Three Conversations with Kelly Reichardt

Kelly Reichardt has slowly been building a reputation in American independent cinema as one of the most rigorous and profound working filmmakers in a rapidly receding artistic landscape. Her first film, River of Grass (1994), starring her producer and horror director Larry Fessenden, is a crafty and incisive feminist subversion of the “Lovers on the Run” subgenre. While Grass went fairly unnoticed in the indie glut of the mid-90s, Reichardt’s second film Old Joy (2006), an exploration of masculine anxiety, was a critical hit landing on many year-end “best of” lists. Since then, Reichardt has been working consistently, often collaborating with writer Jonathan Raymond and operating completely free of the studio system. Her films tend to be minimal in dialogue and action, yet these quiet moments contain volumes about what it means to live in the margins of America. Her new film, First Cow, is another collaboration with Raymond from his novel The Half Life and will be released in March, 2020 by A24. When she isn’t directing, Reichardt teaches film at Bard College in New York.

COUNTERPUNCH: As early as your first film, River of Grass, there seems to be a number of references to other films. Stray Dogs with the lost gun, and Badlands with the female narration and lovers on the run plot.

KELLY REICHARDT: The lost gun, it should be said, actually came from my own world. My dad was a crime scene detective and my mom was an undercover agent and they had a lot of detective friends so some of it was coming from their stories. But when I left Miami, which was like a cultural desert in the 70s and I moved to Boston, I started going to the Brattle Theatre obsessively. It was like my mind was being blown if you can imagine not having grown up with anything besides Pink Panther movies. With River of Grass, the influences are so on the surface. I would say there’s not a clear voice of my own that’s bigger than the influences. It’s a young person’s attempt. But it was shot on locations I had grown up around.

CP: There is such a difference in style between River of Grass and Old Joy.

KR: Well, I was a decade older. During that time I had committed to obsessively watch films, read about films but also at that point I kept shooting. I made a 50 minute super 8 film and I just started shooting and practicing doing things that nobody is paying attention to. I’d been trying to get another feature made and for better or worse, that never happened.

And I think part of Old Joy for me was finding a writer or a piece of writing that made sense to my sensibility. I think it helped my filmmaking greatly to be able to work from pieces of writing that has more depth than me starting with a blank page. Coming from people who wake up and write everyday.

CP: Is that why you usually work from other’s material?

KR: Yeah. I think it made my filmmaking better. It’s enough of a challenge to figure out how to turn things into shootable pieces and make all the internal stuff into something you can get across, hopefully not just with dialogue but in other ways.

CP: Do you feel like you are drawn to writers who work in the same minimalist style as you or do you like when there’s a little more internal monologue that you can then strip away?

KR: It’s been a mixture of both. Certainly working with Patrick DeWitt, he’s a much more dense writer than Jonathan Raymond or Maile Meloy’s stories. I like working with Patrick and John who are both here in Portland and it’s nice to work with people you like and you want to spend time hashing things out with and will also let you ultimately go off and have your way with something and not be precious about the dialogue and are good sounding boards because they’re smart people. Starting with Larry (Fessenden) a lot of my filmmaking choices have been around people I want to spend time with and creating a world that is interesting to me. It’s hard to separate the projects from life. I mean, I live a few blocks away from Jon Raymond…I guess it goes back to hanging out.

CP: Your first film took place in the Everglades while your subsequent films take place in the Pacific Northwest predominantly. How do feel the environment you shoot in has affected your style?

KR: I think that’s what gets revealed to you in terms of who you are and what you’re drawn to. To some degree I’m tied to the budgets I can raise. And that starts to very much affect you…originally I always shot outside because I couldn’t afford any lights. But now as the stories get bigger it’s actually more expensive to shoot outside because we’re trying to do moonlight all the time and there’s so many night scenes. I love Bresson, I love Melville. I am attracted to the woods and the economical way they’re shooting.

