CHICAGO — The Florida-born filmmaker and Bard College film professor Kelly Reichardt makes beautiful movies about harsh conditions. In the singular early 19th century Oregon-set “First Cow” and now with her newest work, the disarming seriocomedy “Showing Up,” Reichardt pays attention to lives lived, often precariously, just above a fraying safety net. She’s attuned, in other words, to circumstances most every other filmmaker in America prefers to tune out.
“Showing Up” counts as Reichardt’s ninth feature, if you include her early, 48-minute “Ode,” inspired by the Bobbie Gentry song “Ode to Billie Joe.” It’s her fourth collaboration with the actor Michelle Williams, and the new film returns Reichardt to Portland, Oregon, where the 59-year-old filmmaker lives when she’s not teaching at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. “Showing Up” marks the director and screenwriter’s sixth film working with her friend, author and screenwriter Jonathan Raymond.
Williams plays Lizzy, a talented, yet-to-be-discovered sculptor facing a deadline. Her gallery show opening is days away; her face, more and more, rests at the intersection of preoccupation and frustration, while she works away, or tries, in her apartment rented from her enviably blase artist landlord (Hong Chau), likewise prepping for a gallery opening. “Showing Up” accumulates many small slings and arrows in its process-oriented narrative about how work gets made under everyday pressures.
Reichardt and I talked over tea on a recent Saturday, in the lobby of the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: I’m not quite sure how you did it, but in “Showing Up” you and your co-writer, Jon Raymond, have this central character who’s living with a lot of worry and disappointment in her life. Yet somehow the film has a light spirit; it’s reassuringly what it is, without any obvious manipulation or overstatement. How’d you do that?
A: Wow. Thank you.
Q: So we’re done here.
A: All right! Thanks! My work is done; your work is done. (laughs)
Q: Where did “Showing Up” begin as a story idea?
A: Jon and I had the initial idea of writing something based on the Canadian artist Emily Carr, who early on became a landlord in order to have more time for her own painting. She rented to what turned out to be some fairly high-maintenance tenants, intruding on her work time. That was the idea. But when we got to Vancouver to do some research, we found out Emily Carr was HUGE. A major celebrity. So we decided not to make a film about her.
Jon had the idea to sort of bring the idea home, to Portland. He was much braver about it than I was. I kept saying, “We can’t make a film about contemporary young artists. People will hate us! It’ll be too hard to pull off!” But we kept writing.
Q: You filmed in the summer of 2021?
A: Right, during a record-breaking heat wave. One day it hit 115 degrees, and we actually had to stop filming that day.
Q: Did you have any prior relationship with the Portland art school you used for the setting of the film? Tell me about what it was like to basically reopen it as the art school of your dreams, for the purposes of the movie.
A: The location of the film is the Oregon College of Arts and Craft, which was a flagship for ceramics in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The school relocated several times; the place we used was the place they moved to in the ‘80s. And it shuttered its doors for good just a few months before we started shooting.
It was a big deal in Portland. Everyone I know in Portland has some connection to that school. Then it was purchased by a private middle school that was trying, I think, to save it from developers. So it’s defunct as an art school but they’ll keep the footprint. We wrote the script specifically for this place. And we got to create our own art school from scratch. It was really great, actually. Tony Gasparro, the production designer, and I would look at floor maps of our dream school in my apartment, and then eventually the rest of the artistic team started bringing in all these artists and art students from all over Portland, and they started filling the place, which was empty, with art, and looms, a dye room … to see the school come alive again was really beautiful.
Q: Your devotion to process — to see and to show how long it takes Lizzy to adjust the arms on one of her dancing-woman sculptures, for example — that takes time. Usually in movies about artists, it’s all shortcuts and end results. I like the level of micro-crises Lizzy is dealing with while trying to meet this important deadline.
A: That was an early concept Jon and I had: the process. Not just showing the end result of something. We wanted to respect the artistic decisions (Lizzy) was making, and then show all these things that happen to her along the way.
I’m not from what you’d call an art family. I’m from a law enforcement family (laughs). But on my first film “River of Grass” (1994) my dad and his crime-scene friends were really involved. My dad is in the movie, and his friends helped us dress our crime scene, giving us stuff to use. I used my dad’s house to film some scenes. That’s his pool in the film. This was a really low-budget undertaking. We didn’t have (filming) permits for anything. We were constantly getting pulled over, and crew members would get dragged down to Dade County (Police Department). And then my dad would get everybody out.
Q: I read that in your production courses at Bard, you have your students remake scenes and even whole films for class, is that right?
A: That’s right. The idea is to really follow the shot design, but in a low-fi way, so you’ll get the lowest-fi version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama from the ‘50s. In the more advanced class, the students remake a feature film, with each student taking 10-minute segments of it, and then the whole thing gets put together on the second-to-last day. And then we screen it on the last day. It helps them to walk in the footsteps of a beautiful filmmaker, for one thing. And to consider how something can be done with three well-designed longer shots instead or 15 shorter ones. It’s the basics, really: when to move the camera versus moving the people within the frame. And getting (students) to consider everything in the frame.
Q: Until recently I didn’t know you had worked on “America’s Next Top Model.” That seems unlikely for Kelly Reichardt.
A: Here’s how that happened. My very dear friend Richard Glatzer worked in reality TV and he was a producer on “Top Model.” That’s how he could afford to live and to make films (including “Still Alice,” for which Julianne Moore won an Oscar) with his partner Wash Westmoreland. I was staying with them in New York and I needed money so I could take off from teaching and write “Old Joy” (Reichardt’s breakthrough indie). So Richard got me a job on “Top Model” for a season. That allowed me to buy a used car and drive around Oregon and scout for “Old Joy.” And then write it. Richard made that happen for me.
When I was young, the idea was to get out of wherever you are. You have this idea there’s stuff happening in New York and you go to somehow meet like-minded people. You start hanging out at the copy shop. Everyone’s at the copy shop, and there’s all these fliers for the (art) shows. And you do in fact meet the people who you’ll spend the next 30 years of your life with. When I look back at how it all worked out, it’s amazing to me.
Back then everything was just a blind shot, and that’s how communities were formed. There was time to hang out. And there were always financial woes and considerations, and trying to pay rent and living on beans and rice. That was par for the course. But what a young person has to pay for rent now? In a big city, whether it’s Portland or Austin [Texas], let alone New York? The goal of going to one of these places after college, to be a young artist, seems absurd. So crazy expensive. To make rent now, how do you have time to hang out at a coffee shop, just hang out with your friends, go see a band? I mean, that’s how art happens. Or should happen.
Q: So what do you tell your students about all that
A: Well … first of all, I teach at Bard, so most of them are, you know, financially, fine. Some of them do work one or two jobs while they’re there, and they struggle. But everyone finds out eventually that filmmaking is expensive. I don’t really have any answers.
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