“The Mastermind” is anything but.
The titular character of director Kelly Reichardt’s film, JB Mooney (Josh O’Connor), is bored or repelled by the life he’s expected to lead, so he steals art instead. When he finally goes to pull his big heist, it’s ill-conceived and poorly executed, forcing him to think on his feet, which, it turns out, is not something he does all that well.
Reichardt is best known for her quiet, often brooding or melancholic movies set in Oregon (“Wendy and Lucy,” “Meek’s Cutoff,” “First Cow”), but she often works in different time periods and styles.
“Not to be corny, but I love the language of cinema,” she said in a recent video interview. “There’s always something to learn.”
Kelly Reichardt is the director of the ’70s-era heist film, “The Mastermind.” (Photo credit David Godlis / Courtesy of Mubi) Josh O’Connor stars in Kelly Reichardt’s ’70s-era heist film, “The Mastermind.” (Courtesy of Mubi) Show Caption1 of 2Kelly Reichardt is the director of the ’70s-era heist film, “The Mastermind.” (Photo credit David Godlis / Courtesy of Mubi) Expand“The Mastermind” not only switches to the opposite coast, but it also marks another shift in tone for her. Aided by a memorable jazzy score by Rob Mazurek, she has made an entertaining film while also inverting the heist genre to show a man falling apart in a moment, in 1970, when the nation is also coming apart at the seams.
On a New York Film Festival panel, Reichardt confessed to stealing a potato from Whole Foods as part of her research (she’d never stolen anything before) and explained that it was also a different film from the one she’d set out to make. Reichardt was drawn initially to the story of a couple of teenage girls who were inadvertently caught up in an art heist in 1972. Those girls are now just a footnote in the story of JB as he alienates loved ones with his misbehavior. (The film also features Alana Haim as his wife Terri, Bill Camp and Hope Davis as his parents and John Magaro and Gaby Hoffman as old friends.)
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. I just want to let you know that I’ve alerted Whole Foods about the potato.
[Deadpan] I don’t know what you’re talking about.
It wasn’t a big heist. But you feel proud of yourself. I went home and hung it up on my wall. You call up someone and say, “Look at this, I took a potato.”
Q. Were you looking to challenge yourself with a different type of story or film, or were you just inspired by the idea?
I just came upon this story and wondered about those girls who got caught up in the heist. Once I started writing, it changed from my original concept. And then I thought it would seem like an art heist film, but it would really be a film about coming undone. I actually had to get the heist out of the way, so it was a weird structure for a screenplay and that was a challenge to figure out – but that was kind of the point: I was like the character because after the heist goes wrong, he no longer has a map to follow and would have to make his life up. I never had a form to follow.
Q. You must always be adapting as you go. You talked about how you not only started with the idea of the girls, but also these elaborate scenes involving a circular driveway that you had to adjust.
It’s a daily process that’s always changing. I was thinking of this Costa-Gavras film “State of Siege,” where there’s a montage of cars going to kidnap a senator, and it’s so elaborate, and I thought, “Wow, I love this.”
When you’re planning, you can be so completely ambitious and fill your notepad with pictures of cars going through the circular drive with a parking lot over there, but you’re making up a space that doesn’t exist. I guess if you had a trillion dollars, you would just make the space as you want it.
Then you go scouting and you’ve trapped yourself into looking for this specific space and having to really bend your mind to say, but how can this actual space work? You’re adjusting constantly so when you know where you’re shooting a whole new plan comes into play. You try to carry over some ideas, but maybe the new location offers new ideas.
In the end, the original idea just didn’t work for my story – there were going to be too many cars and not enough reason for them. It would look cool, but it’s really all fat and doesn’t really have a purpose in the film. So things get cut back.
And even then, on the day I’m shooting, I’m using 50-year-old cars, and if I get them to run for ten minutes, that’s the victory.
Q. You not only switched from your original story about the girls, but you shifted the time of the heist from 1972 to 1970. Why?
The draft was still going, and I wanted JB’s friends to feel that pressure – he doesn’t (feel it), because he has two kids and his dad’s a judge. And I liked the idea that 1970 was the end of the ‘60s, but not quite in the ’70s yet. But things are amping up: the U.S. is going into Cambodia, the Weather Underground is starting to blow stuff up, there’s union fights and the cusp of a woman’s revolution. It’s a time where people were wondering what’s next.
Q. Did you want us to root for JB as he makes his bad decisions and treats people badly or just to relate to his missteps and misjudgments?
If you look back at the ’70s and Jack Nicholson and all those leading men, they were all [jerks]. They were crappy to women, and they weren’t home taking care of their kids. But people loved them because of their charm. And I wondered, does that still work? If you take a charming guy, when does that run out so it’s a weapon that doesn’t work out any more?
I just thought of JB as someone who would have a talent but not even appreciate it – he never even makes the effort. He’s someone who has a lot of privilege. If he screws up, he has nets to catch him – he’s middle-class and his father is a judge. JB is rebelling against his middle-class life, even if he does it in a stupid way. His wife doesn’t have that option.
In “Wendy and Lucy,” if Wendy [who is homeless] steals a can of dog food because she doesn’t have any money, she’s in trouble. So JB has a lot more room to screw up.
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