GQ: First Cow is based on Jonathan Raymond’s novel The Half-Life, which is an epic, sprawling book—but there’s no cow in it. How did you and Jonathan end up inventing what would end up being the central character?
The cow was sort of the key that unlocked the whole thing. The novel spans four decades, there’s a trip to China, King Lu is really two different characters in the novel. For a decade, I’d been saying, “Oh, don’t give The Half-Life to anyone else, but I have no idea how I could ever make that movie.” The revelation of the cow was the thing that opened the door to being able to keep all the themes and characters from the novel, and be able to do it in this passage of time that works for my filmmaking.
We had been brainstorming about it and I think it kind of worked backwards. We had this idea of this chase scene, but we didn’t really have the thing that they were running from. And then, one day, John had this idea about the cow. It was reversed engineered.
You went 12 years between making your debut feature, River of Grass, and your next feature, Old Joy. I know you made some short films, but what were those 12 years like? What was happening for you?
What was not happening was getting a film made. Independent filmmaking, or any kind of filming, was really not open and generous to women in any way. It was really like beating your head against a brick wall. People who somehow managed out of a fluke to get a first film made—trying to get a second film made was just really an impossible venture it seemed.
I spent a decade trying to get another film made and then I sort of gave up on feature filmmaking and I went back to Super 8 and tried my hand at less narrative approaches to filmmaking though I don’t have a brain for it at all.
In that time I started teaching and I just thought I would teach and make films for personal gratification or whatever. And then I saved up enough money to shoot Old Joy—I did a season of a reality TV show and was able to buy a used car to come out West.
What was the reality show you worked on?
[America’s Next] Top Model. Richard Glatzer, the director, he’d been working on reality shows since the very first reality show—I don’t know what it’s called, it’ll come to me. Richard got me the job and I went out to L.A. and while I was working on it, I was working on the script Old Joy at the same time.
Wow. That must’ve been an intense mental switch every day. In a New York Times profile of you in 2016, you were candid about the reality of making low-budget films, saying, “it also just means that I’m not getting paid, and I’m in my 50s.” What did the financial situation look like by the time you got to First Cow? Are you able to share how much that one cost to get made?
Oh, no, I can’t tell much anything. It was a low-budget film, obviously, but bigger for me. Still, as my male filmmaking colleague said—I asked him how much he was getting for his film and he goes, “Oh, it’s really low-budget. I mean, way more than you.” [Laughs]