CP: So you found a way to make the practicality of it…

KR: Yeah, it’s built into the aesthetic of things and what the stories can be.

CP: You mentioned Bresson, a very spiritual filmmaker. Do you feel there’s something in your films that taps into that?

KR: Yeah, hopefully. It’s something I’m not sure I can articulate but I think there’s an existential element, certainly to Jon Raymond’s writing and hopefully Wendy and Lucy isn’t really about a lost dog…and it is, you know?

CP: Are there certain non-narrative filmmakers that inspired you?

KR: Yeah. Bard opened up a big world, you know with Peggy Ahwesh, Jackie Goss, and Peter Hutton who was the one who brought me to Bard. He does these beautiful landscapes, I mean hard, beauty is not really the correct word, landscape films that are silent that will just be a series of really minimal, well-chosen shots that can give you an idea like, “Oh I thought I was looking at these two rivers,” or “I thought I was looking at the life of a barge,” But I realize, “Oh that film’s about the entireness of industrial existence and who wins and who loses without a word ever being spoken. Peter passed away and that was a huge, huge loss as far as a sounding board. I could never guess what Peter would say about a cut that I would show him.

CP: Are the scenes in your films how you see real-life conversations going on or are you developing something?

KR: No, I don’t know if real life has anything to do with it. I find it, cutting I mean, it still blows my mind when I’m editing and you see the different ways a scene could go and what you could get across just based on the amount of space you leave between things. Or how silence, and I don’t mean true silence, but I mean like not having dialogue can build so much tension. I’m interested in being able to get to emotional things through those sort of devices as opposed to someone telling you how they feel I guess, It’s just a wonder that a whole other language works and how certain formulas just prove out to be true. We all know this internal narrative language whether you want to resist it or not. And knowing the audience is well versed in that, you can use that to your advantage.

CP: How do you work with the actors? Are you going into backstories or…

KR: It depends. Everyone really wants something different. Some actors are like, “Tell me exactly what you want. Where should my hand go?” And other actors are like,” Don’t give me the internal, that’s my business. I’ll figure it out.” Michelle (Williams) will make a backstory for her character that I’ll help her with. But it gets so that I can’t even keep up with it and I’m like, “Okay, whatever. Whatever works for you.” It’s like any kind of social thing. You know Michelle and I work together a lot so it’s super easy. She’s like, “Oh, you hated that?” and I’m like, “Well, yeah.” Some actors are very sensitive, some actors are hilarious and easy. Some are assholes and don’t make eye contact and that’s a nightmare. Fortunately I’ve dealt with very little bad attitude on set but I’ve fucking dealt with it. Everyone’s such individual. You never know how you’re going to feel on set about performance and what’s going on. It might be totally different what you end up experiencing in the editing.

CP: There’s stuff that doesn’t work, that you thought would?

KR: It can go either way. You know? “Oh, that dick gave a really good performance. I see what he was doing now.” (laughs). It can go in any direction. Shooting is such a stressful, like, you don’t have enough time, you don’t have enough money. You might find comfort in something you recognize in a performance. Like, “Oh yes, I know what this is.” And discomfort in something you aren’t able to recognize as what you were imagining or what you were thinking or seems different than it did yesterday. Then you get in the editing room and find there’s a lot of options in that and the other thing you’ve come to know too well.

CP: It seems like you are building up a bit of a Kelly Reichardt Company, working with the same actors. Is that one of the reasons behind it, the practicality that you have this relationship and there is that trust?

KR: Yeah. I mean, I’m also working with new people all the time. It’s easier to work with people you have a good thing with, obviously, but it’s also sometimes once you edit a person a ton of times, you have to step away because you become overly familiar and it’s hard to have a blankslate of someone. But there are actors I always just want to work with. Obviously it’s been a huge help to me that Michelle is just always game. That’s kind of awesome. All those women I work with are just so awesome. Then there’s just people too, like James LeGross is one of the great chameleon actors of our time. You don’t have to think about how he would fit into a role. He could be whatever you offer him.

