NK

How did you find your way to cinema?

KR

I grew up in Miami, Florida. There was really no art in that world at all, but my dad gave me a Pentax K1000 in sixth grade. My dad was a crime scene photographer and he would bring me the expired film from the crime lab, so I always had a lot of film I could shoot. I took a photo class at Bob Rich Photography, which was like a big porn warehouse that also had Sunday photo lessons. During that time I just wanted to get out of Florida and go to some place where people were thinking about things.

I remember when Christo came to wrap the islands in the Miami Bay when I was in high school. My friend volunteered on the islands and I got to go to some of the parties. I thought, Okay, these people are in on something together and they’re doing something. If I just get to where they are, which seemed to be New York, the rest would just come together. Somehow it did.

I got a job working the counter at the Whitney when I got to the city. I tried looking at art for the first time and deciding what I liked and didn’t like and what I should like. I ended up being there at the same time as Stephen Malkmus and them, but I never met those guys. I would’ve been too intimidated anyway. Then I lived for a little while in Boston. A big influence on me was the Brattle Theater, which was programmed by Sarah Eaton. I went to the Museum School in Boston and I went to the Brattle nightly. There was a new double feature every day.

NK

The Mastermind is your first film written without a co-writer or an adaptive source. How did the idea come to you?

KR

I’ve been interested in art heists for a long time. I came upon a story, just looking at art heist stuff in small-town newspapery things, that covered the 50th anniversary of these teenagers who got swept up in a snatch-and-grab robbery. That’s what drew me in. I think in my first drafts of the script the teenagers played a bigger role than they did in the end. It’s hard to remember why, but the idea began with this image of a circular drive in front of the museum and how the heist worked around this whole parking lot/driveway situation. Of course, by the time we shot it the parking lot looked very different. But those were the beginning threads.

NK

Was this when you were still making Showing Up?

KR

In fact, I was in Antibes with my cinematographer, Chris Blauvelt, staying out there for the premiere at Cannes. We had to be there at the beginning and the end of the festival so instead of being in Cannes the whole time we stayed in Antibes. Chris would go out and have his adventures all day and I would stay back and iron t-shirts and look for stories. I don’t really like doing the press for my films—it’s not the most giving part of moviemaking, so it’s nice to have something to stew and work on and not just talk about what you already did. I was trying to fortify myself for the upcoming press run of Showing Up.

NK

So the film was inspired by a real-life robbery back in the day?

KR

Yeah, 1972. The girls were caught up in Worcester, Massachusetts. I liked the idea of it being an East Coast thing. It makes sense because of all the small local museums in the East. I also wanted to get away from the West Coast as a landscape. There were others, but these snatch-and-grabs all happened before the Gardener Museum heist of 1990—that’s when people got serious about security and did away with the circular drives. In the Worcester one, they stole like four masterpieces—a Rembrandt, a Picasso. But I liked the idea of small town Massachusetts, something that wasn’t an industrial town, and that’s sort of Arthur Dove’s background as well. I liked the idea of him taking these lesser known works. I mean, in the ‘70s, Arthur Dove was really out of fashion. But he is sort of credited with being the first American abstract painter.

So anyway, 1970 became the year for my script. I really liked the idea of setting it in the fog of the end of the ‘60s, like past 1968, but not yet in the ‘70s. There’s still a draft. It’s the year that we invade Cambodia. It’s the year of Kent State. The ideas of the ‘60s have been shot down and you’re in the ashes of that. I thought that was a good setting for this character.

NK

I wanted to ask about the Vietnam backdrop.

KR

I know I just brought it up, but I’d like to avoid talking about it. I guess I’d just say this: Vietnam was what was happening in the world, but it’s at the periphery of the character’s consciousness. That’s how I tried to set it in the movie, at the edges of the frame.

