“Nobody cared”: the 2008 movie Michelle Williams wants to talk about
While being an actor brings opportunities that many of us could only dream of, it’s surely not an easy job to navigate, especially when you work on a movie you love and feel super passionate about, but years on, only a small handful of people really seem to remember it.
Michelle Williams’s passion for truly moving and impactful cinema has taken her from Me Without You and Brokeback Mountain to Synecdoche, New York, Blue Valentine, and My Week with Marilyn, as well as to some much bigger fares, falling victim to the MCU, but she has always given time to small projects, even if, while filming, it seemed like no one was interested.
In 2008, she made her first of several collaborations with Kelly Reichardt as a homeless woman searching for her dog in Wendy and Lucy.
It was made on a small budget of $300,000, and Lucy, the dog, was even played by Reichardt’s own pet. Since the release of the film, which received positive reviews, the two have reunited for the likes of Meek’s Cutoff and Showing Up, proving to be a pretty reliable indie filmmaking duo.
But when they were making the movie, Williams admitted that it seemed like no one really cared that it was being made, although this surprisingly worked in her favour. “I don’t think I really felt any pressure in making Wendy and Lucy because nobody cared that we were making Wendy and Lucy,” she told Vanity Fair.
She explained, “It was a six-person crew, but it was precisely like the arrow on the target of the kind of work that I wanted to be doing, the kind of work that I had always wanted to do. And then here I was, even though nobody cared about it.”
Wendy and Lucy grossed $1.4million, which isn’t too bad for an indie movie made on such a small budget, and it certainly helped that Williams was already an established star, having previously appeared in Brokeback Mountain, which had earned her a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ nomination at the Academy Awards.
But this project brought her closer to what she truly wanted to be doing, and while she enjoyed the freedom that such a small crew gave her, where there’s much less pressure when there’s not a big studio watching a production like a hawk, she still wishes more people would appreciate it.
Those who do like the film seem to really love it, and Williams especially enjoys it when people ask her about it because, “It has a really special place in my heart because you don’t really make a movie like that thinking really anybody’s gonna see it. You’re really just kind of doing it for yourself”.