CP: What’s your experience in getting those performances? Specifically in Meek’s Cutoff. How you’re directing them and what they want.

KR: it was a situation where you read a script and it’s called Meek’s Cutoff and the men have most of the dialogue and there’s absolutely an expectation that the person that’s talking has the camera on them and a lot of times in Meek’s it’s the people that don’t have the lines that have the cameras on them and who get the close ups. And that was, possibly for better or worse, not laid out maybe frankly on my part before going into it. I guess I didn’t know it would be such a big deal and it was a really big deal for people. Some people rolled with it. But I did have the absolute feeling that had I been a dude, it would have been like, “Oh, he’s doing something. Oh interesting.” And being a woman you say, “She doesn’t know where to put the camera. She didn’t even get my close-up.” Like, you don’t get the benefit of anything. Actors are really vulnerable. They’re like laying themselves out for you, and you can serve them or not serve them. And in moments of true vulnerability it can get hard. It’s all hard. You’re making something. I mean, it can get hard with your best friend when you’re writing something and you’re in your comfortable house working. It certainly gets hard with the person you’re just meeting and you’re in the fucking freezing and they’re like, “What the hell am I doing out here at my age in the godforsaken desert and the camera’s not even pointed on me?”

CP: I want to talk a little about your preparation for a film. There seems to be a lot of thought put into the shots themselves and compositions. But then there also seems to be more freewheeling shots caught on the fly.

KR: No. No there’s not.

CP: No?

KR (Laughs) I don’t think so. We’re pretty tight. You plan as much as you can and then you’re going to be in this world. It’s not like you don’t ever think of a shot along the way. That’s completely untrue. But our days are so tight.

CP: And you’re storyboarding too?

KR: Sometimes. If I’m going to shoot a damn, I’m going to storyboard it. I have a shot list for what I want to do usually. It’s different in every setup. I’ve heard Herzog in his Masterclass clip, he goes, “Storyboards are for cowards!” and I’m like, “Yeah, whatever you say.” And again, I’m sure Herzog goes on set and everyone’s like, “What is he going to do?” But you know that is not something that is afforded to, not to keep harping on the woman thing, but there is no way I’m walking on a set and trying to figure out what I’m doing while my crew sits around and watches me. That is my worst nightmare.

CP: Do you have the feeling that you have to be 200% rather than 100%?

K: Yeah, totally, but some of it has to do with the speed at which we have to work. But, yeah, I just don’t think you can be a 5 foot tall woman and be on set and not know exactly what you’re doing and be like, “Hey, let’s figure this out in some groovy way.” That’s just somebody else’s world.

Somebody Else’s World: An Interview with Kelly Reichardt.  By Edward Leer.

Counterpunch , March 27, 2020.

I recently spoke with director Kelly Reichardt by phone about her new film First Cow, which premiered at the 2019 Telluride Film Festival (our Matt Delman reviewed it following the subsequent New York Film Festival) and is now finally rolling out in theaters. The film is a deceptively quiet period piece (passionate emotions roiling just below the surface), based on Jonathan Raymond’s The Half Life, set in the Pacific Northwest of the early 19th century, where white fur trappers, non-European immigrants and Native Americans co-exist in uneasy quasi-harmony. John Magaro (Overlord) plays a shy, awkward cook – nicknamed “Cookie” – who befriends King Lu, an entrepreneurial Chinese jack-of-all-trades played by Orion Lee (MLE). They bond over their status as social outcasts and together hatch a plan to earn money through Cookie’s considerable culinary skills. The only problem is that the only source of milk in the region is a cow that is not theirs. Using her trademark gentle pace and meticulous attention to visual detail, Reichardt (Certain Women) weaves a beautiful tale of the risks and rewards of brotherly love. Here is a condensed digest of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Hammer to Nail: Let’s start with the genesis of the story.

