Michelle Williams - Page. VIDA: Let’s talk a little bit about Meek’s Cutoff, which is the second film you’ve done with director Kelly Reichardt—the first being Wendy and Lucy. I was wondering what it was like to work on more than one film with the same director. Do you feel because you’ve spent so much time together at this point that you have kind of a shorthand when working together? WILLIAMS: You know the safety you feel when a man asks you to marry him? VIDA: Mm- hmm . She wants to marry me. VIDA: Did you know from the beginning that you’d be doing two films with her? WILLIAMS: No, I had no idea. One day she came over to our house in Brooklyn with a manila envelope, and said she had something special to give me. So we walked upstairs and sat on my bed, and she handed me the first draft of Meek’s. It really is one of the top five favorite moments of my life—it’s right up there. Because I wasn’t expecting it. I hope to make movies with her for a long time to come. So I guess at this point, knowing Kelly has been like an education in film. Not that she’s ever tried to teach me, but just sort of by osmosis, and being her friend, and understanding what she likes, and having her reference movies, and then going and finding them myself, I feel at this point I know how to fill her frame. I know what she wants. I know what she’s into. I know what her taste is. There are limitations when you work with Kelly. There’s a very specific style that she’s after. But in those confines you can actually find so much freedom because of the specificity. VIDA: At first I couldn’t believe the film was shot in Oregon. It was really interesting to see the high- desert part of the state. As I watched these three families go across the plain, with their guide and the covered wagons, I just felt the heat and the toil and the immense effort of it. And the weight of those dresses! WILLIAMS: I know! The only part of your body left exposed to the sun were your hands. My hands have aged at a rate disproportionate to the rest ofmy body because of being out there in the hot sun for two months. You couldn’t keep sunscreen on your hands; you were just sort of filthy all the time. But the dresses, they were ingenious for so many reasons. They actually do keep you quite cool, because they’re cotton, and they also provide cover. Privacy is important to women, and when you’re on the trail like that, so little is afforded. But with the dress, you can actually go to the bathroom in private. It provides an incredible shield. You could literally be in a conversation with somebody and just sort of drop down . I can’t believe I’m talking about this. I read once that when James Dean was feeling inhibited on set, he went off into a corner and urinated. I thought, How interesting! Then having that experience of peeing in private underneath the dress . You’re out there in the desert all day. I mean, what are you going to do when you’re a girl? We were scared about snakes and all these creatures and critters, and it finally just became this weird joy to be out there, just stuck behind the bush . I can’t believe I’m still talking about this. VIDA: This is the second conversation I’ve had in two days about peeing and long dresses. Yesterday a friend of mine was telling me that she lived in Rome when she was a teenager, and she had this really fabulous friend who wore long dresses, of the sort that were really popular at the time.
Anyway, this girl was on a date and was too modest to tell the guy that she had to go to the bathroom—and she didn’t want to interrupt the flirtation—so she just peed as she walked down the street. My friend asked her, “Well, weren’t you afraid that he would smell the pee?” And the fabulous Italian girl said, “No, all of Rome smells like pee.” . Only men can really do . Okay, I’m going to stop talking about peeing and long dresses. VIDA: What about the bonnets? In the production notes for the film, Kelly Reichardt talks about the scope of women’s eyesight, just even the frame of what they could see in front of them was limited by the bonnets. WILLIAMS: Yeah, it’s like wearing blinders, really. But again, the lack of privacy on the trail almost created a sense of privacy when there is none. Zoe Kazan and I became close during the movie, and we missed our bonnets. I missed the whole thing. There were two Winnebagos that housed hair and makeup, wardrobe, ADs, changing, everything . Michelle Williams was born in Montana in 1980. Her first major acting role was on the television show Dawson’s Creek from 1998–2003. Even while the show was still. The current range of golf shirts from all the leading brands in golf such as Callaway, Nike, Adidas and many more. When you’re covered from head to toe all day long, you’re not used to the sight of skin, and I would sort of avert my eyes because I’d feel like I was seeing something inappropriate. But we bought bonnets. We’ve been threatening each other to wear them in Brooklyn, but so far neither of us have been bold enough to break them out. VIDA: Emily, the character you play, and her husband don’t have any sexual interactions. They barely touch at all. Then when Emily interacts with the Native American, who the men on the trail