The filmmaker talks about why a dog (even her own) can’t always save us, what crime scene photos taught her about filmmaking and why she hates B&B’s.
Is it fair to call your new film, “Wendy and Lucy” — which tracks a young woman’s dissolution after her beloved mutt goes missing from a supermarket parking lot in suburban Oregon — the anti-“Lassie”?
Well, Lucy doesn’t rescue anyone from a fire or keep a kid from drowning.
The film is oddly timely, reminding us of how people on the lower rungs of society are the first to fall off when times get tough. Are you trying to bring a jolt of social realism into American film?
Jon Raymond and I came up with the story post-Katrina, and we did start with this idea: Say you have the gumption to set out and make your life better, but you don’t have the benefit of an education, a nest egg or a family net. Can you really improve your situation?
That point is driven home when Wendy calls her sister from a phone booth and the sister excuses herself from the long-distance call after five seconds.
The sister herself is so strapped she can’t be generous. She doesn’t have anything left to give financially or emotionally. She herself is tapped out.
We should mention that Wendy is on her way to Ketchikan, Alaska, where she hopes to find work in the fishing canneries.
It was before Sarah Palin.
Do you think Palin has ruined Alaska as a symbol of the untrammeled frontier for future filmmakers and novelists?
No. Hopefully, she fades from memory quickly.
As someone who has been called one of the great hopes of small-scale independent cinema, how much did you spend making this film?
A total of $300,000. We shot in 18 days with a crew of volunteers and used only available light. I cut for six months in my apartment in Astoria, Queens, occasionally making trips back to Oregon to shoot the kind of footage you can’t do with a crew in tow, like train yards.
You live with Lucy, the dog that stars in the film along with Michelle Williams.
Yes. Lucy was also in my last film, “Old Joy,” wandering around in the woods.
Where are you from?
I grew up in north Miami. My father was a crime-scene investigator, and my mother was an undercover narcotics agent. I got into photography in sixth grade. My father let me use his camera and then got me my first Pentax K1000.
How would you describe crime-scene photography aesthetically?
It is a sort of landscape photography, very wide and objective. It can be a scene of a pristine home and lawnwith a dead body in the carport.
The look of your film is reminiscent of the banal landscapes enshrined by American photographers in the ’70s.
Stephen Shore, Robert Adams and Joe Deal’s photography are big influences and part of that school of “man-altered landscapes.” For me a landscape that’s completely free of man-made stuff is not that interesting. I like a little bit of a footprint.
Where do you and Lucy stay when you are scouting for locations?
We stay in a lot of cruddy motels, the kind where you drive right up to the door. I may be getting too old for it, I realize.
Why not stay in B&B’s?
The New York Times, 30 novembre 2008