Kelly Reichardt: The genesis was Jonathan Raymond’s first novel, The Half Life, which I believe I read in 2004. The novel weaves together two stories between 1980 and 1820 and involves Cookie, and the King Lu character is actually two characters that were kind of fused together in our script, but it was just kind of a giant…it’s not a film I could undertake. And so I wrote to Jon Raymond after finishing the novel and asked him if he had any short stories, which led to him sending me Old Joy. And that was the first film I made based on one of his stories.

And then over the last however many years it’s been, we’ve sort of come back to this idea of The Half Life, just always pondering how we could get our arms around it for a film, something that I could expand upon as opposed to just extract the novel. We came up with this cow idea – the cow’s not in the book – and that kind of gave us a vehicle to keep Jon’s characters and the themes of the book and bring them to this other story. And it was just in the mode of where I could get in and sort of expand and get into the minutiae and details of the story as opposed to covering the bigger points of four decades.

HtN: Sure. And then of course you have that opening scene that sort of keeps some of that original idea of 1980.

KR: Yeah, that was a nice way to introduce the Columbia River, which is where the whole film takes place, and show the present day of this barge going down the Columbia, because it’s the same river that the cow comes down and was a real way…it’s like a trading highway for the Multnomah tribe and I think many of the tribes that lived along the Columbia River.

HtN: So, you’ve made two period pieces – this and Meek’s Cutoff – and then your other films are set in contemporary times. Do you nevertheless see any thematic resonances between this film and your previous work, things that you continue to explore in film after film?

KR: Yes, and a lot of these things are seeded in Jon’s writing, themes of just questioning how capitalism works with the natural world and is it possible for those two things to co-exist. There are also questions of American mythology, based on if anybody can make it in America, you just need an idea and some tenacity and you can just pull yourself up from your bootstraps and make your way, and is that really all it takes? And I guess also there’s resonance with a film like Wendy and Lucy, with the stealing of the dog food; in this film, there are these guys that are stealing a basket of milk, which is like the big crime in the film, as opposed to seeing the legitimate beaver trade, that’s going to wipe out the beaver and wipe out the indigenous people who’ve lived there forever, as the real crime. So, it looks at those sort of power structures and ideas of justice, but also friendship, which has been a theme in a lot of my films, as well.

HtN: Definitely. Why, by the way, in this film and in Meek’s Cutoff – your two period pieces – are you drawn to the 4:3 aspect ratio? Is it something you feel is just a better fit for films about the past?

KR: No, it’s more about space. I mean, I like the frame. I think it’s good for intimate storytelling. In Meek’s, it worked really well because I was trying to keep you with the party that was going West and they just didn’t know what was up ahead. And so the Academy frame really helped tell that story in that way. And it also worked in terms of the women’s bonnets that gave them no peripheral vision and it was a nice frame for the wagons. It’s a tall frame.

And in this case, it was like another intimate story and I just wanted to be with these guys, shooting in a forest where things were, again, just getting the height instead of the expanse. But it is an intimate frame and so if you’re going to be telling a story in a little hut, it’s quite nice. And there were a few scenes where it allowed me things I wouldn’t have been able to get to otherwise, like the scene with Toby Jones and Scott Shepherd on top of the cliff with Cookie down below. It’s a fun frame where you can do things you wouldn’t be able to in a frame with less height.

HtN: Right. I agree. Speaking further about the look of this film, your cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt, has worked with you since Meek’s Cutoff. He has an interesting body of work. He also just shot Autumn de Wilde’s Emma., which is opening around the same time as First Cow. I was particularly impressed with your nighttime scenes, which appear to be photographed with very little light. I’m sure the truth is more complicated, but it’s really remarkable work. How did you two decide on the look of the film?

KR: Well, a sort of color guide was the paintings of Frederick Remington, who has a lot of night…One of his books that we were looking at and I was passing around to everyone in the crew, I think it’s actually called The Color of Night. And he has these really muddy blues with a lot of green in them and yellow and these sort of coral stars and fire. Some of the scenes are shot day for night and some are night for night. It took some doing just to answer the question, “Can you make day for night look beautiful and not look hokey?,” and I think Blauvelt did a really amazing job with that.

