“The Mastermind,” Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, loosely based on an actual robbery of a Massachusetts art museum in the early 1970s, has only been out for a few hours. But already somebody has bought a ticket and taken pictures of the screen during scenes where star Josh O’Connor appears in his underwear. The photos are now on social media.
“What the f–k?” Reichardt asks when we tell her about this. “That’s the problem when they say, ‘Josh’s audience will come to your film.’ That’s the problem.”
Over the course of her career, Reichardt has become something of an institution in the American independent film world, with her intense focus on compelling characters, deliberate pacing and a general thoughtfulness that sets her apart. Movies like “Old Joy,” “Wendy and Lucy” and “Certain Women” have been embraced by cinephile circles as softspoken modern classics. Her movies inspired a devoted following even before Josh O’Connor showed up in his underwear.
But with the audience for her types of movies – adult dramas that seek to capture the human experience without the assistance of elaborate visual effects and devoid of a connection to any pre-existing property – seemingly shrinking, we wondered how it is Reichardt makes a living and keeps on making movies her way.
These days, Reichardt says, it’s actually easier for her to get a film made. “The ’90s were impossible,” she explained. “I didn’t get a film made for 12 years – and not for lack of trying. That was in the age of, ‘We just don’t make women’s films.’ People would tell you all the time. Now age has trumped being a woman, which is good.”
While it might be easier, it’s still not easy. Reichardt said that she would “never give up my day job” — she teaches a semester every year at Bard College, which keeps her from having to, say, direct commercials to pay her bills.
“I always feel like, Oh my God, we pulled one more off. This would obviously be the last,” she said of her mindset at the end of each film. “I just have that feeling. Because clearly this can’t go on forever, but we’ve gotten quite a few films made now.”
With “The Mastermind,” Reichardt first took the film to A24, which had released her two previous movies (2019’s “First Cow” and 2022’s “Showing Up”). A lot of the folks at A24 had previously worked at Oscilloscope, which had distributed 2008’s “Wendy and Lucy” and 2010’s “Meek’s Cutoff.” “It was a long run with the same group of people and then, well, they didn’t want the film,” Reichardt explained of her story about a struggling family man who pulls off heists.
Immediately, Reichardt and her team focused on Mubi, the production and distribution company behind recent successes like “Decision to Leave,” “Passages” and “The Substance.” (They also have Jim Jarmusch’s Venice-winning “Father Mother Sister Brother” coming soon.) “The word was that Mubi was going to be moving into producing films and they’re open to projects like this. And in fact, they were. We were really supported,” Reichardt said.
She was given one round of notes during editing that she could “take or not take” but, Mubi was otherwise hands-off. “They were like, ‘Make the film you want to make.’ I’m grateful,” Reichardt said.
Not that she holds any ill will towards A24. “I’m grateful to those guys too, for making my films. You got to keep the door open for them. I made a film about a guy stealing milk and another film about a bird with a broken wing. I get it,” Reichardt said. The company has recently been looking to make moves in the IP space and bigger films, like a “Death Stranding” adaptation with Alex Garland and a Hugh Jackman-fronted “Robin Hood” redo.
“The Mastermind” is, in some respects, a traditional heist film. It’s hard to use the word “commercial” when describing one of Reichardt’s films, but it certainly has more mass appeal, perhaps, than earlier movies. To that end, the filmmaker said that AMC Theatres showed the movie as one of its secret screenings, and her friend’s kid sent her some of the reviews from Reddit and TikTok after that screening. “I don’t know if that audience thought it was a more commercial film,” Reichardt joked.
“The great thing about having a day job is that you just want to make the best film you can make because you’re using a lot of resources and a lot of people’s time and you only have one life to live, and you want to do the best work you can do,” Reichardt said. “I feel like I don’t live in the world enough to know what people want. Like, I walk down the aisle on an airplane and look at what people are watching, and a lot of adults watch stuff that seems like it’s for kids, and I’m like, I can’t.”
She said that she wasn’t deliberately attempting to make a movie that appeals to more people, but that she does like a good heist film – Jean-Pierre Melville’s movies and Jues Dassin’s “Rififi” and “procedural films.” Reichardt said that “First Cow,” a 2019 Western drama she directed, is “kind of a heist film,” which is true. She appreciates that the genre “gives you a little bit of structure to play with and to go and do with what you will.”
Reichardt was particularly inspired by an Alain Cavalier film from 1967 called “Pillaged,” based on a Donald Westlake novel about a group of thieves who attack a small mining town on payday. “That’s maybe the best heist film,” she said.
Perhaps most impressive is how “The Mastermind” looks – this is a movie stuffed with period detail on a fraction of the price (Mubi hasn’t disclosed the budget publicly). Reichardt credits her location scouts in Cincinnati, who found real places that largely look how they did in the early 1970s. “It’s like a scavenger hunt,” Reichardt said of the process.
There was also the ability to paint out modern elements, things like CCTV cameras and cell phone towers. “You’re editing scenes and they’re coming back to you with less crap in it,” she said. It’s something that Reichardt acknowledged she “probably would have rolled my eyes at at a point, but now I’m totally beholden to and think they’re freaking geniuses”
The exterior of the museum, for instance, in Columbus, Ohio, is an I.M. Pei-designed building that, over the years, has taken on security cameras and lights and “things that don’t match the minimalist, brutalist design.” But in “The Mastermind” you can see how the building “was supposed to look.”
It’s enough to make you wonder if Reichardt would ever make a studio movie, something that she wouldn’t have to scrape together. “No,” she said emphatically. “I don’t think it would be a good match. I have my little world worked out for me and it works nicely. I think I’m good at collaborating with my friends that I’ve been working with for a long time, but I don’t think that I would really know how to navigate that whole system.”
She said that she is in the “eating pie and drinking and thinking” stage of her next film. But first she’s got to sell “The Mastermind,” by any means necessary.
“What you wanted to tell people is that Josh is naked in the final scene,” Reichardt joked.
Whatever it takes.
