LAND of MILK and HONEY

With the superlative First Cow, ace auteur Kelly Reichardt finds an American creation myth in the small tale of two friends stealing milk from a cow. Total Film talks to Reichardt and her cast about the year’s best moo-vie…

Iremember one scene, when we were all around this cow and it decided it was going to wee,” recalls Orion Lee, one of the two lead actors in Kelly Reichardt’s minor miracle of a film. “And oh my gosh, the bladder on a cow! There was this huge puddle. And the smell! We had to move away and start again.” Well, they do say never work with animals. But before we paint too dark a picture of Evie, the two-year-old Jersey who is the titular star of Reichardt’s seventh feature, let it be said that she was, when not weeing, a pleasure to work with. “She’s a super-sweet animal,” stresses Reichardt. “She had a great temperament and tolerated us. It’s more about training the crew to slow down and become quieter and to work against the normal vibe, because crews are normally wild and fast-moving.”

“She was a very friendly beast,” smiles Lee’s co-star, John Magaro. “Those moments in the field at night when I was milking her, and speaking to her in an almost romantic way, those were some of my favourite moments to shoot. There was a peace.”

‘Peace’ is a good word to describe First Cow and Reichardt’s body of work as a whole, for all of her features – River Of Grass, Old Joy, Wendy And Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, Certain Women – move at an unhurried pace, with unfussy camerawork. Serious critics like to call it ‘slow cinema’, a genre that groups together the contemplative films of such arthouse auteurs as Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson and Béla Tarr, but don’t be lulled by the hushed narratives and minimalist, observational style: beneath the placid surface, Reichardt’s films are nothing short of radical.

Take First Cow. Set in Oregon in the 1820s, a time of fur trappers and blood on mud, it sees Chinese immigrant King-Lu (Lee) team up with a gentle cook who is nicknamed, appropriately enough, Cookie (Magaro). They are desperate, like everyone else, to find their fortune or to at least survive, and they spy their chance when an English landowner (Toby Jones) has the first cow brought over simply because he desires milk in his tea. Each night, King-Lu and Cookie sneak onto the Chief Factor’s land and milk the cow, thus providing themselves with the secret ingredient that make Cookie’s ‘oily cakes’ a rousing success, with queues forming up the muddy street like you’d nowadays see outside some artisan stall in downtown Manhattan.

You might call First Cow a heist movie and a western, but it’s a long way from Michael Mann’s running gun battles or John Wayne and Clint Eastwood dishing out rough justice. Instead, Reichardt and her regular scribe Jonathan Raymond present a story of an intimate friendship between two men. It is not a romance, à la Brokeback Mountain, but rather a profound friendship the likes of which you rarely see on-screen, let alone in a western.

“Those films that you’re talking about are the westerns with the strong protagonist who brings justice… that’s been done well enough, it’s not interesting,” says Reichardt. “Those are big ‘outside your story’ things to think about, but when you’re making the film you’re really just hunkered down with Cookie, King-Lu and the story. It was fun watching these actors get things to the next place, and fun to watch the tough trappers just be these sort of big muppets, fighting.”

“The characters need each other,” says Lee, who nods along when TF suggests that he and Magaro must have hung out after shooting in order to build such a palpable friendship. Lots of dinners and drinks, yes? Er, no. “We didn’t do any of those things,” he laughs. “We didn’t practise being friends. He was quiet and working on his own thing; I was loud and working on my own thing. But we did go on a camp together, with a reenactor of that period, who taught us a lot of things [trapping, starting fires, etc.]. It was three days and two nights. Secondly, we were always listening to each other, as actors. It’s actually quite rare for two people to listen to each other. Even with your best mate.”

Magaro nods. “The boot camp allowed us to catch each other’s rhythms, slightly, but not nearly a chance to get to know each other. We were lucky that this is a story of a budding friendship, people learning about each other. We were definitely too exhausted to hang out at night, but each day was a chance to get to know each other better. The audience gets to see our growing friendship in real time, in a way.” He grins. “I was able to cook Orion the oily cakes in full 1820s cooking gear, over a nice fire, on the boot camp. As a foodie, I immersed myself in the cooking several months before we started shooting. Kelly was kind enough to send me a few cookbooks from the era. My wife got sick and tired of eating stews every night.”