HtN: He really did. Some of those nighttime scenes, we can barely see detail and yet we can see what we need to see.

KR: (laughs) I mean, usually, the director is saying, “I want it darker,” and the DP [Director of Photography] says, “That’s dark enough,” but we both loved the darkness equally. (laughs) So, sometimes it’s a little dangerous because we don’t pull each other back at all from crossing the line into complete…we’re getting a little better, though.

HtN: (laughs) Well, I really appreciate how the film looks. I also really appreciate the cast. I had just finished watching season one of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, on Amazon, in which John Magaro plays a significant supporting role. How did you pick him for the film? And then I didn’t really know Orion Lee at all before, but they’re both great.

KR: Yeah, I didn’t…I haven’t seen that series, but John Magaro was kind of in our orbit. He was in Carol, Todd Haynes’ film, and he had done a lot of plays with Scott Rudin and Eli Bush, who produced the movie. And in fact, Jon Raymond had worked on a commercial, years ago, where they cast John in this…I think it was a video game called Rock Band. I think that’s what it was called. So anyway, Magaro, I just thought he really was unexpected for a Western and just everything about him felt right to me. He looks like like someone in a Courbet painting. I was just really drawn to him.

And Orion Lee, it was a huge search for King Lu. I would like to say Orion was good luck, but in fact, he comes from the labors of our casting director, Gayle Keller. He did three or four readings over the course of a month or two and I just kept pulling his readings and leaving them on my desktop and I just kept going back to them. All of them were really different. In the beginning, we didn’t have a lot of mutual references to go to when I was first Skyping with him. He does a lot of theater and he loves big movies. What we were going for was not so on his radar, but every reading was just so interesting and had something coming through that just felt like, “Oh, there’s a person here, and this is an interesting person.” And so yeah, it was just such a good find. I keep feeling that it was very lucky, but I feel like it’s not fair to Gayle to say that it was luck.

HtN: I also wanted to ask you about the score and the sound design. It’s a remarkably quiet film, but you do have a score. Can you talk about how you designed the soundscape?

KR: Yeah, it’s really challenging to make quiet films more so even than when we shot Meek’s Cutoff, where we were really out in the middle of nowhere, but it’s a lot of years since Meek’s Cutoff and we were shooting closer to Portland, where there was 8 to 11 seconds between airplanes, it turns out, so you can never get to a scene without an airplane. That was just something we had to give up on early on. The air traffic is insane. So you’re out in this forest, but it’s not quiet. And so for the soundscape, I should say the music’s from William Tyler, which was him and his beautiful dulcimer, and that was really wonderful. But I did the sound design with Leslie Shatz in New York. And then I really went down the rabbit hole with the crickets and the birds. When we were done, I just still felt like they were just somehow distracting to me.

So I went to Oregon and I did another…I can’t remember if it was a week or two…with a young sound designer out there who was all up for whatever. And we just did crickets and spent a week just doing crickets and birds, making sure the birds were from the region, and just really hand-placing every bird and cricket sound so that it wouldn’t be like a wall of crickets, which is funny because sometimes I go out now and I’m like, “Oh, it’s a wall of crickets,” but a cricket sound, just because it has a rhythm to it, it can be really distracting and it doesn’t always fade away. So anyway, it seems ridiculous now, but at the time, I don’t know, I was just obsessed with the crickets and the birds, getting them to feel just in the space. And so yeah, like everything, it’s a long process. I haven’t dealt with music in a while and it was really great to be able to just allow myself the beautiful sounds of William Tyler.

HtN: Well, it really is quite a lovely soundscape. So, thank you for talking to me and I wish you all good things with the film. 

KR: Thank you so much!

