I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jon Raymond, the Oregon novelist and short-story writer whose work provided the basis for Kelly Reichardt's films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. His book Livability, which contains the original stories those films are based on, came out in January, and I'm very anxious to pick it up to see how his sensibility translates to the page. * * * * *
Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s film about a young woman sliding into economic oblivion when her car breaks down in small-town Oregon, was released in December of 2008 — right about the time when the public’s awareness of the full, terrifying extent of the American economic crisis was sinking in. The small, unassuming, deceptively simple film could not have been more out of step with Hollywood — or more in touch with the anxieties of the nation.
“I think we hit the zeitgeist about as well as we could have hoped,” says Jon Raymond, the Oregon novelist who co-wrote the script of Wendy and Lucy with director Kelly Reichardt, based on his short story “Train Choir.” “If people are like me, money is one of the only two thoughts they ever have. It’s odd to me that more movies don’t talk about it. I guess money does come up in sort of weird, fantastical ways — in bank heists and things like that. But rarely does it appear in the quotidian way it does [in Wendy and Lucy].”
Wendy and Lucy is Raymond’s second collaboration with Reichardt — he also co-wrote her acclaimed 2006 drama Old Joy, which was also based on one of his stories. They met through a mutual friend, director Todd Haynes, and began working together when Reichardt, who had liked Raymond’s novel The Half-Life and mentioned she was looking for material that could be adapted into a film. He gave her “Old Joy” to read, not thinking there was anything very cinematic in its story of two estranged friends on a hiking trip, but Reichardt saw possibilities in it. Plus, it had a small cast of characters, a manageable number of locations, and she could put her dog Lucy into the movie as well. (A star was born: the dog would go on to share top billing in Wendy and Lucy two years later.)
Raymond admits that at 50 pages, the Old Joy script didn’t look much like a conventional script. And even Wendy and Lucy, despite having a stronger plot device at its centre, courageously spends much of its time lingering on seemingly tedious, undramatic activities. “All the courage there is on the part of Kelly,” Raymond says. “This kind of storytelling is pretty easy to do in short story form, but it’s so rare to see someone gear up the whole apparatus of a film and do something that’s so patient and so attentive to character.”
It’s a world Raymond knows very well — the Walgreen’s where much of Wendy and Lucy takes place is just two blocks away from his house. And he’s just a short drive away from the trainyard where the film reaches its heartbreaking conclusion. (NOTE: Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want the ending spoiled.) “I don’t know for sure what happens to Wendy after that scene,” he says. “My sense is that is that although she might attempt to get back to the dog, but I doubt she ever does. It’s probably a 50/50 chance that she makes it to Alaska [her original destination]. And I’d guess there’s about a 20 per cent chance of something truly horrible happening to her on her train ride out of there.”
The odds of Raymond and Reichardt working together a third time, on the other hand, are pretty solid: he’s written a new screenplay that she’s currently in the process of casting. “I always tell her, ‘I hope you don’t start reading more books,’” Raymond says. “I think as long as I can keep her from reading any other writers, I’ll be okay.”
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