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.
How physically and emotionally lost does the cast and crew themselves have to be to pull something like this off?
That happened to us, but we didn't know it at the time. Sometimes the movie itself exerts its own power over everyone involved in it. Sometimes I think it casts a spell -- or maybe I'm just a little crazy. Maybe it's my own craziness. But we all felt that way, and at the time, it feels real. You don't think, "Oh, this is the movie working its voodoo on me to get me to the place I need to be." We were coming apart at the seams.
What happened?
Well, first of all, the desert. I don't know where you're from or where you were raised; is the desert your natural environment?
Sacramento, California. No desert. And you're from Montana, so I guess...
Kalispell, Montana. No desert.
Right.
When I first got there, I thought, "I... I... I can't stay here. I have to turn around and go home. I can't live here." I think it was something about the climate; I don't naturally love the desert. I think it was something about the landscape where everything looks the same -- one patch of desert is completely unrecognizable next to another patch of desert. It's just not my natural environment. So from the moment I got there, it unsettled me. But I've come to love it. If you look hard enough, you can see variation in the landscape where you think it's actually completely barren and nothing lives out there. You spend a little time, you look a little closer, and you see what's actually inherent to the land. But at first it felt like we'd been sent to Mars. You know! The desert does crazy things to people's minds! Mirages! Carlos Castaneda! Peyote! It's the desert!
What effect does that process have on performance? I mean, acting's hard enough, right?
You find ways to make it through; you find things to cling on to. Friendships, kindnesses, meals, jokes... But all the while there's this sense of foreboding. But like I said, I think that was more imagined than real. Look, I'm using the words "spell" and "magic," so it's someth
ing that I can't completely comprehend. I just know that something is at work in me. Whether I'm creating it or it's coming from an outside force, I don't know.
Got it. So what was your favorite joke?
[Laughs] I was actually reading in the women's journals, and I came across a joke. I showed it to Kelly, and I said, "Can I say this? Look at this! It's amazing!" And she goes, "Whoa, yeah, Michelle, that's incredible." And she puts it in the movie -- and she gives it to another character.
Weak!
[Laughs] It's this line where this woman suddenly finds herself crying because she's thinking about her father's pigs back home and how well taken care of they are -- that she would rather be a pig than a person when it comes to this trail. She was thinking about how they were safe and warm in their pens and being fed twice a day.
We should all be so lucky. Without giving anything away about the movie, did you think -- or do you continue to think -- about how these people lived the rest of their lives?
I don't any more. But in the weeks immediately following when you wrap shooting, I think about them. It's such a strange business: this kind of real/unreal, feeling like you're living someone's story. And then they call, "Wrap!", and there's no story to tell anymore. So the first couple of weeks, I do find myself imagining or wondering or, for my sake -- which is somehow invested in Emily's sake, which is somehow invested in my sake -- I hope she was right. I hope that her intuition to follow the Indian and put her faith in him was going to lead them to a better place. But who's to say?
How does that phenomenon apply to playing Marilyn Monroe? Considering all the history and mythology and everything we know or think we know, did some unknown, intuitive part of her stick with you?
I think with anybody you play, there's a sort of comedown process where you have to let them go. There are parts of that you're excited to shake it off, and there are parts of that you grieve because it's allowed other parts of you to live. There's a lot of goodbyes in this business -- that's what I've learned. Goodbye to the people you met in the place you'll never return to. Goodbye to the character you played. Goodbye to the actor you pretended to be in love with... There is a lot of letting go.
Goodbye to the journalist who's about to get thrown out of the room.
Goodbye to the journalist who's about to get thrown out of the room. A lot of goodbyes.