Kelly Reichardt, co-writer and director of Night Moves, recently talked to me about her latest effort and made some interesting comments about assumptions that have been made about this film and her directorial style.
Kelly, by calling your film Night Moves, which is the title of director Arthur Penn’s dark, Gene Hackman-starring entry in the ‘70s wave of ‘New Hollywood’ titles, are you trying to evoke the mood of those films or even align yourself with those filmmakers, perhaps?
No, it really wasn’t that. Only the cinephiles in America really know the movie Night Moves, and really a much bigger reference for the title Night Moves was a song in the ‘80s by Bob Seger. We were going through some silly boat names, and my producer Neil Kopp has a little boat named Night Moves, which I’m sure is referring to the song and not that movie. I thought that it really worked for our film, and had different meanings that could be drawn from it. It was a working title, and we thought that we’d have to get serious at some point and change it, but it stuck and the movie became Night Moves… But hats off to the ‘New Hollywood’, sure, and obviously those movies made a big impression on me. I love the pacing of those films, and the size of them and the way that they’re shot, but it certainly wasn’t a world in which women were included. I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to be a part of the ‘New Hollywood’, in the end.
It’s been three years since your previous feature Meek’s Cutoff, so is that to do with problems finding the right project – or money?
Money! Exactly. And we really wanted to shoot it in the fall, and while we were writing it, Jonathan Raymond and I, we were looking at paintings by Charles Burchfield and hoping for that fall look in the Applegate Valley… We tried to shoot it one fall but missed our chance, and so we had to just keep on doing more searching and more scouting. And so yeah: it’s very hard to get a movie going for all sorts of reasons.
Jesse Eisenberg has played darker characters before, but nothing like this, as he’s not cute here…
We were really making a movie about a fundamentalist. That’s essentially what he is… He doesn’t question his own mind, his own ideology or his instincts. He believes he’s absolutely right and a soldier for what he believes, and that he’s going out to do what’s right and what’s good. He’s not interested in grey areas.
Dakota Fanning is also more complex and adult here than we’ve seen her before…
She plays someone who would have grown up with the comfort of money, and then dropped out of her liberal college on the East Coast and got radicalised. That was our sort of backstory for her, and now she’s using her family’s money to do things like go out and blow up dams… But she turns, her thinking changes, and she feels the consequences.
And then there’s Peter Sarsgaard, who can play characters that are so amiable and charming, and then turn bad so quickly and completely…
You can’t trust Peter Sarsgaard! Never! I mean his characters, not him personally… There’s a creepy underbelly, I think, to almost every character that he plays, but in this case we thought that his Harmon was our psychedelic warrior. He’s an ex-Marine and really into just blowing things up, which has led to a real agenda, unlike the other two characters.
Many commentators use the tricky term ‘neo-realism’ to define your filmmaking style, the particular way that you capture the drama in your movies, so is this something that you agree with?
You know, I really just focus on the film that I’m making and the characters, how I want to tell the story, and I don’t really spend much time objectifying myself [laughs]. That’s really a conversation for someone else to have. I mean, like the ‘New Hollywood’, I’m certainly inspired by neo-realists, like those Italian directors, but I wouldn’t want to put my films in a box like that.
And Kelly: what do you do now that Night Moves is finished? What sort of projects are in the pipeline? And will we have to wait another three or four years?
Probably! Who knows? I am working on something, but it’s in such an early stage that I can’t talk about it. And school starts next week here in New York, and teaching is my other job, and really that’s all that I can think about right now.
I Wake Up Screening 