Desperate Times

An interview with Wendy and Lucy director Kelly Reichardt

by Sam Adams

The accident of timing has everything to do with how a movie is received, and there's no question Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy hits home more forcefully now than when it premiered last May. The spare, lyrical story of a cash-strapped woman (Michelle Williams) whose last threads of hope fray when her canine traveling companion goes missing seems tailor-made for hard times, when even the formerly comfortable are staring destitution dead in the face.

The movie's seeds were sown by Hurricane Katrina, particularly the glib judgments made of the city's poorest residents from afar. "I wanted to ponder the question of, 'Really? Can you improve your situation just because you want to?'" says Reichardt. "The idea that there's opportunity for everybody and all you have to do is pull yourself up by your bootstraps is bullshit."

Reichardt conceived the movie along with writer Jon Raymond, who wrote the story on which her previous movie, Old Joy, was based. Raymond spun the initial idea into a short story called "Train Choir," which subsequently served as the basis for Wendy and Lucy's script. Although Reichardt says Raymond did "most of the heavy lifting," they exchanged drafts of both story and script, and share credit on the screenplay. "He reads all my drafts, I read all his drafts, we go back and forth," she says. "If things come to a head, I get it my way in the script, and he gets his way in the story."

Stranded on her own in a strange town, with a dying car and a lost dog, Wendy is perilously close to falling off the map A drugstore security guard, played with worn dignity by Wally Dalton, offers her a modicum of help, but his efforts fall short of what it would take to get her firmly back on her feet. "She could be better off, but she's not in that game," Reichardt says. "What she has access to are people: Some are better off, some are worse off, but nobody has that much room to be generous."

Williams' quietly devastating performance is notable for its restraint. No matter how many times the bottom falls out, she never sheds a tear. Her fear is mixed with resignation, as if she's quit hoping people will give her the help she needs. "We agreed from the beginning that Wendy was used to things going wrong, and would be really buttoned-down emotionally," Reichardt says. "The main thing I said with Michelle is I wanted her to never look at the big picture, to only look at what was in front of her. For her to get a glimpse of what her situation is would be too overwhelming."

The movie's political resonance is strong enough that it doesn't need to be stressed. Reichardt frames it in humanist, rather than polemical, terms. "If anything's political about it, it's that it's posing a question," she says. "Are we connected? Do we have any responsibility to each other, or are we all just strangers?"

While scouting locations on a six-month road trip, Reichardt saw a woman's tire blow out on a Texas road, her car ending up in a ditch. "It was a Mexican woman, mid-40s, she was in her socks, the tire that blew out was her spare, her minutes were up on her cell phone, she had no AAA, she had no credit card — in fact, she had less than $20," she recalls. "So I spent the day with her, trying to get a hold of her situation. I felt like the Wally character: How deep into this do I want to get? I want to help, but I don't want to be too inconvenienced."

Wendy and Lucy was produced under its own strictures, shot in 18 days and almost entirely with available light, which gives the movie its plangent black-on-black look. In lieu of costly lighting, one scene was lit with a flashlight bounced off a piece of reflective board taped to a car roof.

"You don't have the crew for it, don't have the budget for it, so it has to work to the aesthetic of the film," Reichardt says. "I didn't want to romanticize the story, and not having lights helps. You assure yourself nothing is looking too beautiful."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

See Cindy Fuchs' review of Wendy and Lucy.