NK

There’s quite often a political undertone in your work, even if politics never enter directly. I think of Wendy and Lucy (2008) as a Great Recession film, though the only financial crisis onscreen is a personal one. And Night Moves (2013) captures a leftist disaffection with Obama-era liberalism that feels incredibly prescient today. It makes the work interesting as markers of time for American politics.

KR

Oof. Yeah, I don’t know. I’m a politically minded person, but I try to make character films. I’m interested in power structures, big and small. The big ones are kind of too much to take on in the scale that I work in, so I focus more on the small power structures.

NK

The Mastermind and Night Moves seem to go together as two stories of crime and punishment. These are genre pictures that don’t go the way you think they will.

KR

Yeah, if you told someone going in that they’re going to see a heist movie, they might be pissed off when they come out. It’s more of an anti-heist movie. I think of it as an unraveling film. In a heist film, the heist would happen in the second act; in this film it happens in the first act, so it screws with the genre. You’re with a genre that has rules for the first part of the film. So Josh O’Connor’s character has rules to follow, and I as a filmmaker have rules to follow. After the heist, though, the structure of the film is more open and more has to be made up, both for the character and for myself. There’s more space and less rules to follow. That also makes room for the audience to become more of a participant and bring their own thoughts and conclusions to the film.

NK

Do you think growing up around law enforcement has affected the way you treat action and consequence?

KR

Everybody brings the baggage of who they are to their work. You can think you know what you’re doing, but things often get revealed to you when you’re making things. I always think, Oh I’m making something that’s entirely different than what I’ve done before, and then I get in the editing room and I go, Ugh, there I am again. But I really don’t know how much is from my life growing up with detectives versus watching a bunch of Jean-Pierre Melville films. I really can’t parse it.

I was exposed to a lot of gore as a child. When I was still really young I would wait for my dad at crime scenes. There were pictures on the walls that were like, really disturbing. Nobody thought to protect me from them. That said, I have no appetite, stomach, or anything for those kinds of images. I have no desire to recreate them.

But, it’s funny, my father was a crime scene detective and his buddies were all crime scene detectives. A crime scene investigator deals with the aftermath of the event, I will say that. I’ve been teaching film for like 30 years and the only way I really know how to teach is to deconstruct. Deconstruction is what I’m always doing in teaching, so I’m sure there’s a relationship there.

NK

How much does humor come up on set? Josh O’Connor’s performance in The Mastermind is perhaps a great entry point for this.

KR

Josh has a great sense of humor. I think if someone has a sense of humor they just find their own way to do certain things, gestures, whatever. Josh’s timing is very good—it’s innate. Sometimes, the way I imagined something having humor was very different than the way Josh did it but I’d be like “Oh wow, that’s better.” Humor springs from seeing the way that people are with each other. The whole team.

NK

How do you direct actors? Do you have certain guidelines you set forth for performance?

KR

I am really just giving people a place and something to do. My method is to keep people busy, to keep them out of their head. Physical activity, working with kids, working with animals, those are good ways to keep people engaged. Acting is still mysterious to me. I don’t totally understand it and I don’t try to question it too much, because it is of course the people that really aren’t acting that surprise you. It’s such a mysterious thing and I don’t really know how to talk about it, but you know when it’s happening and when it’s not. Like, sometimes Chris Blauvelt and I will just start poking each other when something’s happening. And then sometimes in the editing room I’m like “Oh, okay, I didn’t really see that!” That’s cool, because there’s so much going on when you’re on set. Being in the editing room allows you to take stock of things from a distance. I think just giving actors room is the thing.

NK

You do your own editing. How do you approach pace?

KR

As it comes to me, I guess. That’s kind of what editing is to a large degree: finding the pace of things. I think everyone has their own rhythms they cut to. Part of what I hope I get better at as I get older is being able to break away from my natural rhythms and diversify a bit. Everything in filmmaking is a long process. You just keep working away at it until it makes some kind of sense to you.

NK

Do you feel the way that you edit shapes the way you film, and vice versa?