  

Interview: A Conversation With Kelly Reichardt. By Christpher Reed. Hammer to Nail   , March  13, 2020.

When Bong Joon Ho won the coveted Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival for his film Parasite, one person’s vote on the jury held special meaning for him: that of the director Kelly Reichardt. A pillar of American independent cinema, Reichardt favors quiet, minimalistic storytelling, often focused on the margins of society. As she once put it, “My films are just glimpses of people passing through.” Bong has spoken frequently of his appreciation for her work; he called the opening shot of her 2008 film, Wendy and Lucy, “one of the most beautiful opening scenes in the history of the movies.”

Reichardt’s other films include Old Joy, a touching exploration of male friendship; Meek’s Cutoff, a dramatization of a journey on the Oregon Trail; and Certain Women, her phenomenal 2016 triptych about life in contemporary Montana. Her newest work is First Cow, a loose adaptation of Jonathan Raymond’s novel The Half-Life. Set during the 1820s in what is now Oregon, the film follows Cookie Figowitz (played by John Magaro), a baker from Boston, and King Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant, who team up to sell baked goods made with stolen milk from a local land baron’s cow. The cow, championed as the first of its kind to be brought to the region, is a funny symbol of encroaching wealth—a striking but superfluous creature that becomes the focus of the drama.

Bong, who saw First Cow when it premiered at the 2019 Telluride Film Festival, is one of its biggest fans. Ahead of the film’s release, Reichardt, Bong, and I spoke via a four-way Skype call (Bong’s translator, Sharon Choi, was also on hand), with Reichardt dialing in from Los Angeles and Bong from Seoul. If Bong has been changed by winning four Oscars for Parasite (including a landmark Best Picture trophy), it doesn’t show. Sitting in front of a wall of DVDs in his home and tugging at the sleeves of his sweater, he peppered Reichardt with questions and showered her work with praise. For her part, Reichardt invited Bong to visit Portland, Oregon, after we discussed their writing processes, aspect ratios, how their works critique capitalism, and more. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Kelly Reichardt: I’m very intimidated! Where do we start, Bong, my goodness! Congratulations!

Bong Joon Ho: Thank you!

Reichardt: Are you able to do any work now that you’ve stopped going around with Parasite?

Bong: Now that I finally have time, I’m trying to get back on it, but I’m so exhausted, mentally and physically. I’m just a shell of a human.

How about you? We last met at Telluride, and I saw First Cow there. It was completely packed; I felt like I could hear everyone breathing as they watched the movie.

David Sims: Is that when you first met?

Bong: We first met at Cannes. On the awards stage. And I confessed, “Oh, I’m a huge fan!”

Reichardt: Which was very nice! I was on the Cannes jury with Yorgos [Lanthimos, the director of The Favourite], and wherever we walked, people were asking Yorgos for his autograph. And he would go, “Oh, excuse me, Kelly, I have to go give my autograph.” So when Bong won and he told me he liked my films in front of Yorgos, it was a very big moment for me.

Bong: At Cannes, they always talk about how directors in competition should never say hello to people on the jury, but since it was after the awards ceremony, I felt more comfortable.

Reichardt: It was perfect timing. Can I ask, Bong, if it hadn’t been for the Oscars, how would you usually write? Do you work by yourself?

Bong: Even when I have a co-writer, I don’t really discuss things with them. I let them do their own drafts, and then I take over and spend five to six months producing the final draft on my own. I have an iPad and a wireless keyboard that I always take to coffee shops, and I just hide in a corner and write by myself. I have to be at a coffee shop with noise around me; I always end up sleeping if I write at home.

Reichardt: Oh, I understand. But you can’t go sit in a coffee shop now! You’re too famous! You blew it!

Bong: There’s always corners where I can hide!

Sims: Did you follow your usual writing process for Parasite and First Cow?

Reichardt: I write often with my friend Jonathan Raymond. Usually he does the first draft, and then, like [Bong], I take it and break it apart. But I like to start scouting while I’m writing. Do you know your locations when you’re going to shoot?

