The Truly Independent Filmmaker

To make the movies she wanted, Kelly Reichardt had to go it alone.

- Logan Hill

In the winter of 1994 director Kelly Reichardt almost missed the Sundance Film Festival debut of her first film because she was stuck on a train.

“I couldn’t afford the plane tickets,” says Reichardt, shrugging her slight shoulders in a Manhattan cafe. “The train froze on the tracks and took five days instead of three. We got there just in time for our premiere. We hadn’t showered in five days. We were total grease heads.”

Reichardt was one of two women filmmakers at the Park City, Utah, festival that year. Her feature, River of Grass, which she describes as “a road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime story without the crime,” got strong reviews, though some of her peers were not so supportive.

“I remember Kevin Smith was there with Clerks,” she says, sipping a chamomile tea. “He’s in this book [Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes by John Pierson] talking about my film and how it’s an example of a  film that should have never been made. They say that it looks like it was shot on postage stamps. The guy who made Clerks …” She pauses for wry emphasis: Clerks was memorably low-fi. “That’s the kind of friendly Sundance camaraderie back in the day. But there were other, nicer folks.”

That year, the festival launched the careers of the fanboy kingpin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy), as well as perennial Oscar contender David O. Russell (Spanking the Monkey, Joy) and documentarian Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Life Itself), to hardearned, near-immediate acclaim. For Reichardt, it was the beginning of a more circuitous journey that, like her ill-fated train ride, took much longer than necessary. Although