David Hast: Scott, have you seen Meeks Cutoff?
Scott Vander Werf: I have seen Meeks Cutoff. I saw it recently on your recommendation. It's the second film I've seen from director Kelly Reichardt, the first being her second movie, which was called Old Joy.And I really enjoyed this film.
DH: Yeah, it's a very different kind of Western. And this is, guess, our fifth episode in a row onWesterns, right?
SVW: Yeah, and it's progressed. And when we started with John Ford, and now here we are with something from within the last 15 years and quite a very much a modern or postmodern Western.
DH: Yes, it's not a traditional Western at all, but we decided to do this one after doing our, you know, Westerns on the one on the 40s, one of the 50s, one of the 60s from the 60s. And then we did one Smoke Signals, which was, you know, directed by and written by Native Americans. This is a Western directed by a woman of which there are not very many at all. Yeah, it's just a just he's just not done nine feature films since she started 30 years ago in 1994 and this is her fourth of those. And we'll talk about Reichart more but this particular film Meek's Cutoff is it's obviously not a traditional Western about revenge or gunfights but it is set in the West. It's about a small group of pioneers just three covered wagons with three couples and one child trekking slowly across the seemingly endless, waterless landscape of Eastern Oregon in 1845. And they're being guided by this pompous mountain man, Stephen Meek, the title character, played by Bruce Greenwood, a really interesting Canadian character actor who most people won't think of who he is by the name, but if you saw him in a movie, you'd recognize him.
SVW: Although maybe not in this movie because he's got a gigantic beard and very long hair.
DH: Yeah, right. So he's got the whole mountain man look and uh he embodies the worst of the West. He brags about massacring Indians. He disrespects the women in the party and he's just generally full of bluster. And the question through the whole movie is does Meek actually know where they are or are they lost? I mean, they just keep going over to the next hill and the next hill and it's just this desert and they don't have water. And they're trying to make it to where all the pioneers were in the West. They're trying to make it to the fertile coastal part of Oregon, across the Cascade Mountains. And they can't even find the mountains. And thenthe story like most Reichert films is slow and kind of minimalist and eventually they come across a single Indian who they take captive.And some of the party, including Meek, are sure that the Indian is gonna just lead them into an ambush, while others, mainly the main character played by Michelle Williams, hopes he might be able to lead them out of the desert better than this idiot Meek.
SVW: And in fact, initially Meek just wants to murder the Indian. He just wants…thinking that there are more that are gonna there's more in the mountains if there's one there's manyand some of the settlers alsothe men are kind of agreeing with thatandit's interesting about howthroughout the film the men will talk separately from the women out of earshot and we don't hear what the men are saying the perspective of the film is all through the women there through their eyes as they're watching their men, these wives, watching their husbands decide what their fate is going to be.
DH: Yeah, mean, Reichert's filmsare very often from a female perspective. She doesn't say, I'm making feminist movies. know, she's like, I don't have a political agenda. But she certainly…her movies are from that kind of perspective.And really, Michelle Williams' character is sort of the main eyes ofthe movie. And I also think, you know, this is basedon loosely on a true story, but Reichert said for her research, she mainly read women's journals of the time. What makes this really interesting as a Western is it's before where most Westerns are set, right? Most Westerns are set post-Civil War and up into the early 1900s.This is set in 1845. So she's really showing the sort of raw Western movement of a group of pioneers.
SVW: Yes, and it's also like the northern part of what you would call the in terms of the western part of the United States most of the classic westerns that we think of from Hollywood take place in Texas or Arizona or New Mexico.
DH: Right, this is they're almost to the coast except they can't find it.
SVW: And the Indian it's very interesting the Indian actually doesn't really pose any threats in the sense that he doesn't have any weapons with him.He's acting kind of strange. I've read some critical essays on the film where some of the critics say that maybe he's uh not quite right in his mind, but I don't think that's so. He does seem to…and he understands that, at least in the case of the Michelle Williams character, uh shekind of cares for him at least a little bit.She's the leading voice to keep him alive.