Bong: Like Oregon is to you, I’m very familiar with Seoul as a city, and a lot of my films feature Seoul. Parasite was such an interior story, taking place inside homes and buildings, so the rich house was a mix of soundstages and a set we built outdoors, and we built the entire poor neighborhood in a water tank.

Reichardt: First Cow is based on a novel by Jonathan called The Half-Life. It was the first thing I read of his. The novel spans four decades and includes a ship ride to China, and I’m making small-budget films, so for many years we were trying to figure out how we could make it. The cow is not in John’s novel—we came up with it as a way to tell the story while keeping it small enough.

Bong: You basically re-created the premise of the novel.

Reichardt: The presence of the cow gave us a simple plot structure, and it allowed a lot of the themes Jonathan had in his novel about the beaver trade in 1820s Oregon to come into play.

Bong: [The cow] is part of a very primitive state of capitalism and commerce.

Reichardt: It’s this early seed of capitalism—can capitalism work with the natural world? There’s this hubris, the idea that these natural elements will be endless. In fact the beaver trade collapsed very quickly.

Bong: In First Cow, we see [the film’s main character] Cookie picking mushrooms, and it would be best if he managed to find the milk he eventually needs naturally. But the milk is already possessed by someone. When we learn about Marxism, we learn about who owns the modes of production, and that’s where the drama unfolds. It’s very interesting—you’re seeing the birth of U.S. capitalism.

Sims: I know both of you have worked with animals before, though I suppose Okja was a fantasy animal.

Bong: How did you find the cow? I’m sure it was a fierce competition!

Reichardt: It was! I picked the kind of cow I wanted, a Jersey cow, and then they’d send me videos of the cows, and I saw this one and I loved her. We trained her to ride on a ferry, because cows don’t swim. But it was very superficial casting—I was looking for the prettiest cow.

Bong: With Okja, because we didn’t have an actual animal on set, the director of photography and I were quite lonely. So we actually created a stuffy that was the size of Okja so that the actors could touch and interact with it. With First Cow, I’m sure it was more comfortable. [Raises an image of the Okja puppet on his iPad.]

Reichardt: It’s so big! She’s still so beautiful!

Bong, do you always work with the same cinematographer?

Bong: With Mother, Snowpiercer, and Parasite, it was one cinematographer; his name is Hong Kyung-pyo. With Okja, I worked with Darius Khondji. I think any foreign productions I do now will be with Darius, and any Korean films will be with Hong. Do you work with the same cinematographer?

Reichardt: It was different every time, and then from Meek’s Cutoff on, always with Christopher Blauvelt. I like working with him so much—you’re not starting from the beginning every time.

Sims: Director Bong, I know you’re developing two projects right now—one English-language and one Korean. Can you work on multiple scripts at the same time?

Bong: Only in the very early stages. Once I start writing, I can only work on one project, and the same goes for preproduction. I’m always jealous of directors who can do projects in between TV shows. How about you, Kelly?

Reichardt: One project for me, too. I teach in the fall every year, and I make my class somehow wrap around all the things I want to research for the film I’m making. For this, I was showing them Ugetsu and The Apu Trilogy and Woman in the Dunes, because I wanted to look at [films] where people are [living in hutches and] on dirt floors.

Bong: Whenever I watch your films, I always want to visit Oregon, but I’ve never been able to. I’m curious what that place means to you in your body of work.

Reichardt: Please come visit! We’ll show you everything! You know, I started going there because my friend Todd Haynes [the director of films such as Carol and Dark Waters] moved there. I’m from Miami, Florida, which is very flat and white with blue oceans, and [Oregon] was so different for me. It’s a very [geographically] diverse state—it has a desert, an ocean, an old-growth forest—and it’s not like California, where so much has been filmed. You can be a little bit off the radar.

Bong: Where is the forest that you shot First Cow in?

