Kelly Reichardt has been called one of America’s greatest filmmakers, and also one of its quietest. But her latest, The Mastermind, centered on an art heist that goes off the rails, is probably her loudest movie yet and definitely her biggest budget to date. Reichardt even set out to make something different from her previous work — which includes First Cow, Showing Up, and Wendy and Lucy — only to get back to the editing room and realize, “Oh, there it is. Another one of these films.” Naturally, Reichardt’s crime movie is a character study about a man trying to charm his way out of failure.
The Mastermind stars Josh O’Connor, most recognizable from last year’s Challengers or one of four movies out this fall, including the new Knives Out sequel. (He headlines projects from Steven Spielberg and Joel Coen next.) But while O’Connor is on a trajectory to be a household name, he’s perfectly cast in The Mastermind as a movie star’s foil, the dimly lit thief J.B. Mooney.
As promised, the movie does open with a satisfying heist — a thrown-together choreographed art theft of Arthur Dove paintings, based on a real-life one in 1972 at Worcester Art Museum. For Mooney, stealing the artworks isn’t the hard part; it’s the holding onto them that becomes the problem. O’Connor’s dimpled smile is on display as a man who has coasted aimlessly through life on his good looks and privileged upbringing (his father is a powerful local judge). Family connections won’t get him out of this one, though, as Reichardt describes The Mastermind as an “unraveling” — an “anti-heist” film.
Reichardt talked to The Verge about the challenges of writing and being a budget-conscious filmmaker (and the expense of scenes with cars, shots at night, and her first-ever built-out set), all the while trying to avoid the H-word: heist.
The Verge: Your films tend to have an atmosphere that is unique to you. How do you set the tone of a Kelly Reichardt film?
Kelly Reichardt: I mean, it’s funny, because I always think when I’m starting out that I’m doing something completely different. It’s not going to be like anything I’ve done before. And then I get in the editing room and I go, “Oh, there it is. Another one of these films.” So yeah, I don’t know. I guess everyone has their own kind of footprint, for better or worse.
Did you find the film in the edit, or how much was it locked in the script?
The script was the script. I mean, there were so many locations and so much car work and so many… I just didn’t have the funds to shoot in a way that I’d find something in the edit. [Cinematographer] Chris Blauvelt and I, we’ve worked together on so many films now. And I talked to Chris about the edit all the time when we’re constructing the scenes and the shots. The edit is part of the conversation, but of course, nothing’s in stone. And you get in the editing room and you go, “Okay, here’s the film I have.” And there are many discoveries to be made in the editing room. But it wasn’t like Meek’s Cutoff.
The concept was that I would have this genre form that I was working in, and then that would, like the character, come undone. It’d really be a sort of aftermath film. That was kind of what I was going for.
But I mean, the shooting has to be so specific because of the amount of time and finances we have. I’m in the editing room with tons of footage to go through and find. It’s nice to have a design and see that come through in the editing room.
I want to dig into the day-to-day of directing The Mastermind. Were you able to buy time in certain places?
I mean, well, there’s so much car work. You’re never buying time when we’re doing car work. Car rigs are slow. And I guess there are nighttime scenes all over the place. Those things all slow you down. I just had this fantastic crew and the locals in Cincinnati were amazing.
But also, the museum stuff was difficult. We built the interior of the museum in this warehouse — not a soundstage, it was an old warehouse. But it was really exciting seeing it come together. If you had a shitty day of scouting, where you didn’t really have any big catches, you still came back and something was happening in the “museum.” This whole building’s happening and the paintings are getting done and the frames are getting built, and that was exciting. That was its own little world. I haven’t really had any builds in my life, so yeah, it was cool.
Did it make you want to make more of them?
They’re expensive. I like shooting on locations. They have their own challenges. But I thought, “Oh, if we build this, I’ll be able to… For the first time, I’ll have a space that we designed and I’ll be able to really design my shots.” But they were putting it together until the minute before we shot, so I never really had all the time in there I wanted to have.
So we are locked into this kind of big heist film—
Yeah, but I don’t think we should say “heist” because people have expectations. I think it’s almost like an anti-heist film. I showed a cut to a friend and she was mad afterwards, and she said, “Don’t tell me I’m coming to see a heist film, and I’m coming to see this?” And so people should be measured about the heist-ness.
This story could have been told in a lot of different ways. We leave the heist and it becomes a movie about a person traveling and that felt really familiar and warm.
Well, I kind of trapped myself into this because I… whatever. The third act became really difficult because it could have gone in a lot of different ways, as you’re saying. And it just kept becoming like a new first act. And I was like, “Oh, I’m really in the weeds with this.” And I showed it to Jon Raymond, who I have worked with many times. He’s my very close friend and writing partner in a lot of our movies. And I showed it to him and I was like, “I can’t find my way out of the weeds in the third act.” And he went in there with a buzzsaw.
It took a long time for me to let it become the unraveling that I wanted it to be and not keep building it back up. That was a long journey.
As you walk away from the film now, what do you think its thread or through line is for you?
I don’t know. I kind of already am past the point of looking back at it oddly, because now I have to start talking about it. But I’m done with that film. I mean, is there a through line? I think the best way I could put it is how I keep calling it sort of an unraveling or an aftermath, kind of. Depending who you are in the world, either the bigger systems hold you up — there’s no shortage of watching people fail their way to the top, right? And then there’s closer, more intimate relations that pick you up and keep you in place and help you through. And in The Mastermind, we’re watching a character, a dude who kind of burns through all of those.
Everyone’s trying to make sense of this weird moment that we’re in in the world. The Mastermind is about the past, but it still feels like an urgent film. Why did you choose this era to set the story in? Are there things that you find as reflection points?
Well, it’s easier to make sense of a political moment that has passed, right? And to have space and time. I wouldn’t know how you could make a film of the now. And even some that I’ve gone to see, I feel like saying, “Don’t put this on me. I’m not ready to make fun of this time. I’m not ready to find irony in it. I don’t want it.” I thought [Sean Baker’s] Red Rocket did an amazing job of being a politically current film without talking about being a political film. I admired that film for that.
But I guess one way to think about, to ponder where we are, is to look back to this other time. It really wasn’t like the starting point for me. I wanted to tell this little car heist in the film that took place in an era probably every filmmaker my age wants to make. I did not want to make a film that’s full of melancholy or anything like that. I don’t want to romanticize the time.
I mean, my first political memory is being a kid and being in the swimming pool and having to get out of the swimming pool to watch Nixon resign. And that was my first thought of even paying attention to something happening in government or something. Shit, I was pretty young.
There are a lot of differences in the current time too, right? I feel like now, why aren’t we all out in the streets every minute right now? Where is everybody? In Portland, there’s this one guy on Burnside Street with a “stop authoritarianism” sign, and he’s out there every day by himself, this old guy. And it’s just like, “Where is everybody?” And that’s different about this moment, that moment.
