But yes, it has allowed me a nice teaching job. Here I am dragging these actors through the desert and we can’t even see their faces clearly this isn’t working. Especially after Meek’s Cutoff, I thought I’ll never make another one. But what’s success? Every time I make one of these films I assume it’s the last. The very fact that Reichardt gets these movies made – the simple fact that she is here in competition at the Venice film festival – makes her a highly successful director, whether she likes it or not. To me, it’s a case of: is the scene successful? Is the shot successful?” “I mean, I think the films are both imperfect and successful in showing the parts of life that we don’t often see on screen. “Well, that depends what we think of as success,” she counters. The very notion of success appears to cause her discomfort. My sense is that she rather relishes the role of outsider. I ask them all the time: ‘Aren’t you mad at anything?’ They look at me like I’m off my rocker.” But the kids I know, I love them, but they’re not mad the way we used to be. “I mean, granted, I’m around kids who can afford to go to these fancy colleges. “I don’t see much concern or interest,” she says. They would never dream of riding the box-cars to Alaska, let alone attempt to bomb a dam to make a political point like the activists in Night Moves. They are so grounded, so groomed, so perfectly content. The students, she suggests, regard her as a bit of a crackpot. When she’s not leading a film crew across the desert, or through the woods, she supplements her income by teaching at a number of liberal arts colleges. She’s based in New York, but she shoots out west. Her parents were cops (Dad a crime-scene investigator, Mum a narcotics agent) but they broke up when she was young both started new families, and she basically feels she has been rattling loose ever since. She was raised on the east coast, in Dade County, Florida. Anywhere other than this Venice hotel with its polished fittings and the gondolas gliding by on the canal at our backs. Or you go into the cities and you can smell the lumber plants everywhere.” I suspect she would quite like to be there, hanging out in the hippy farm or the lumber yard. “It’s all right in your face,” she says.”There’s always a train going by with a forest of redwoods on the back of it. It’s last gasp of the old frontier, a clashing contrast of civilisation and nature, industry and activism. Night Moves, she explains, is the perfect Oregon story because the Pacific Northwest feels like the environmental frontline. She curls her slender frame into a corner of the couch and tugs her knees to her chin, apparently determined to take up as little space as possible. It is the last interview of the day, although Reichardt has yet to settle.
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