There is a quiet riot taking place. Miami-born Kelly Reichardt is very low profile. A fiercely independent voice of indie cinema in the US, Kelly divides her time teaching in upstate New York, and doing her quiet and personal films elsewhere. In her gentle and subtle style Kelly likes to break genre conventions. In First Cow (2020), she challenged with the rules of Western. Now, with The Mastermind – which premiered this year in the Official Competition ofCannes and is now available on Mubi – she confronts the orthodoxies of the heist movies.

The Mastermind stars Josh O’Connor as James Blaine Mooney, an extremely uneasy father of two very hectic sons, with a distant wife (played with nonchalance by Alana Haim). After tussling with multiple and equally frustrating part-time jobs, Mooney devises a shambolic plan to steal expensive works signed by Arthur Dove – the United States’s first abstract painter. The action takes place in Massachusetts during the 1970s. The Vietnam War protests are raging, and the hippie movement is beginning its demise. The turmoil is very subtle, and Mooney does not seem very connected to the broader developments.

Duda Leite talked Kelly Reichardt via Zoom.

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Duda Leite – In First Cow, you challenged the conventions of the Western genre. Now, in The Mastermind, you do a similar thing with the caper movie. Do you enjoy breaking the rules?

Kelly Reichardt – Well, the genre rules were not made up by people like me. But I’m a fan of some of them, a lot of them really, like [Jean-Pierre] Melville. I think the genres work for a certain type of character but they don’t work for everybody. Even George Simenon’s novels always have this feeling of doom to them. So I was thinking of him a bit. But I was thinking that if I would just follow the genre, that really wouldn’t be a film. It would be more of a coming undone film. So I’ve decided I would just start there and then I would kind of leave the form in the same way the character has to start improvising his life.

DL – One of the greatest elements of The Mastermind is the soundtrack. How was your collaboration with Rob Mazurek? I thought it was great that you’ve kept untouched the heist movie rule of a jazzy and cool soundtrack.

KR – Thanks. When I was writing, I was listening to Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra and Miles Davisand just whatever was in my record collection. But then when I was starting to edit, I asked the music supervisor I was working with to turn me on to some people playing jazz now that was kind of minimal and improvisational and would have the sound of the 1970s. And she turned me on to Chicago Underground.

DL – Is that a new movement?

KR – It’s actually the name of Rob’s band with Chad Taylor, the percussionist. And so I started using their music as temp music. I’m not a music editor so I was kind of Frankensteining some of their different numbers together to have different feelings. Later I met Rob Mazurek and started sending him scenes with his own kind of semi-destroyed music and then he started composing. It was back and forth over months, as my cut would become tighter [note: Kelly is the editor of this film] , I would send him scenes and he would try things and some worked and some didn’t. And some worked better in other places. That was the first time I worked with a music editor. And that was great. It was a big challenge and it added a whole new learning element for me that I hadn’t gotten that deep into before.

DL – How do you feel the movie connects to the present time in the United States?

KR – Let’s just say in the 1970s’ America there was the Vietnam War and bombs over Cambodia and the country was incredibly polarised and the National Guard was going into American cities and onto the campuses of American universities. It’s the year of the Kent State shootings. I don’t know how much people know about that in America, but it was a big deal. And so nothing like the present time at all (being ironic).

DL – Could you see that happening now?

KR – Who could imagine the National Guard going into an American city in this day and age? But this is where we are. So there’s that. We shot through the election period of last year. And, when you’re making a film, you’re in a little bit of a bubble. And I know none of us wanted to be on the last day of shooting. Part of what was sad about it is we knew we couldn’t hide in our bubble anymore and we would have to re-enter the world as it is.

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Kelly Reichardt is pictured at the top of this interview. The other image is a still from The Mastermind.