‘There’s this weird mythology that back in the western days everyone was white, when really everybody was from all sorts of different places’ ORION LEE

Birth Pains

First Cow might have happened back in 2004, when Jonathan Raymond’s first novel, The Half-Life, was published. It was this book that Raymond and Reichardt would eventually scale down into the screenplay of First Cow, but back then it seemed too daunting, for the novel spans decades and involves a trip to China. “I just couldn’t get my arms around it,” says Reichardt, who instead teamed with Raymond to adapt his short story ‘Old Joy’ into the same-titled 2006 movie. They worked together again on Wendy And Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff and Night Moves before finally conquering The Half-Life by stripping it down to basics and adding the benevolent bovine. That’s right, there isn’t even a cow in the novel, and Reichardt isn’t sure when they made her the centre of the action.

“It’s hard to say exactly because there’s just a lot of daily brainstorming going on,” she chuckles. “It’s an organic process that involves having a lot of coffees. I can’t remember the eureka moment.”

Script cracked, the casting came next. And while you might think that Reichardt would have been tempted by big-name actors given her ever-growing status as one of the finest filmmakers working in America today – and given her last two movies have seen her direct Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, Laura Dern, Jesse Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning – she was of an opposite mind: “If you’re allowed to cast people who aren’t well-known, so they don’t have a life attached to them, and can just be your characters… that is its own privilege.”

But what about Jones as Chief Factor? For while this is Lee’s first lead after popping up in films as big as Justice League and Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi, and Magaro is hardly a household name despite starring in The Umbrella

Academy, Overlord and Carol, Jones is one of the most celebrated actors working today. Well, Reichardt couldn’t resist. Turns out she’s a fangirl, and of one show in particular. “I just love Detectorists so much,” she laughs.

“The only thing she ever talked about was Detectorists,” confirms Jones, looking genuinely perplexed. “But when Kelly approached me that was one of the easier decisions I’ve ever had to make. When you when get the opportunity to work with an auteur, it’s usually a good idea to do it.”

And it didn’t bother him that Chief Factor is the villain of the piece? He shakes his head. “It’s my job to humanise characters. Thinking ‘good’ or ‘bad’ doesn’t help you play any character ever, other than to say if it’s written as a ‘bad’ character, I’ll be damn well focused on when he’s good. There’s something about the fact that he’s opened up by his taste buds, and memory resides in taste. You have a duty to suggest complexity.”

As does Reichardt. Her films focus on the marginalised and those who struggle to get by, and they are nearly always set in the Pacific Northwest despite her growing up in Florida and living most of her adult life in New York (“When you’re dealing with American myth, you tend to end up in the west,” she shrugs). First Cow, a microcosm of capitalism, takes place at a time of the cross-country migration that we’re familiar with from countless Hollywood westerns, but it also acknowledges that people were pouring in from the UK, Europe and Asia – that America is a country built by immigrants.

“There’s this weird mythology that back in the western days everyone was white, when really everybody was from all sorts of different places,” says Lee, who was delighted to witness such representation.

“I think it’s a gift that she’s offering these non-traditional western heroes,” Magaro says. “It’s time to see something different.”

Jones nods. “The strongest thing about the film, to me, is it’s like a fable. In a way, it’s like Eden being screwed. It’s like biting into a problem. That is timeless but I don’t think it’s accidental that Kelly has made this film now.”

For her part, Reichardt says she was interested in, “The very, very beginning of corporate America... when it’s not even America yet, and the first corporation, the first trappers, are here, and how quickly that transforms what was there before them, in terms of the first people and the environment and the animals. Also, it was interesting during the time we were living through to show the migration, and how it’s coming from Europe and Asia before people were really trekking cross country – the white influx. Who’s here first? A bunch of people who were not what we think of as the first wave.”

Turns out that this ‘slow cinema’ period piece – or peace, to use Magaro’s word – is roiling and seething under its placid surface. A revolutionary drama that speaks to the here and now? You’ll be chewing the cud for weeks.