10 · 09 · 08

Kelly Reichardt presents Wendy and Lucy

Clara Sánchez/Translated by Tess Wheelwright

Last night the film Wendy and Lucy premiered with director Kelly Reichardt in attendance. The film tells the simple moving story about the relationship between Wendy, a woman who goes to Alaska in search of work and her dog Lucy.  

The film is full of images that depict silence and one of the spectators said they considered it to qualify as part of the Dogma 95 movement, which said that films must be made with minimal resources, without bringing in outside props or artificial lighting. In response, the director said, “I can’t live with these rules, here there are no imaginative restrictions, there is music, effects.”

Reichardt described the film as “a small story of characters that must look at their economy. It is the story of a woman and her dog, which is why I decided that the production should also be very austere; I resorted to the small amount of resources in order to avoid slipping into sentimentalism.”

Produced by Todd Haynes, the film is based on a short film by Jonathan Raymond called Train Choir, which was why the filmmaker wanted to “use the sound of trains as they were a free musical score.”

The filmmaker was asked by an audience member about why she chose Michelle Williams to play the leading role, “She’s very melancholy, is that why you picked her?”
Reichardt responded, “I think that Michelle was in search of a role where she could say a lot with very little movement. Todd Haynes worked with her in I’m Not There and he proposed that we use her. Yes, she is someone who can project a lot without doing very much, or very little. But I think that this phenomenon is also characteristic of Raymond’s stories, which contributed a lot to the vision of the film. What’s melancholy here is probably you.”

Finally when asked about what sort of message she wanted to give with the film, Reichardt said, “I don’t think that there is any message. I like that the film questions our responsibilities. What kind of society do we want to live it? What can we do to take care of one another?”