The Certain Women director on why she cast Michelle Williams and Kristen Stewart in her latest dose of ‘slow cinema’, adapted from Maile Meloy’s stories

Seven films in, Kelly Reichardt has proved herself the modern master of “slow cinema”. Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff are unhurried, melancholic dramas. Her often female-fronted films don’t boldly announce themselves, but gently ease you in, enveloping you in their characters’ microcosmic journeys.

Her last film, Night Moves, a thriller about a pair of corn-fed eco-activists (Jesse Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning) who plot to blow up a hydroelectric dam, signalled a shift in tone. But she’s back in what you might call her comfort zone with Certain Women, an adaptation of Maile Meloy’s short-story collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

Certain Women recalls the hushed tone of her earlier work, and the cast is Reichardt’s starriest. Michelle Williams (a frequent collaborator), Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart and newcomer Lily Gladstone play four women who populate three interlinked vignettes set in and around Livingston, Montana. Reichardt diffuses the wattage with long takes of cold, stark landscapes, trenchant stares, and meaningful silences.

At Sundance, where the film premiered in 2016, there were some walkouts during its first screening. But Reichardt is sanguine about the birth pains. “I get nervous premiering a new film because it’s the beginning of entering the world of talking about the movie. You’re going to talk about everything so much that you get further and further away from your experience of it. The nature of press is summing stuff up, and you’ve worked really hard to not sum stuff up in the making. So it feels a little bit like undoing your own work to get a film out there.

“I just don’t have that perspective,” she says. “I don’t have a bird’s-eye view on it. The rhythm of things seems to me so much dictated. It all just seems everything is getting faster. Faster, faster, faster – we all want things faster. I guess there is a part of me that likes the pull against that. Montana has a different pace than maybe another place would.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michelle Williams in Certain Women. Photograph: Park Circus

Montana is what drew Reichardt to Meloy’s prose. Having grown up on the east coast, in Dade county, Florida, and based her professional life in New York, Reichardt has shot all her films on the opposite side of the country. She credits her friend, director Todd Haynes (whose feature debut, Poison, won the top prize at Sundance a few years before Reichardt arrived on to the scene), for encouraging her to head west after he moved there in the early 1990s. Until Certain Women, all her films were set in Oregon. Certain Women finds her venturing further inland, to snowy pastures.

“I liked the idea of going somewhere new,” she says. “But I’d also always been curious about the area. I drive through Montana every year, going back and forth in between Oregon and New York – and I stay a night, each way.”

It was also cheaper to shoot in Montana,” she says, explaining that the state gave her a “generous grant” to make a film there. “Oregon has lost a lot of its subsidies. All those unromantic things play into it.”

But Reichardt is no pragmatist. Despite her recent professional collaborations with A-list actors, she has yet to follow in the footsteps of many of her Sundance alumni by going mainstream for a big paycheck. “I’ve never had a grand plan,” she says. “I’ve always tried to work out a life where I can afford to live. You figure out that aspect, then you can afford to have a project, too.” To supplement her income, Reichardt teaches at liberal arts colleges.

“Also, I want to work with people I admire,” she says. Williams – currently Oscar-nominated for Manchester by the Sea – is the most obvious of these: her pensive presence melds seamlessly with Reichardt’s aesthetic in Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff and now in Certain Women.

Reichardt is effusive in her praise of the actor, who plays an unhappily married woman trying to persuade a family friend to sell some vintage sandstone for her family’s new home. She stops short of calling Williams a “muse”. “There is something strange about that term. It wouldn’t be my word. But I do enjoy working with her. I can never guess what she’s going to do.”

As for casting Stewart, who has racked up an impressive recent list of heavyweight collaborators – including Ang Lee, Olivier Assayas and Woody Allen – Reichardt says she decided on the Twilight star after watching outtakes from Still Alice, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s Alzheimer’s drama starring Julianne Moore. Stewart played Moore’s daughter. “I thought she was interesting in the dailies [rushes],” Reichardt says. “She’s just not getting to find out all the directions she can go in.”

But in the end, Reichardt says, her films are all about the performance. “All these actors are so good you feel like if it doesn’t work, it’s because I fucked up.”

• Certain Women is released in the UK on 3 March.