Josh O’Connor heaped praise on his “The Mastermind” director Kelly Reichardt during the film’s Cannes press conference on Saturday, saying “there’s a kindness” to working with her “which you don’t often get.”
“I don’t know that I was necessarily aware of it at the time but there is something in working with Kelly,” O’Connor said. “There’s a kindness to working with Kelly which you don’t often get. I find that really informs a performance.”
“The Mastermind,” a subdued, ’70s-set film starring O’Connor as an art thief on the run and Alana Haim as his wife, earned a 5.5-minute standing ovation at its premiere on Thursday night. Earlier in the press conference, O’Connor said that he’d been “a big follower of Kelly’s films” before signing onto the project and was drawn to his character due to his “ordinary” nature.
“When we go to the theater we see oftentimes the most extreme versions of characters and human nature, and that’s what we know as drama,” he said. “I find that now I often want to see ordinary people put in kind of extraordinary positions.”
O’Connor, who is in a second Cannes competition film with “The History of Sound” alongside Paul Mescal, was also asked to respond to his co-star calling him “silly” at that film’s presser earlier in the week. O’Connor missed “The History of Sound” premiere and press conference due to the filming of Steven Spielberg’s next movie.
“It sounds kind of coy but Josh is just incredibly silly to me,” Mescal said on Thursday. “We got fixated on this diet during the shooting process but we also became fixated on having eight jolly ranchers a day … There’s a microcosm to our relationship that I think of Josh and I think of jolly ranchers.”
O’Connor responded: “Regarding Paul, I am silly. And we did — every Friday we used to eat candy, that was our treat.”
Asked how it feels to have two films in competition and be an “actor of the moment,” O’Connor said, “I’m spending less time at home, that’s the bit that sucks,” adding: “I feel very lucky to be working. It’s just a small moment, it will pass. It’ll go any minute now, so for now I’m just soaking it all in.”
Alongside O’Connor and Haim, “The Mastermind” also stars John Magaro, Hope Davis, Bill Camp, Gaby Hoffmann, Eli Gelb, Cole Doman, Javion Allen, Matthew Maher, Rhenzy Feliz and Ryan Homchick. In addition to directing, Reichardt also penned the script.
After the standing ovation at the film’s premiere on Thursday night, Reichardt delivered a poignant message: “America’s in a ditch right now, but maybe we’ll get out of it. But in the meantime, we have the movies.”
Reichardt expanded on that during the press conference, saying: “It’s all really scary. It’s surprising how far it’s gone how fast. More scary to me was watching at Tufts, the college I went to, watching a young woman walk out of class and get shoved into a van and taken out of the country. That to me is scarier.”
Magaro then chimed in, calling it “ridiculous.” “We have a leader who is having temper tantrums every day but it affects millions and millions of people’s lives,” he continued. “It’s hard for me to remain hopeful, but we still have a judicial system to some degree in this country and I feel like it’s going to be hard for him to hold that crazy order in place.”
Though “The Mastermind” doesn’t have an outwardly political message, it’s set in the backdrop of the Vietnam War, which O’Connor said added to how he built his character. “We’re surrounded by men who oftentimes have low self-esteem and a big ego,” he said. “It comes from privilege, total privilege. It comes from generations of men being told that they deserve something more.”