Reichardt: Everything is a one-hour radius from Portland. You can go a very short way and be in the forest.

Sims: Did you shoot in an Academy aspect ratio [which is very square] because of the forest?

Reichardt: I really like the square. There’s room up top and on the bottom for the trees, and for the close-ups, it’s so nice. And the economy of it: It’s not capturing grand landscapes, but people who have very small lives.

Bong: Even when you see the forest, it feels very personal and intimate. I can’t imagine [the film] where you see more of what’s left and right in the image. The relationship these two men share [in First Cow] is so uniquely subtle and beautiful, and I think the aspect ratio really helped in establishing that.

Sims: That’s noticeable when we’re first introduced to King Lu: It’s very dark, and he’s naked in the forest, and the mood and the situation feels very enclosed.

Reichardt: This was, on a practical basis, the hardest scene, because of the darkness. I was trying to shoot day-for-night and not have it look too hokey, because it’s tricky to light that, but then it actually became night—the final product is a mix—and so I found it really challenging. We also shot it early on, and these actors didn’t really know each other yet, and we’re in the forest and it’s cold. So Orion [who plays King] is very vulnerable—he’s surrounded by this crew and he’s sitting there naked! In the story, they’re just meeting each other, so maybe the awkwardness works.

Bong: That first encounter between the two men is so subtle and delicate. Although the character is naked, you can’t really see his skin color, so it’s almost like the two characters have the same skin color.

Reichardt: Because of the way we shot it, they both look kind of green! Everybody in Oregon then was an immigrant, besides the indigenous people. This moment is so dark in America, you know, with the fierceness against immigration and the false narrative that we’ve [been] some white nation for forever. So I didn’t want [the message] to be too pointed, but it’s there.

Bong: How did you find Orion? I assume it’s the first time you’ve worked with him.

Reichardt: It was a very long search. I was Skyping with actors in China who didn’t speak any English, wondering if they could learn the lines in time, as well as learning a Native American language. Orion finally came to us and read maybe four times over a month or two, and he just kept coming back to my mind. We didn’t really have any references to connect over, with film or music. He loves Shrek, you know; we’re not on the same wavelength! But he was so game, and always interesting.

Bong: The chemistry between the two men is amazing. They both feel so vulnerable.

Reichardt: When we were shooting, we had them go into the woods for three or four nights with a survivalist. They learned how to build a fire without matches and to trap, and it was cold and rainy. We did this instead of rehearsing—this is how they bonded.

Sims: Do either of you favor rehearsals before you start filming?

Bong: I don’t really like rehearsals, but my films often involve a lot of complicated camera movements, so for those we will have physical rehearsals where we coordinate the blocking. But I try to keep that as short as possible. I really like shooting when it feels like people aren’t ready and things aren’t meticulously set up. I want to capture the awkwardness you find in those moments on the camera. It produces a strange sense of reality, though it’s not always easy.

Reichardt: I can’t afford to have [rehearsals]! In Meek’s Cutoff, which was a Western, we had a pioneer camp so [the actors] could learn to walk oxen and things like that. But I’m not into rehearsing—just having people learn how to do chores.

Bong, I have to go, but I wanted to thank you! I really appreciate your voice. I’ve been going through your list of new filmmakers you like, and it’s turning me on to new things. It’s so inclusive.

Bong: Some films are more poetic and more beautiful when you go into them not knowing anything about them, and I think your films are always like that. With First Cow, it’s something that a filmmaker like me could never imitate—so I’m very jealous.

Reichardt: [Waves hand dismissively.] Oh, come on. Come to Portland, Bong! Come to Oregon! There’s no show business there, we can just go out to eat, and Todd Haynes and I will just take you out into the woods.

The Director Whose Movies Make Bong Joon Ho Jealous.  The Oscar-winning Parasite filmmaker spoke with his hero Kelly Reichardt over videochat. The result was as delightful and nerdy as you might imagine. By David Sims. The Atlantic ,  March 4, 2020.