The critically-acclaimed Old Joy sees two old friends go in search of themselves on a camping trip. Carol Murphy talked to director Kelly Reichardt and actor Daniel London at the London Film Festival.

Kurt (Will Oldham) and Mark (Daniel London) are old friends who reunite for a weekend camping trip. With them they carry the baggage of their fading friendship and also the lives that they have built for themselves and the subsequent values that they have acquired. Kurt is a childlike drifter, aimless, without commitments, whilst Mark is married with fatherhood close at hand.

Kurt takes Mark on a journey to a pastoral idyll, to a remote natural hot spring in the Cascade Mountain Range in Portland. The trip marks an attempt for them to engage with the idealism of their past friendship. What they discover, however, is an inability to find personal or political meaning or contingency through this idealism of how they once lived their lives.

Writer/director Kelly Reichardt used the short stories of John Raymond, the context of today's Bush administration in the US and the photography of Peter Sillen as a structure on which to stencil the alienation and lack of hope surrounding the central characters – two inept liberals.

Carol: What was the germination for this project and what were your intentions for the film?

Kelly Reichardt: Well, I had read John Raymond's book called The Half Life when I was driving on a cross country trip with my dog, who's in the movie. I was thinking a lot about the friendships that are in that book, and I contacted John to ask if he had any short stories that I could read with similar elements regarding the friendships. So he sent me Old Joy. I worked on the script for a long time, and then the story was published with Justine Kurland's photographs in a book called Old Joy, which was a very beautiful photography book. That's sort of where it started.

What were the elements about the relationship between the two central characters in the book that interested you?

Kelly: John has a way of writing about friendship that has a lot space in it, and it hums around an idea. When you read it, it leaves you chewing on it for a while and it gives you a lot of room to bring your own experience to it. My filmmaking is open like this as well. So that was what really appealed to me, and the characters seemed like people that I related to. I was interested in making a film about this exact moment in time and the sort of disillusionment of people my age – the characters are actually a little younger than me – about what it is to live in America and the feeling of loss of hope and the death of liberalism and all those things which are very hard for a character like Kurt, I think. That's what drew me to it.

The sort of space that Kelly is discussing, is that what attracted you to the script and the project as an actor?

Daniel London: Well, first of all I think that it is rare to look at a non-romantic relationship in a film, like a friendship, in that way. I felt that what Kelly and John were getting at was a very elusive quality that I think is rare in film, or in any art, where a friendship begins to go bad, and trying to find the remnants of what was there. That was really appealing to me but, in terms of the space, I feel like this whole project was more like acting in a play than in a film, just because of that space that Kelly allowed, which was to do with the nature of the project and the way she worked. As an actor I felt like I had a lot of room within a scene to figure out what it was all about, and that was a liberating thing.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 114.