Jon Raymond is an author, frequent writing collaborator of director Kelly Reichardt, and friend of the label. His collection Livability included the short story that inspired “Old Maria Barrios spoke with Jon about making films from his writing, and revisiting “Old Joy” after so many years.

Maria Barrios: I was intrigued by the process of adapting your writing for the screen.

Jon Raymond: With all the work I did with Kelly, I've never remotely had that feeling of violation that a lot of writers have when their stuff gets adapted. It's the opposite. It's this organic process that, to me, only makes it way better.

It was an interesting thing, re-watching the film this time. In my mind, I've shaped it to be, “Oh, the movie is quite faithful to the story, it's pretty much the same thing.”  But watching it this time, I thought, “This movie is so much more than the story.” It's just so much more dimensional and textured, and there's tons of dialogue that's not in the story and tons of sense impressions that are not in the story.

MB: What else stood out in the film adaptation?

JR: On the biggest level, the pregnancy and that relationship—it kind of frames the thing. I've said this many times, I wish I had thought of that when I made the story. It adds such a huge depth to the whole relationship.

I don't remember being super involved in the actual adaptation of the story. Kelly gave me a credit for it - I must have been reading drafts - but she did the lion's share of the work. It caused something to happen that I would never have been able to comprehend.

Then she went to Portland and shot it, and I was still in New York, so I would get phone calls from her but, whatever kind of improvisations were happening on set and whatever things they were discovering out in nature, I had no role in whatsoever.

MB: How did you and Kelly become regular collaborators?

JR: It was through the making of “Old Joy” that we really became friends. It was in those conversations that we kind of realized “Oh, we enjoy hanging out with each other. We enjoy this conversation.” Seeing the movie done where I was like, “Okay, I get the assignment. I get the kind of movies that you want to be making.” But I don't think I had any comprehension entering into it, that she was going to make something so lovely and artful.

MB: Seeing it again after so many years, was there any specific part of the film that you really love or admire?

JR: Yeah, I do find the shots at the hot springs to be just insanely gorgeous. And specifically the shots of Will [Oldham, who plays Kurt in the film] giving the weird back rub with those maple leaves kind of back there, with the sun. I remember seeing those for the first time and being like, fuck, those are really, really beautiful shots.

This was always going to be a story about a certain kind of masculinity, a certain kind of liberal, probably West Coast sort of touchy-feely, post-feminist sort of guys. As it then transformed into a kind of a weird road movie, the filmic references became more available. I realized at a certain point, it's almost like the opposite of a Sam Peckinpah or a Tarantino movie, where they're often so much about finding the tenderness inside of male violence—through these acts of bloodshed and horror, some sort of weird male bonding happens.

“Old Joy,” on the other hand, is more about finding the violence inside male tenderness. And it's like these guys who have been so, you know, trained out of that kind of mentality in a certain sense, still have these extremely subtle competitions and dominations going on between them. The scales kind of tip in different balances through the course of the film in insanely subtle ways. I found it amazing that Kelly was able to express that.