Reichardt makes films with lots of tension, little action

It's often hard to describe a Kelly Reichardt movie. Even she has problems, and she's the director. She's on tour promoting "Certain Women," but she hasn't quite got it down.

"It's a hard one to sum up," she said. "And it's nice not to sum it up."

Like most of her films, it's about people living in the West.

"It's set around Livingston and the Clyde Park area of Montana." She paused and smiled. "I haven't got to what it's about yet. I'm avoiding it. It's the story of some ... lives. Yeah! People! Animals!" She began laughing.

"Certain Women" is three loosely connected short stories. The first features a lawyer, played by Laura Dern, with a difficult client. Then there's an unhappily married couple building a second home, perhaps as a way to save their relationship.

And there's a woman working alone on a remote ranch. She becomes obsessed with a young lawyer, played by Kristen Stewart, who is reluctantly teaching a community-ed class. She signed up for the class thinking it was in another, much closer town.

"Takes me four hours to get here. It's going to take me four hours to get back. And I have to work in the morning," she says, eating a burger after the class with the rancher. Suddenly she looks up.

"Did you tell me how you ended up in this class?" she asks.

The rancher shrugs. "Just saw people going in."

An action thriller it isn't. But Reichardt's low-budget movies pack a power that has led to her being called the Poet of American Cinema. The films burrow into your mind and get under your skin.

A New York Times critic wrote about the sustained unease and the presence of some unnamed looming threat in her films. Reichardt doesn't deny it, but doesn't elaborate much, either.

"We all live with the threat," she said. "We all live on the brink of disaster! Truly!"

"Certain Women" is based on short stories by Maile Meloy. The struggles Meloy's characters face are all very relatable, Reichardt said.

As a director, she tells the stories quietly. Conversations stutter to silence, thoughts are left unfinished.

"It's between the lines where you can really catch the glimpses of what's really happening with people," Reichardt said.

Actor Michelle Williams has appeared in three Reichardt films. She plays the unhappy homebuilder in "Certain Women." When she got the film script, she reportedly thought it was incomplete because there were so few lines.

Reichardt thought it was one of the most talky movie she's made. She's been known to rehearse entire scenes in silence, to see where dialogue is even needed. "It's a visual medium," she said. "If you can show it and then lose a line, then I am all for that."

It's a testament to Reichardt's work that her films feature big-name stars like Williams, Dern and Stewart, despite being made on a shoestring.

Although she makes films set in the West, she's lived most of her adult life in New York. She looks at going to make a film as getting away from home.

"Originally, you could go places where there was no cell service and then you really have your crew and actors captive and they have nothing else to think about," she said. "That's getting harder to do. But you can take people away from the humdrum hassles of their lives and your own and be completely consumed in a project, which is very gratifying."

Especially, she said with a laugh, if it's her project.