Kelly Reichardt on The Mastermind, Josh O’Connor, and making indie movies and keeping her day job

Kelly Reichardt is regarded by many as the queen of American indie cinema, known for her small, minimalist and character-driven stories set on the periphery of the mainstream.

Her characters are quiet and understated, such as Lily Gladstone’s break-out role as a ranch hand in rural Montana, in Reichardt’s 2016 drama Certain Women.

The writers room of America’s Next Top Model is the last place you’d expect to find Reichardt, where she served on staff for one season in the mid-2000s. She did it, of course, for the money, and her wages on the Tyra Banks extravaganza paid for film stock for a short which eventually became her 2006 movie, Old Joy.

Old Joy was Reichardt’s second film, and it took more than a decade to get up and out after her debut. For most of the 1990s, she couldn’t get financing, and repeatedly heard, “We don’t make women’s films”.

“You are so lucky if you get a film made, it’s just the luckiest thing,” Reichardt told The Nightly. “Every film I make, I go, ‘if this is the last film we make, let’s make sure we do what we want to do’.

“Because I’ve never given up my teaching job (at Bard College). Certainly, I know that I don’t make my living filmmaking. I know it can go away.”

After Old Joy, Reichardt has been steadily making acclaimed indies, often with actor Michelle Williams who has starred in four projects. Their first collaboration, Wendy and Lucy from 2008, was recognised by the Cannes Film Festival when it was selected for the Un Certain Regard section while their latest, Showing Up in 2022, competed for the top prize, the Palme d’Or.

Reichardt was back at Cannes this year, and again in the Palme d’Or race, with her ninth film The Mastermind, an unconventional art heist film that flips the genre tropes.

Inspired by a real-life 1970s robbery, The Mastermind is set in 1970 and stars Josh O’Connor as JB, a middle-class husband and father who plots and then executes a heist of a small town gallery, pulling from its walls four Arthur Dove paintings.

Reichardt isn’t interested in making an Ocean’s 14 – if she’s making a heist film, it’s not going to adhere to the expected structure. The robbery takes place in the first act, and the rest of the film follows JB as he tries to elude capture.

But changing it up wasn’t easy. “A lot of tropes are a good starting point,” she explained. “For example, in a heist, the first act is everybody gets out of jail and meets up again and decide to do one more thing, and then the heist happens somewhere later in the second act, and then the fallout.

“But I put the heist upfront and it caused quite a lot of problems, actually, and you realise the form is the form, and why things work in a certain way.”

She struggled with the third act, and The Mastermind’s pacing has been challenging for some audiences, especially if they were unfamiliar with Reichardt’s storytelling ethos, which is to shift the camera a little sideways, away from the stories that dominant male filmmakers have been telling for decades.

“A lot of genres are largely established by men (…) so you have this pattern, this structure, but if you somehow change the point of view and let in some of the characters that would be more outside where the focus would be, and let some of those views come in.

“Genre tends to focus on the big moments, and I’m more interested in the minutiae, and for better or worse, I like the small moments, and that’s not outside of real life. Or a heightened reality but to place it inside everyday life with everyday troubles.”

The Mastermind’s JB encapsulates this so well. He’s tried to pull off this extraordinary act, but what he’s really responding to is his own restlessness of an ordinary, suburban life during a historical moment of social revolution and rebellion.

O’Connor was the only person Reichardt had in mind, having met the young British actor through filmmaker Karim Ainouz. The right casting was essential because the film goes through long stretches of little dialogue and requires JB’s wordless presence to entrance viewers through the screen.

“That how he is even in person, he’s quite lovely to work with,” she said. “He’s the only actor I talked to about the part. I first saw him in God’s Own Country years ago, and then in The Crown.

“My biggest fear of the project was that there were so many different tones in it. I was like, ‘Wow, he has a lot of different tones to traverse’ but it seemed kind of effortless on his part.”

Perhaps she expressed special reverence for O’Connor’s seeming ease because Reichardt doesn’t find the process of filmmaking effortless. “Everything is a process and takes a long time, there’s not many magic moments for me in filmmaking. Everything is kind of a slog.

“But I liked the idea of beginning something with the shape of a genre film, and then as the character spirals out, the structure of the genre would fall apart too.”

She has now found it personally easier to have her films financed, made and distributed than that drought between her first and second features, because she always writes to a budget that’s in her zone.

But she is apprehensive about the greater shifts in the industry towards consolidation and downsizing.

“It would be sad if everything becomes a product.

“I was just shipping off my Christmas presents and I decorate the boxes and I want to have different stamps on them, but you get to the post office, and they’ll put one big white (label) on it (across the top of the box), and you’re like, ‘ah…’.

“It’s everywhere you look, it’s one more thing where things nobody voted for are imposed on us. Consolidation is scary for sure.

“(But) this year, there are so many films, and there are a lot of good films, and there are a lot of independent voices. Some of them are huge budgets, but they’re a voice you can recognise.”

The Mastermind is streaming on Mubi from December 12