The Sound Of Showing Up

A conversation with filmmaker Kelly Reichardt

At the start of Kelly Reichardt’s career (and mine), I wrote a review of her first feature, River of Grass. It was the 90s, and she sent me a postcard. When we said hello for an interview in March, Reichardt said it had meant something then, “that someone's really understanding what we're doing and that was cool.” Forward to: a cool career and currently, a great, cool comedy.

Linking to my review and an interview:

Showing Up is the inspired title of Kelly Reichardt’s eighth feature, a sneaky, funny little masterpiece, beautifully measured, tender-yet-irritable telling of the daily life and low-level strife of a mid-career working artist, a ceramics sculptor in modern-day Portland, played by a formidably distracted Michelle Williams. Her daily tribulations are those of Job in six-point type; as she prepares a show while working at the Oregon College of Art and Craft (an institution, defunct since 2019, of which Reichardt and her crew had the run of the premises) while also dealing with a troublesome friend-peer-neighbor-landlord (Hong Chau, her character both focused and trippy) who’s preparing two new shows. Then the bird. Then her cat. Then everything.

The result is exquisite rather than mundane, slyly wicked, exploring a working artist’s tribulations and ministrations across a confined period of time, but in concert with everyone whose path she crosses in those few days. By story’s end, Reichardt makes it almost seem as if quotidian frustrations are a necessary part of Lizzy’s process, unbeknownst to her. More review here.

Reichardt and I talked about the lovely sound design and how her own hearing has shifted, as everyone’s does across a lifetime.

Changes in hearing, it must be a worry if you’re a filmmaker. Someone who’s notoriously proud about their hearing is Michael Mann. And one of my favorite memories of a preview was being at the Ziegfeld in New York sitting on the aisle seat directly next to Michael Mann during an early screening of Ali. He’s twirling the knobs of a device in his lap and giggling maniacally whenever certain things happen, especially with Jamie Foxx, but he was also actively doing his own live mix just to figure out how it sounded in that great, defunct room.

I shouldn’t make it an old-age thing because I can remember laying in my bed and hearing my siblings at the table and being like, with my pillow over my head, when are they gonna stop scraping that plate?