KR

For sure. I tend to always be thinking about the cut when I’m on the set. Sometimes it’s really gratifying when a scene slips together the way you designed it to, and sometimes it’s really fun when unexpected things happen as you’re shooting. There are just so many surprises that come up. It’s one thing to go to a location with a viewfinder and look at it a million times. It’s a totally different thing when the actor’s there and the animal’s there and the lighting’s there and so on. You can’t predict the exact way that actors are going to be with each other or how they’re going to work in a space. Gus Van Sant always says that if you shoot a scene before lunch and then shoot the same scene with the same actors and same crew after lunch, you would have two distinct scenes. He’s right. There’s a living thing that’s happening.

NK

Is there a part of filmmaking you like best?

KR

Depends on the movie. Doing research and location scouting is really intense but you also don’t have the full stress suit on yet. The Mastermind was less stressful. The local crew we had was fantastic. When I first went to Cincinnati, I had a location, which was the exterior of the museum—it was a library in Indiana, not even in Ohio—and I had Josh. At that point, I was wondering, How is this film going to come together with all those locations and actors and the amount of time that we had? How could this even happen? But it did happen, and it was a really great process. I had such a good team to work with. A lot of us had worked together before. Chris Carroll, the assistant director that I’ve made many films with, and Chris Blauvelt—we’re a really tight team. And it's the same producers for all these movies, Anish Savjani and Neil Kopp. Plus Tony Gasparo, the production designer.

One thing I really loved about making this film was coming back to the office after scouting all day and seeing the museum come together. We realized that we were going to have to build the interior of this museum ourselves, which was not in our original budget. We built it in this shitty little warehouse that was attached to our offices. This was the case in Showing Up too, we had the physical building of the school but every day the art was getting built by a million people. It was so exciting to see the school come to life. In the case of The Mastermind, we’d come back from scouting and go to the museum interior and see the floor being put down, walls being put up, paintings being made, little things being carved. There was a whole factory of people at work! It was overwhelming. Like, “Here we go! I had this idea, now all these people are here making it happen. What good fortune!” It was just such a good ride, all of it. You know, shooting’s hard, it just is, but shooting this one was hard in all the right ways.

NK

I really admire the way that you’ve established a rhythm to your work over the years, with long-term collaborations and a process that seems to only grow over time. It feels like an instructive lesson in filmmaking, knowing who to turn to build a collaborative framework.

KR

If I hadn’t met Chris Blauvelt, I probably wouldn’t be a filmmaker. The DP thing is very tricky, it’s like finding your life mate–at least for me. I don’t think it’s that way with everyone. It’s great to have new people and new energy come in, to keep things alive and changing, but, at my age, I don’t want to mess with the core of it.

Dawn Suttner, she’s the music supervisor that worked with me on this film, she was from Showing Up, and she brought on a music editor, Gisburg Smialek. I had never worked with a music editor before. And we had a new musician obviously, Rob Mazurek. It was a fabulous ride with him. So it’s nice to have new blood in the mix. And I should say, in the editing room, I’m the editor but Ben Mercer my editing assistant. He’s been there since Certain Women. He’s become a really integral part of the editing experience for me.

NK

At what point does music enter the conversation? You’ve worked with some incredible composers over the years, and I love the Rob Mazurek score in the new film.

KR

It’s different for every film. For Certain Women, Jeff Grace composed a lot of music, but I’d gotten so used to it without the music that I only ended up using one piece. For First Cow, a lot of my temp music didn’t work, and I really didn’t know what I was going to do. William Tyler came to the editing room with his various instruments, and we just fucked around for a day to see what would work, and then he went back and made music. For The Mastermind I was using temp music from Chicago Underground, the Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek group. That was sort of a starting place for the score and then it became a real back and forth with Rob, him sending me stuff, me sending him notes, and then we had the help of the music editor. That was a cool process. Rob was in Texas so it was all done virtually. He’s a free jazz guy, so even the idea of him composing things was different. He was just sending stuff and letting me try it. We kept all the instruments separate so we could kind of zero in on different elements.