DH: Right. But he's obviously, I mean, he...their relationship with him and that character is very muchrepresentative of what relationships were between these white intruders into the land of the Native Americans. He cannot speak a word of English and they can't understand a word he's saying. So there's no real communication between them. And so, of course, it's ambiguous when they start to depend on him to sort of lead them. Where is he leading them? I mean, they've taken him captive. They're talking about killing him. Some of them are, they're, they're abusing him, right?So he's certainly fierce for his life. So you can understand why they think that might happen. But yeah, and that's about as dramatic as it gets, you know, Reichart’s films are really, as, as I said in the opening, kind of minimalist. They've been, they've been sort of lumped in with uh a sort of genre term, “slow cinema.”I feel like they're almost, they're all kind of poetic road movies. In some ways they remind me a little bit of like the short stories of Raymond Carver or something where they don't have a... Well, Reichart herself even said that her movies are glimpses of people passing through.I saw an interview with her and she was pointing out that they often take place in a very small amount of time, like the whole movie takes place in a few days or a week.
SVW: She also meant, you mentioned...they seem like a Raymond Carver short story andshe has collaborated very a lot with the short story and novelist Jonathan Raymond with her either stories or scripts.
DH: He's the writer or co-writer on almost all of her. I think other than the first movie she made, I think he's on all of them.
SVW: Not the last several, but...
DH: Okay. Well, a number of them anyway.And uh she does work with a lot of the same people and she's worked with the same cinematographer once she...paired up with a cinematographer on about a orfourth of the nine movies. She's only worked with that cinematographer.And Todd Haynes has been an executive producer on several. She's of the same generation as the independent filmmaker Todd Haynes. He's worked with her since her early days.
SVW: He's primarily been the executive producer on most of her films.And in terms of the cinematography, I'm interested in how she shot this in 1:33. Talk about that.
DH: Well, that is interesting, right? So she shot it, you know, the standard aspect ratios, the width of the film is either the 1.85, 1.85 to one, right? Ratio of width to height, which is very close to what our TVs are. TVs are 16 to 9, which is close to that ratio. So that's standard. And then you get widescreen, which is going to be over two times as wide as it is high, like 2.2 or something. And you know when you watch that on your TV, it's masked. You see black at the top and the bottom so that you get the true widescreen effect. But 1.33, that's the classic ratio. That is what film was from the beginning of film in the 19th century all the way through the 1950s or into the early 1950s. That was the only ratio there was. And then in the 50s is when all these widescreen aspects broke out. But if you shoot a film now in 1.33, you are purposely using a retro format. And she did that to make it feel constrained. She said it herself. She said she wanted to match the closed in view that the women had through these long bonnets that they wear that kind of mask their…they have like these classics, like a pioneer bonnet that stick way out in front of their faces. So literally it's almost like blinders. They can't see a wide perspective without turning their heads.And it also matches the shape of the covered wagons more squarish. So uh, she just wanted to do that.
SVW: The other thing that she does with her all of her I believe all of her movies is she is not just the director but the editor as well. And that's kind of unusual isn't it that where the director is the editor.
DH: Yeah, that puts her in a category that really, you know, almost identifies her as an independent filmmaker. There are a few mainstream directors. I think Christopher Nolan has edited some of his movies, but you rarely see someone, you know, uh direct, maybe co-write, and then also edit all their own films. John Sales is one I can think of who edits his own films, but he's right in the same category as her. He's a...he works sometimes with known actors. Obviously, Michelle Williams is an Academy Award-nominated, well-known actress, and she's in four of her films. But most of the other actors are not as... although this film has a few well-known actors, right? Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan. Yeah, so it's kind of a hallmark of a director.Often,directors aren't going to be given that kind of freedom if they're working with a larger budget and a studio behind them.
SVW: And now you talk about uh the rhythm of the film and one of the things that I thought was interesting was how she focuses on the daily tasks that these women do every day and it also opens, basically laying the ground on what the film is with the opening sequences where there's no dialogue.I don't know the, I didn'ttime it, but it seems like it's almost 15 minutes or so of the first, the first 15 minutes of the film, there's no dialogue. It's just this wagon train moving forward, interspersed with shots of the work that they have to do to maintain the wagon train.
