“With my friends, I’m pretty simple and transparent. If you ran into me on the street, you’d grab it right away. With journalists, it’s more complicated. If I try to be authentic, to engage in a true dialogue – which often gives me pause – and it comes back to me distorted, if I say important things, which, once published, lose their meaning and their weight, all of this can hurt…” On the phone, on the other side of the Atlantic, in Brooklyn, where she has lived for ages, Michelle Williams has a soft but resolute voice. At 42 – including thirty in front of the camera – she has seen reporters pass by who asked her to tell her life story.
Missed appointment, in 2022, at the Cannes Film Festival (the actress was pregnant), where the film by Kelly Reichardt, Show-Up, which comes out today, was presented. Since then, we have seen it in The Fabelmans, by Steven Spielberg, as an incredible sassy mother in this real-fake biopic from the director. Role a bit ironic when we know that she began her career in 1998 in the series Dawsona teenager discovering from her cinephile suitor that “the whole universe is in Spielberg”.
The suite resembles the thousand moults of a chameleon. Actress “polymorph”to use the words of Kenneth Lonergan, who directed it in Manchester by the Sea (2016), for which she will again be nominated for an Oscar, ten years later The Secret of Brokeback Mountain (2005). Able to transform into Marilyn Monroe in front of Simon Curtis’ camera (My Week with Marilyn, 2011), such as signing for the Marvel franchise (Venom, 2018 and 2021), Michelle Williams has continued, in around forty films, to alternate independent feature films (I’m Not Thereby Todd Haynes, in 2007) and blockbusters (Shutter Islandby Martin Scorsese, in 2010, All the money in the worldby Ridley Scott, in 2017…).
Four films with Kelly Reichardt
Within this filmography, director Kelly Reichardt holds a very special place. Together, the two women shot four films (out of the eight that make up the filmmaker’s work). “As a friend, Kelly is the funniest womanconfides the actress. As a director, she is uncompromising, precise, direct. She has a very clear vision of what she wants, she knows how to get there, and she gets you there. »
Mutual friends, New York, a meeting at a Yo La Tengo concert… It’s the cinema that will really bring them together and weld them together. “I had heard a lot about her as a directorsays Michelle Williams. So I got myself Old Joy [2006]. And I wanted to enter his universe. I wanted her to choose me, to become a “Kelly Reichardt actress”. I received and read the script from Wendy and Lucy [2008], and I said yes immediately. It’s there, when I moved to Portland [Oregon] with my daughter to work on the film, who we got to know each other really intimately. »
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