NK

And casting? You have your mainstays, but you bring a lot of newcomers in, including people who haven’t worked a lot on screen before.

KR

Gayle Keller has cast many of my movies. She’s one of the first people I send a script to. She just keeps plugging along. Her great claim to fame for me was finding Orion Lee for First Cow. I mean, that was an insane search that went on for so long, and she scoured the earth. For The Mastermind, the search didn’t take long, Josh was the person I knew I wanted for Mooney. I knew I wanted John Magaro, and I’d been trying to work with Gaby Hoffman forever. She's always so busy, but she’s really great and special. We did her scenes on the very last night—she flew in and did those scenes. She’s amazing. And then Alana and Hope, that was all Gayle.

NK

You’ve had some great people break out with you, like Orion Lee and Lily Gladstone. I wonder if there’s some magic touch to it.

KR

Again, Gayle found Orion. He did a lot of readings for us, it wasn’t a fast thing. It was wonderful that it worked out, but it was a really long process. I always think that Lily Gladstone kind of found us. She was in Montana when we were shooting Certain Women and sent her tape and then sent more, and—I don’t know, it’s just like the world throws people together at the right time. So much is good fortune. It’s hunting, hunting, hunting, and then good fortune. But nothing was going to hold Lily back. She has insane tenacity. She was going to find her way, whether it was through me or someone else.

NK

Are there young filmmakers today who you follow?

KR

Okay, terrible question, or I’ll just have a terrible answer because I do not watch a lot of new cinema—American, I should say. It’s just not where I turn, if I’m looking at contemporary work it’s more likely to be outside of America. Or I’m likely to go before the invention of the Steadicam.

NK

Where do you look outside of America for new cinema?

KR

I never knew about Nuri Bilge Ceylon! I just got turned on to him, and, oh my God, now I’ve got to see everything he made. I love Lucretia Martel. I keep up with as many of the Apichatpong Weerasethakul films as I can, but he’s so fast. Brett Story’s documentaries, the Canadian filmmaker, she’s fantastic. That’s the most recent. But, I have my old people that I love. I look at a lot of student work, obviously, because I teach, and there’s a lot of great stuff, but I can’t keep up with everybody. I watch them when I have them and it’s great.

NK

How do you think about the life of your movies after they’ve had their theatrical release?

KR

I really don’t. I’m just trying to think about how the next year of life is gonna go. I mean, who knows what’s going to happen with our world? But you mean, as far as work? As far as the films go? Legacy. You’re calling me old. I am old. Every film that I make, I always make thinking that it’s going to be our last film, and that the jig is up. I really felt that way after making Meek’s Cutoff.

NK

You felt that way on set?

KR

Yeah, I was like “Let’s just go for it, we’re never going to be able to do any of this again.” I kind of always have that feeling that this could be it. You know, my life really is not that exciting. I’m a very homebound, walk-the-dog kind of person, and so the only real adventure in my life is when I’m making a film. I miss some of the people in my life when I’m not making a film because the only way we really get to spend time together is when we’re making a film. I have these windows between teaching that allot time for doing that. I always teach in the spring so the falls are for shooting. It used to be the other way around, which meant the winter was for shooting, and I’m over that. When a film winds down you’d think you’d feel like, Oh I’m done, phew, I’m gonna go sit with my newspaper and coffee. But really you’re left with a huge void and you inevitably start hopping onto the next project.

I just want to have something to wake up and work on so that I’m not looking at the New York Times all day. My first conversations will be with Neil and Anish who have produced all these movies and are there from the very first draft to the bitter end. I live in Portland and Jon Raymond lives up the street and we usually end up having coffee to start talking about something that will ultimately take on a whole life of its own.

NK

I think that void is a very common feeling for directors.

KR

Or just for anybody. A painter puts up the next painting. You have to have a daily regimen, a practice. That’s what they call it, having a practice.