I think that adds to it. In Old Joy, it really was like the film: the further we got into the woods, the more this sort of masculine connectedness was happening, almost to the point where I was like, "Okay. Too much male energy going on.” But these actors, they're in a car together all day long and they're hiking and they're dealing with Lucy, the dog. The bonding is pretty easy, I think.

Fortunately, I haven't had the situation where two actors haven't gotten along. With Orion [Lee] and [John] Magaro, I think they each had a lot of the characters they were playing in them. Magaro is very interior and Orion is very much like, "Why are we doing this? How are we doing that?" I'm not positive I'm right because I mostly know actors through working with them and maybe they get home and they're completely different, but it seemed to me that they had a lot of the energy of their characters in them naturally.

In First Cow, the counterbalance to those characters’ sweetness is that nearly every other male character in the film is an aggressive asshole. There’s cruelty in even the small moments, like the older man cutting in front of the kid to get the last oily cake. What drives you to approach and depict traditional masculinity in this way?

It’s to make fun of it, especially right now. Well, always. It just all seems so ridiculous that it doesn't wear itself out. I mean, seriously, we have a president who cannot wear a mask because it damages his masculinity. What can you do besides make fun of it at this point?

In this case, all the fighting trappers are the sweetest guys, which was really hilarious and helped mood-wise for everything we were doing. There was a tone in The Half-Life that was humorous that I am really glad it translates into a movie. So many of the films we've made have been so aughhh—I don't know how you're going to spell that—but I did want to do something that had a little bit more levity to it. And it is fun to do that. it's fun to cut that stuff too: just in the sound room, watching a bunch of guys back in New York doing the sounds of the trappers wrestling.

Most of your films are concerned with people living on the margins of the capitalist system, which especially resonated in the discourse around First Cow. How much consideration do you place on politics when you’re making a project?

Those are the big conversations in the beginning and then the further into it you get and the more research you're doing, the more you're just trying to focus on the characters and who these exact people are and let those other things fall away. Then you're building those things back up when you're editing. I mean, the scene in the Chief Factor's house where there's 10 levels of who's on top: there's women, there's the First People versus the white people, a Chinese man, a servant. Constructing that scene, it’s a balance of focusing on the topic and the characters.

In the script, it mentions the servant, but then when we're setting up the shoot, I'm going to have the servant do this whole thing. Just by the fact that you're giving the servant that much time and going into his bedroom is, in a way, the political part of it. The fact that I'm going to spend time with him and show his moments. You've got to think about it in the shot and how it's playing. Some of it is just thinking about where you're going to put the camera, but it is also just not letting that be the focus over who the characters are and trusting that it's been considered and built in, and it'll show itself.

Many of your characters are profoundly lonely people, and you depict loneliness in a way that feels deeply authentic. What is your relationship to loneliness: are you a person who is comfortable with isolation and working alone?

I've been alone for a long time. I live alone. But I like being in a community of friends. I can spend a lot of time alone, but the [William] Blake quote in the beginning [of First Cow: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship”] is very true to me. I really wanted to keep that quote, which is in John's novel, because I wanted to be making a film about friendship and not about sparsity. Friendship has made my life so rich and making things with people who are your friends … these are now decades-long relationships that are deep and nourishing.

Right, and I’ve been thinking about your films more since we've been in isolation and people are grappling with loneliness but also deepening their relationships with nature, or building a different form of community.

I do think that some of what we're trying to get with aloneness in the film or, thinking of Wendy and Lucy, that America, in its lack of social nets for people, loves this heroic “pulled myself up by my bootstraps” without an acknowledgement of systems that leave people really on their own. As opposed to a coming together, “we can all lift each other up” kind of thing. I think of artist communities my entire adult life as being a sort of haven for that and for friendship and for working. Lack of community, or each man for himself, is a bad idea.

Speaking of those artist communities that you found in your life, how did you come into your own creatively?

I was always taking pictures as a kid and that gave me whatever armor you want to use to get through middle school. It was also just something to do. I always had a sense that there were things going on. I mean, if I look at Miami in the 70s, there was so much going on. I'm reading Joan Didion's Miami right now, which is so interesting, seeing her talk about the Miami I lived in. Plenty going on, but to me it was sort of a cultural void as far as art went.

