In a cinematic landscape preoccupied with noise and spectacle, Kelly Reichardt has built a three-decade career out of embracing the quiet. From 2008’s Wendy and Lucy and 2016’s Certain Women to 2019’s First Cow and 2023’s Showing Up, her intimate, character-driven films unfold in subtle gestures and profound silences, observing with deep empathy ordinary people on the margins of American society. Now, with Mubi’s The Mastermind, she turns toward an unexpected subject: an art heist in 1970 suburban Massachusetts.
True to form, Reichardt doesn’t deliver a slick caper. Instead, she transforms the genre into something soulful and subversive, a gently mesmerizing meditation on human folly, frustrated ambitions, and the fragile architecture of confidence and privilege. Josh O’Connor (never better) plays the indelibly named J.B. Mooney, an out-of-work carpenter turned hapless thief, whose ill-conceived attempt to steal a clutch of modernist paintings from a local museum has grave consequences.
While drenched in the period’s warm tones and rich textures (and set to a propulsive, brassy jazz score by Rob Mazurek), the film raises questions that feel starkly relevant in the present, set as it is in an America riven by conflicts at home and abroad. During the emotional standing ovation following the film’s Cannes premiere, Reichardt remarked, in characteristically wry fashion, “America’s in a ditch right now, but maybe we’ll get out of it. But in the meantime we have the movies.”
The acclaimed independent filmmaker, who has also taught film at Bard College for nearly two decades, spoke to Vogue last week about the noteworthy events at the edge of the action, the artist who inspired Mooney’s wardrobe, and the materials that apprised O’Connor of 1970 America.
Vogue: What first drew you to the idea of an art heist, and what did you want to bring to it that was new?
Kelly Reichardt: I fell upon a story of the 50th anniversary of four teenagers who, in 1972, were doing a school art project at the local museum and got caught up in a snatch and grab. That was fun and intriguing and became a bouncing-off point. I had been collecting art-heist stories for a long time and thought, at some point, I’d like to do one. But it was a matter of, what did I want to do with it? I wanted to make a film that would use a genre as a stepping-off point and then go into a more open sphere with less guidance for me, as a filmmaker, and for the character. Then it would become more of an unraveling film.
Why set the film specifically in 1970? Some salient political and social events are swirling in the background.
It is the background. This is a character who’s not really paying attention to the world at large. He’s pretty caught up in his own world—1970 is at the periphery of the frame as it is at the periphery of his mind. But 1970 America, it’s the haze of the end of the ’60s. We’re in Vietnam, the draft is still underway, but my character’s a little bit old for that, so it’s not breathing down his neck. Also, he lives in a world of privilege. It’s the year the National Guard goes onto university campuses, there’s the shooting at Kent State, and we go in and bomb Cambodia. The country’s super polarized. But that’s all really not what my character’s thinking about. That’s just what’s happening in the world in 1970.
You’ve said Josh O’Connor was the only actor you approached for the role. What made him right for this?
When I started thinking about actors, Josh was first to mind. He’s got a timeless face. He’s got a good physicality—he is in touch with his whole body and voice. He can get a lot across without counting on it being in the dialogue. He’s really appealing, and after we met through a friend, it was easy to imagine it being Josh.
You provided some materials to brief him about American life at that time.
I wanted him to think about what the East Coast was like in the fall of 1970, so I sent him some documentary films from the filmmakers Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines and some Didion essays, of course. I sent links from radio so you could hear the DJ and what was happening, and then also music that might be from his character’s records. Things about [Arthur] Dove’s paintings and other artists around that and just anything regional.
How did you decide Arthur Dove’s paintings would be purloined?
At first I just put ’em in because I like Arthur Dove, and it was an easy grab from my brain. Then over the course of the year or so that I worked on the script, I tried a lot of different things. But the more things I tried, the more I knew what it should be. I tried landscapes, portraits, all kinds of things. I knew I wanted it to be American and abstract. I liked the idea that Dove’s paintings might seem of value to one person while another person—someone like Mooney’s father—might not see that. Two people wouldn’t see the same thing. Also, the name is quite beautiful for my film. I found an image of a Dove opening at a gallery in 1970, and it made me feel great that even though he wasn’t really popular at the time, it’s conceivable that he would’ve had a show.
There’s such a lovely, distinct, textured look and feel to the film. What were some of your visual inspirations?
[Cinematographer] Robby Müller’s wife sent me an enlarged Polaroid of his that I’ve been living with for quite a few years now, and I was revisiting some things he shot. I really liked the colors and feel of the visual film of The American Friend. Of course those film stocks don’t exist anymore. So how can Chris [Blauvelt, her longtime cinematographer] whip up a recipe with his team to try to make something look of the era? In the same way Rob Mazurek recorded everything on equipment of the time, and we tried to mix it to have a mono feel to it. You’re just trying to get some texture and feel of the time. If you’re shooting 1970, you don’t escape [William] Eggleston—Eggleston is imprinted on us. Also Stephen Shore’s photography. With Amy Roth, who did the costumes, we kind of stole Jasper Johns’s look for Mooney.
The costumes do so much to set us in the place and time.
Amy and I thought of what would end up in someone’s closet. Your mother buys you sweaters, maybe, and still buys you nice shirts. Somebody leaves something at your house that you wear. Does his wife end up wearing some of his clothes? Is there a favorite T-shirt he’s had forever? Getting into their clothes does help the actors, and because I don’t really rehearse, it’s always a fun day to spend with Amy and the actors, trying to figure out why they’d have things.
How do you think the film speaks to where we find ourselves today?
When I made the film a year ago, it wasn’t even the world we’re living in now. This morning I got a text about a Bard student who ICE has deported. I am going to Chicago next, and I live in Portland, so the idea of the National Guard…. But I don’t think what we’re living through now is what we lived through in the ’70s. This seems new for my lifetime. In the ’70s, there were still courts, the House. Power was put into different hands, and now power is all consolidated, so I don’t think it’s the same moment.
Another interviewer recently asked about your future projects, and you said you just wanted to figure out and understand America more. Is that how you’d summarize your larger project?
It’s always part of a conversation. Sometimes I’m in Portland hanging out with [screenwriter and longtime collaborator] Jon Raymond, so what do you end up doing besides analyzing what’s going on? That’s where a lot of things stem from. But I don’t know. I’m, as the moment is—I would like to say the moment’s confusing, but it doesn’t even seem that confusing. It seems like it is what it is, and I don’t know what’s in store.
The Mastermind is in theaters now.