capture and try to bribe to lead them to water, she gets up close to him and offers to fix his shoe. It’s actually a very tense sort of sexual moment, because nothing else in the film is like that. No one comes into the same proximity that you do with him. I thought that scene was really heightened by how repressed the rest of the people and interactions were. WILLIAMS: I wasn’t expecting that, but toward the end of the movie we were all going a little nutty, having been marooned in the desert and replicating these conditions in real detail . The thing I hadn’t expected was that kind of quasi- sexual relationship with Rod . I felt like it was about one woman’s sexual awakening, a kind of spiritual- sexual experience she was having with this stranger, with this man. VIDA: Especially given that Emily’s husband has been married before, but Emily is also much younger. This is a coming- of- age journey for her. WILLIAMS: Right. VIDA: In both Meek’s Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy, you’re often shot at a distance. Whereas in Blue Valentine the camera is so close it’s almost claustrophobic. How does that feel as an actor? WILLIAMS: It was in the latter half of Blue Valentine that the camera started to encroach on us, which it seemed to me was part of Derek’s . So the claustrophobia was something to absorb and work with. I try to practice two approaches when it comes to what to do with the camera in your face: One is to block it out—which is actually possible, because if you can believe yourself to be a child murderess or imagine that a spaceship is landing on your head, you can certainly do away with a pesky black frame in your eye line. The second is to incorporate the camera and the man behind it—I’ve yet to work with a female DP—and make them into an invisible dance partner. It can happen when you’re working with someone you genuinely like and trust, and it incorporates another dynamic of play within a scene. It was like this with Derek and his DP. I wanted to let them in. One of the best things—and something I’m grateful for every time I walk onto a film set—is my six and a half years on Dawson’s Creek and the experience it afforded me in how to get comfortable with the camera. Best acting classes I ever took. VIDA: What did you and Ryan Gosling do to prepare for the second half of the film? Whatever you did, it was upsetting for the viewer, too. WILLIAMS: We lived in this house, and what we really had to learn how to do, in the month or so that we had, was how to fight, because we had just come off the heels of making the first part of Blue Valentine, which was as fun and light and happy of an experience as I’ve ever had. I think Ryan felt similarly. So neither of us were quick to destroy that. We spent the first couple of weeks in the house just doing the dishes and making meals, taking out the trash and balancing out the budget and making home movies. But that wasn’t getting us to the place that we needed to go, so Derek had us step it up, and he would ask us to pick fights with each other. VIDA: How? WILLIAMS: Well, first he did this ceremony where he had wedding pictures taken of us, and he took a framed wedding picture and put it in a wheelbarrow with fireworks that we bought at the grocery store, and he doused it with kerosene and we lit it on fire and watched it burn. But the crazy thing is, it didn’t burn all the way—it burned into a heart around our faces, around our kiss. He couldn’t destroy it. VIDA: It wouldn’t burn. WILLIAMS: It wouldn’t burn. Which I think has something ultimately to do with the ending. Then one day we were spending time together, and Ryan said something to me. It was a jab, and I took it hard, and then it ricocheted. From that moment the infection or something started, and we never were able to get back to a good place with each other, which is what Derek had been going for anyway. VIDA: That thing he said to you that really got you going, was that directed toward you, Michelle, or was it directed toward Cindy, your character? WILLIAMS: It was me . In your mind, was it a series of things that made Cindy fall out of love with Dean, or was there one thing that he did? Or was it just the fact that Dean made this heroic gesture, becoming a father to a child that wasn’t his and becoming so close to the daughter, that Cindy almost started resenting him for it? WILLIAMS: Yeah, I saw it as a deck stacked against them from the very beginning. I saw it as trying to outrun the ghost of your parents, and your parents’ parents, and these moods and behaviors and patterns that are handed down, and you’ve got to be so wily to outsmart them. I believe that they had a deep and abiding love that was real, but I thought that how quickly they came together, how little they had to work with, was where the downfall was . As you get to know somebody, there are ways that personalities don’t fit with each other. Also, I find it so important for me and for so many of my friends to talk things out. But Cindy didn’t have that luxury. She didn’t seem to be surrounded by friends. She doesn’t have family that she can lean on. Sports Apparel, Jerseys and Fan Gear at Fanatics.
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