I did have a strong sense of things going on in other places and that the way to get to that thing would be to get out of Florida. Boston was a completely random stop, but I made friends there and just sort of followed along. I was going to shoot some stuff they were doing, but I needed to get a camera from Mass Art, so I took a night class there.

I was trying to make up for lost time and taking in a lot of film and seeing live music. Then, with River of Grass, I did go back to my own turf to make a story, but I was obviously still heavily reliant on the recent films I'd been turned on to. It takes time, by doing, and some of your voice reveals itself to you. Over time, you'll be like, "Oh, that's the thing I'm interested in." And it keeps popping up or your work reflects back on you.

Your childhood sounds fascinating. Even beyond the seventies Miami aspect of it, your parents worked as a crime scene detective and an undercover narcotics officer. How did that inform, if at all, your view of the criminal justice system and your view of the world?

Well, that's a big conversation. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, but I guess I'm always thinking about it. My childhood was pretty chaotic. When my parents got divorced, my dad moved in with five other crime scene detectives. I remember the first time that I heard one of my dad's friends casually talking about “tuning somebody up” and what that meant. Also, my mom was undercover. When I was really young, it took me a long time to realize what side she was on.

Miami is a very diverse place and I lived in very diverse neighborhoods. I lived through the Miami Riots, the McDuffie riots. I was aware of bias growing up and aware where the power was and where it wasn't.

For one thing, it makes me take political things very personally—maybe we all do. You direct it as if someone in your family's vote is the whole reason that everything's turned out the way it has. I think I realized about racism at a young age. I think because I was surrounded by a mom who had this job and everything, but sexism totally blindsided me. It's weird that I could have felt so attuned to—maybe not in a totally sophisticated way, but in an instinctual way—knowing how things weren't fair on a race basis, but not seeing that until I was older. And that's probably a privilege that you don't realize that you're also in a group that's not the winning group. That is certainly a kind of privilege, to not know that till you're 22.

How was that made apparent to you?

Being on my own movie set, and just putting a movie together and then having a DP show up and having everyone look to that person for assurance because they're a man. But also, it was gnarly making that movie. It was not hidden. I mean, surviving River of Grass, the shooting of it, I was like, "Oh my God, this is happening because I'm a woman." And then I think the distribution had so many sexist elements to it.

And then trying to get a film made afterwards where you go to meetings and people go, "Well, we're not doing women's films.” People were not shy about it. I was trying to get a film made starring Alfre Woodard and they’d be like, “a woman director and then a Black woman lead, you're starting in such a hole.”

Also, just going to Sundance and watching my male counterparts get the budget I still haven't gotten on their second films and feeling like, "Wow, a decade lost”—watching all those guys that I am in the same age of, watching their careers.

I don’t want to say it's okay that it's like that or that it was like that—I'm sure all the systems didn't disappear. I'm just more insulated. But all of that somehow did lead to me teaching, which has been very nourishing and made me find my own way in filmmaking. There were other reasons I wasn't successful at all that other stuff too. I didn't have the skills for all that. The kind of films I wanted to make were not going to easily fit into all that anyway. So it’s not like it was just all one thing. But that one thing did exist.

I know I'm lucky I've gotten to make films, and I know I'm lucky I've gotten to make films with the collaborators I have. And I know I'm lucky to be teaching with people I teach with. I don't want to sound like I'm not grateful for those things. I am grateful for those things.

That decade that I didn't make films, I was always making stuff. It was a very tough time, but it has obviously led to another decade that was really fruitful for me. Life's strange.

One more First Cow question before I let you go: because of the movie release schedule this year, it might end up being an Oscars contender now, and I know what you’ve said about the Oscars in the past. Does that mean anything to you now?

Listen, if you were ever going to win an Oscar, wouldn't this be the great year? Just Zoom in, no outfit. Sure.

I just don't like film to seem like a competitive sport. I just don't like to give that power to anybody. If I get to make another film, I’ll be super good.

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

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Originally Appeared on GQ