A film about daring art theft? Inside the Mastermind, the Latest Movie Ever | Kelly Reichardt

TThe term “cozy crime” describes the unsuspecting criminals who currently dominate both page and screen, but it has different connotations for Kelly Reichardt, director of the new heist film The Mastermind, as it certainly should for anyone in a law enforcement family. Reichardt’s mother was an undercover drug agent, and her father was a crime scene investigator. When the couple separated, she also got an FBI agent as a stepfather. During weekends with her father, who had moved into a house with four recently divorced classmates, she was sometimes given mysteries to solve, like a sort of Thursday Murder Club.

“It looks really nice,” says the 61-year-old, a five-foot-tall director whose film feels quite timely, given the Louvre heist. “But I was only young, and I would often wait for him in his office where there were these big horrible pictures on the walls. That’s not good for a developing brain. My sister and I now tell a joke when one of us is upset, ‘Oh, go to bed and watch some murders, and then you’ll feel better.'”

It’s no coincidence, then, that many of Reichardt’s films have dabbled in crime, from her 1994 debut River of Grass, in which two half-hearted lovers go on the run after being mistaken for murderers, to 2013’s Night Moves, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning as eco-warriors who blow up a dam. Her charming 2019 masterpiece First Cow centers around the simplest heist imaginable: two early 19th-century entrepreneurs stealing milk by moonlight for their fledgling cake business.

A more conventional heist can be found in Mastermind, although Reichardt’s handling of it is anything but conventional. Set in 1970 Massachusetts, and vaguely inspired by a true incident, the film stars Josh O’Connor as J.P. Mooney, an undercover father in a flat cap and fall knitwear, who steals four abstract paintings from a small-town gallery.

In a nod to Reichardt’s upbringing, he accompanies Muni’s two young sons to his various parties. “A big part of my childhood in Miami was waiting in cars with my mom,” she recalls as we sit in this hotel room in London. “My sister and I would have to lie on the back seat while the suitcase was being moved from one car to another. What I tried to convey in the film is that feeling when you are not sure if what your parents are up to is halal, and how confusing it is.”

On set, the director found herself coaching O’Connor and Alana Haim, who plays Mooney’s wife, in the art of early 1970s parenting, which was the antithesis of the helicopter set. “Alana kept wanting to talk to the kids,” she laughs. “Oh my God, she and Josh were clearly so loved by their parents! It must have been beautiful.”

But in another way, O’Connor fit the era: pale and thin, with an authentic ’70s physique rather than the muscular physique of many of his contemporaries. “That played a big role in his choice,” Reichardt agrees. “Josh is a great actor and a great human being, and he doesn’t have an athletic body. That’s hard to find because guys all want to be superheroes now. He’ll be Overjoyed To hear this, I’m sure.

“Mastermind” isn’t so much a heist thriller as it is a “coming-of-age movie,” Reichardt says. An unexpected effect is achieved by moving the offense itself forward. The theft takes place and is dusted off within the first half hour or so, which is equivalent, in terms of organization, to hanging Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in a wardrobe. The remainder of the film recounts the painful consequences of what happened in Mooney’s plan.

“When you have a plot, there are implications that you have to follow,” the director explains. “When you’re outside of that, and you stop the plot to let the audience look and see, it can create its own tension. I like filming parts that would normally be cut from other films.”

One example in Mastermind is the scene of Mooney removing stolen paintings from a wooden box, then carrying them – and separately, the box – up a ladder into a hayloft, before inserting them back into the box. (Viewers who resist slow cinema should count their blessings: Reichardt originally shot footage for Muni to prepare Box.) The scene is revealing precisely because it is so long, its sourness at odds with the usual bravado of cinematic crime.

Although she resists associating her work with whatever the current political climate is, Reichardt admits it’s hard to ignore her in this situation. “I tried to keep my head in 1970 and not think about the similarities, but they clearly present themselves. I live in Portland, Oregon, where they’re fighting to keep the National Guard out. The film takes place in the year that the National Guard was on all these campuses.” The most famous was Kent State University, where the National Guard shot four unarmed anti-Vietnam protesters and wounded nine others. “Turn your federal army against your own citizens,” she sighs. “This is great in 2025.”

Mastermind was filmed in J.D. Vance’s Cincinnati neighborhood during the last election, although Reichardt claims this did not actively influence the production. “We were in a film-making bubble. Yes, the day after the election was a very sad day. And then you have to keep going because there is so much to do.” The film’s cut also isolated her once she returned to Portland. “I cut off seven days a week because I didn’t want to go back out into the world again. I cut off my story on Christmas Day, New Year’s Day. I didn’t want to face the music.” How did she feel when she did that? “As I thought I would,” she says gloomily. “It’s worse than ever, isn’t it?”

But her career has never looked more stable. After River of Grass, she spent 12 years in the wilderness, being rejected at every turn as her male peers pushed forward. “People would quite frankly say, ‘We don’t make women’s films.’” And when she had floor meetings in the 1990s, it didn’t always go as planned. She once told a Hollywood agent that she wouldn’t make her last project unless she could cast Warren Oates, the grizzled star of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. What she didn’t realize was that Oates had died a decade earlier Of time. “There was no Internet at that time,” she protests. “I couldn’t Google him.”

During those comfortable years, a friend offered her some writing work on one series of the glossy reality TV show America’s Next Top Model. Was there anything from the experience you had in making your own films? “Jesus, no!she shouts. She couldn’t look more disgusted if I invited her to be a contestant on the show.

Today, Reichardt is synonymous with satirical, incisive, even profound filmmaking, and a magnet for the best actors in the business: one film alone, the revised 2016 drama Certain Women, starring Michelle Williams (with whom she has made four films), Kristen Stewart, Lily Gladstone, and Laura Dern.

The director also keeps her hand at Bard College in New York, where she has taught film for nearly 30 years. In 2014, she noted that her students were “not as angry as we used to be” and seemed “not very angry…I don’t see a lot of interest or interest.” It’s a complaint that resurfaces in “Mastermind,” where Muni is oblivious to the social and political turmoil of the era.

Reichardt reports that the situation with her students remains exactly the same as it was. “The days of being afraid or angry at ‘the man’ are over. They all have phones and aren’t afraid of corporate power. They go to work for tech companies and then become part of that company. So they’re not at odds with anything.”

Recently, she and a friend were explaining the whole concept of selling to a group of young people. “They had no idea what we were talking about. They were like, ‘We just want to make money.’” Well, I think they had enough stacked against them. Once we said goodbye with a fist bump, it occurred to me that there was an easy way to explain the idea of ​​selling to Generation Z. This is something Kelly Reichardt wouldn’t do.