‘First Cow’

On Monday, 15 July, the LRB in partnership with MUBI screened Kelly Reichardt’s film ‘First Cow’ at the Garden Cinema as the latest in a series of events exploring the art of literary adaptation. Jonathan Raymond, who co-wrote the screenplay and is the author of the novel it’s based on, introduced the film.

There wasn’t a cow in the book. The Half-Life, my first published work of fiction, was loaded with native plants, psychedelic drugs, overheard bus conversations, composited friends and family members, some of whom still bore the names they carried in reality. But there was no cow.

There were two friendships placed side by side, like a collage. On one side were two men, Cookie Figowitz and Henry Brown, who meet, c.1820, in the wilds of the pre-American Pacific Northwest as freelance agents of the global fur trade. On the other side were two teenage girls, Tina Plank and Trixie Volterra, who meet in the 1980s at a commune that shares the same geography.

The two friendships don’t parallel each other very closely, except that both are enmeshed in schemes of fortune-building. The two men conspire to export castoreum oil, a substance harvested from the anal glands of discarded beaver corpses, from the mouth of the Columbia River to Canton. The two girls use funds from a garden of illicit marijuana plants to make a movie about a doctor who lobotomises his wife.

Like most books, The Half-Life wasn’t widely read. It came out in 2004 to a handful of OK reviews and I did maybe six readings. Had I known more about the publishing industry at the time, I might have understood it as a terrible flop, but thankfully I didn’t see it that way. And at least a handful of people genuinely enjoyed it. One of them was the film-maker Kelly Reichardt, whose recent short film Ode I greatly admired. She wrote to me to ask whether I had anything else she might adapt. Something smaller, though, and less resource-intensive. She’d come into a small amount of money and was planning to make a micro-feature on her own dime.

As it happened, I did have a story. It was called ‘Old Joy’, and was about two friends who take a hike in the woods only to realise their life paths have diverged. I doubt anyone else would have seen a feature-length movie in that story, but for whatever reason, Kelly did. She went on to make a beautiful, delicate film. A collaboration was born, which has so far produced six movies, among them Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves and, most recently, Showing Up.

Fifteen years after Kelly read The Half-Life, we got around to adapting it into a film called First Cow. At the time – the spring of 2018 – we’d been on a hiatus for awhile. Kelly had made a movie in Montana without my involvement, and I’d been suffering over a book no one cared about. Kelly had been planning to make another movie without me, based on a book by Pat DeWitt, but she’d run into trouble with the funding. The crew was already on hold for the autumn, though. ‘What about trying The Half-Life?’ she asked.

We began talking about it. We spent about a day entertaining the notion of doing the whole book, both sides, fur trappers and teenage girls alike. But we quickly saw that was impossible. We still didn’t have those kinds of resources. What about only one side then? We both leaned towards the fur-trapping side, which was weirder, and didn’t involve any period cars. Still, the idea had major obstacles. Without the other half of the book to lean on, did the story even make sense? Plus, the narrative still involved a trip to China, including a chapter enclosing a forty-year span of time, in which a silent romance blooms between Cookie and an imprisoned Chinese calligrapher, King-Lu. It was hard to imagine getting all that on film.

If the two characters couldn’t go to China to sell their commodity, what if a commodity came to them? What kind of commodity would show up in the Lower Columbia River basin at that time? Indigenous people had been using the Columbia River as a trade route for millennia. They’d been joined by multitudes from Russia, Britain, Spain, Hawaii and China, dragooned by the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Northwest Company.

And one afternoon, walking home from Kelly’s place, the thought occurred to me: what about a cow? Cows must have arrived here at some point. I knew there had been cows on Sauvie Island, at the axis of the Columbia and Willamette rivers, for generations. What if our characters were present at the landing of the first cow in the Pacific Northwest? When I look back on the moment now, I think of the cow coming in on a sunbeam. Or maybe inside a cosmic scallop shell, like Botticelli’s Venus. Here was a commodity but also a living creature. I called Kelly. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s a good one.’

Once the cow materialised, the storyline fell easily into place. Henry Brown and King-Lu from the novel were merged into a single character called King-Lu. The film became a heist movie, and an immigrant’s tale. New scenes fell into my lap as needed. There was a chase. How about a twist on that shot from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where they jump off the cliff? There’s a conversation between two bad guys. How about putting the opinions of that awful tech CEO in their mouths?

Over the following weeks and months, the script improved greatly as Kelly teased out new textures and characters, and as other helpers came in. We visited the recently opened Chachalu Cultural Centre at the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon, where generous scholars clued us in to regional clothes and cooking methods, and introduced us to language experts who agreed to translate our Indigenous characters’ dialogue. And then the casting kicked in, and these foggy characters became brand new, hard-edged people. The brilliant John Magaro made a natural Cookie; Orion Lee was a surprising King-Lu, but much better than originally imagined. And in the smaller roles, an embarrassment of riches flowed in: Toby Jones as the Chief Factor; René Auberjonois (RIP), a living link to McCabe and Mrs Miller.

In the autumn of 2018, only six months after the first draft had been written, principal photography began. Kelly and her regular collaborators – DP Christopher Blauvelt, producers Neil Kopp, Anish Savjani and Vincent Savino, and many more than I can name here – shot in the woods and on the river banks surrounding our town. After all these years of involvement in moviemaking, this is the part of the process that remains opaque to me – the actual composition of the frames; the blocking of the actions; the real filmmaking. The scripts offer Kelly a rough blueprint, but it’s the poetry of her eye and hand and breath that bring the ideas to life. The best moment in First Cow, to my mind – a quiet scene of housecleaning and woodchopping – had no place in the script at all.

If you weren’t able to attend the screening you can watch ‘First Cow’ by signing up for thirty days free on MUBI.