Michelle Williams on Meek's Cutoff, Goodbyes and Getting Lost At the Movies

Barely a month after leading the Oscar delegation for her 2010 drama Blue Valentine, Michelle Williams is back on the road again stumping for her latest small, intimate, acclaimed -- and sure, emotionally harrowing -- indie release, Meek's Cutoff.

Reuniting Williams with her Wendy and Lucy director Kelly Reichardt, the film features Williams as Emily Tetherow, one of eight people making up a wagon party on the Oregon Trail in 1845. Led by the churlish and unreliable guide Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), Emily and company take a shortcut that turns out to be a road to sagebrush oblivion. When Meek and Emily's husband Solomon (Will Patton) apprehend a Native American who's been following the increasingly desperate party, their collision of instincts, wills, languages and cultures thrusts the group further and further into a spiraling crisis of faith and reason alike.

The vexed, calculating marvel of Williams's expression -- so often reduced here to a dirty face beneath a bonnet, or her firelight witness in the desert night -- fittingly complements Reichardt's famous minimalism. They seem to combine to suggest that while stubborn rationality is no match for the secrets of the earth, history begins anew every day -- and the longer we live, the more there is to discover. It's utterly, deceptively optimistic stuff; never mind the implications of famine, thirst and a curious ending that raises more questions than it answers. Williams spoke to Movieline this week about the complexity of Meek's Cutoff (opening in limited release April 8 with rollout to follow), staying sane in the desert, and the messy business of saying goodbye in the movies.

Congratulations on this great recent run of yours. On the flipside, I wonder how you're holding up on the neverending press tour.

Yeah, Blue Valentine did come pretty close to Meek's. There was some span of time in there, but it seems like it's been erased to be back in the chair. But what did you say? About a good run I was having?

Don't you think?

Well, all of the sudden, I know what's coming next. Zoom. [She raises her left hand and makes a swift, downward roller-coaster motion.]

You have that kind of attitude about it?

I do, I do.

Wow. Why?

I think because I started acting when I was so young, and for years I auditioned without getting a single job. Then I worked pretty consistently for a year, and then I got Dawson's Creek. And I was on Dawson's Creek for two years before I got a movie. So I feel like that's pretty ingrained for me: the understanding that it's going to come and go, and that I'm going to fall in and out of good times. I don't know, it feels like a natural cycle to me. It's like that point on the roller coaster. You know? It has to go somewhere.

So do you consider yourself a cynic or a realist?

It feels like a realistic point of view, though maybe it's the skeptic in me trying to stay alive. I don't think so, though. I don't think of myself as a glass-half-empty kind of person.

How have these last six months -- both on the creative side and this publicity business, the two sides of your job -- affected how you perceive what you do for a living?

On the publicity side, specifically, I was very against... [Pauses] There was a time when I did less of it. Then I was told that these kinds of movies -- Kelly's movie, Blue Valentine -- they have very small publicity budgets, and they don't have the money for ads and TV commercials and such, and so their success -- at least in terms of people hearing about them -- depends on the actors to kind of go out into the world. So when I took in that information, I started to look at it differently -- because I want to keep making movies like this. So I've taken on more publicity than what I've normally done in the past.

And on the creative side? How does success inform your choices in roles?

It doesn't, really. I feel successful enough now to last a lifetime. There's nothing else that I'm... I don't mean there's nothing else I want creatively, or that there aren't personal goals I'm setting for myself, but there's no rung on a ladder that I'm looking up toward. There are specific things I want to do that would only make sense to me, because they're about the way that I work or little inhibitions or blocks that I have. Those are things that I'd like to break through.

Blocks? Like what?

I can't [elaborate]. My head doesn't work that way. I'm not much of a chess player.

Why did you want to work with Kelly again?

Every reason under the sun. Wendy and Lucy was so many things for me; I don't even know how to begin to explain. Wendy and Lucy brought me back a little bit. I felt like I had lost my way -- the way that I like to work, the way that I do my best. I'd sort of lost my way, and Wendy and Lucy and Kelly reminded me what that was. So to have a chance to repeat that was... Well, it was a surprise. I had no idea that she was going to ask me to do another movie with her. Wendy and Lucy was enough for me; I didn't know that I was going to get a second chance. So I wanted to do it because I feel like we have a great amount of trust built up, and that's a situation where I can thrive -- where I'm comfortable.

I guess you'd have to have a pretty elevated level of trust to take something like this on. It looked like an ordeal. Was it?

It was! It was. But you can't fool yourself. At the end of the day we had a hot meal. We also had water. So yes and no: It certainly wasn't as hard as what they actually endured.

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