DH: Yeah, and I love that. It does two things. First of all, it feels very real. I mean, this does not, this is not at all like a mythological Western, like so much of Westerns.It's what it would have been like. They were just trudging across this thing. They wouldn't have spoken much. But the other thing it does is, it makes the movie told visually, which is what movies should be. There's nothing, you know, as a cinema person, I don't really like watching movies that are just packed with dialogue and shot reverse shot editing, because it's like, I could watch this on the stage. I want to see you use the cinema medium and the techniques. And this film certainly does that.
SVW: One of the other things that's a trademark of her films is that sometimes there's not…towards the end we don't want to give any spoilers, but she has like open-endedclimaxes. Yeah, and I mean that's been maybe sort of a criticism of her movies a little bit like you get to the end and you're like what, you know, what actually happens after this movie ends? uh Some people can be unsatisfied with that but she says herself that her movies tend to answer, to end with a question rather than a conventional resolution. And she likes the idea that viewers are going to have different ideas about what happens next to the characters after the movie fades out.
SVW: And that's certainly the case in this film. There's a few other films where there are more that she's done where there are more definitive endings like in the film Night Moves from 2013, which is more of a thriller. And that used she uses her film techniques in that movie within that that as an eco-terrorist thriller film. Yeah, and that's got who's in that that has some no Jesse Eisenberg is in it, and Dakota Fanning those are the two two stars, right?
DH: So she uses some really major stars who like Actors like to get into a movie like if Kelly Reichart is asks you to be in one of her movies I bet anyone would take it.
SVW: Michelle Williams has said in interview that she doesn't even know what the script is or what the story is. If she's…if Kelly reaches out and says, I want you in my next film, she says yes.
DH: Yeah. Her most recent is the only one I didn't really like that much. It's called showing up and it does star Michelle Williams. But every other one I've seen, I've liked and I'm looking forward to her latest film, which is going to come out in October of 2025 called The Mastermind, which I think is another thriller.
SVW: And it's interesting you were saying earlier about how she doesn't look at her films as being like a feminist film or women's films. And she said that in the interview about that I saw about her 2016 film ‘Certain Women’ that also co-stars in Michelle Williams along with Lily Gladstone andKristen Stewartand Laura Dern and these are prominent female characters in the film but there's also a prominent male characters as well and she did she said when that film came out it was being by the critics it was being promoted as a as a woman's film and she didn't she didn't quite like that but it I it's called certain women and and these women are the prominent uh actors in the film but it is it's like uh beyond that as well.
DH: Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that Lily Gladstone's in that right she just won the Oscar for uh killers of the flower moon and people were like, oh, who's this new actress? She's so great, right? um No, was in, before that, she was in this film. And you see an actress like Laura Dern, so some of these actors are doing amazing work in Kelly Reichart films, but it's very quiet. I mean, has Kelly Rieckert film ever done big box office? I doubt it.
SVW: No, and in fact, I looked at, after seeing Wendy and Lucy, which was her film from 2008 with Michelle Williams. I looked at what the box office was and it was literally in just the tens of thousands.
DH: And that's considered her breakout film. She made one called River of Grass first. Then there was about 12 years where she couldn't get a film made. She does not have, she comes from a, has no money connections. She couldn't find money. She couldn't, it took her a while, 12 years before her first two films. Now she makes one every two or three years. But then she did this one called Old Joy. And yeah, Wendy and Lucy, maybe partly because it had Michelle Williams, is considered her breakthrough. But this is a breakthrough mainly with people that know film. She's not a household name and they aren't big box office.
SVW: Well, I saw Old Joy when it came out in 2006. I loved it. It's very much in the same spirit as those earlier films that she's done. And I remember when...I didn't see Wendy and Lucy when it came out, but I remember when it came out because it was being promoted widely because Michelle Williams was in it. And she had been in Brokeback Mountain and earlier had been a child actor in Dawson's Creek. So she was a known quantity.
DH: Isn't she also in Dick, the one aboutRichard Nixon?
SVW: I'm not sure. I don't know that film.
DH: So yeah, when she was young, that was an early film for her. So yeah, I...I can't recommend her movies enough, know, people, and they do have a variety of types. First Cow is one uh that's also a Western that's set in the 19th century. But again, don't expect a conventional Western.
SVW: All right, well, thanks for joining us.
DH: Thanks, Scott.
