Todd Haynes on the ‘Extraordinary’ Alchemy Between Kelly Reichardt and Writer Jon Raymond

Portland local Todd Haynes turned out at the Oregon city’s art museum in late June not to tout his own movies — and he certainly has a major one on the horizon thanks to Netflix’s Cannes pick-up “May December” — but to celebrate his peers: namely screenwriter and author Jon Raymond, longtime collaborator of Haynes’ friend Kelly Reichardt. Raymond also co-wrote with Haynes the script for his acclaimed 2011 HBO miniseries “Mildred Pierce” and developed the story for Haynes’ upcoming gay romance starring Joaquin Phoenix.

Haynes, who moved to Portland in 2000, was among speakers at the Portland Art Museum Center for an Untold Tomorrow’s (PAM CUT) Cinema Unbound Awards, which honored the likes of Raymond, Guillermo del Toro, Tessa Thompson, Jacqueline Stewart, and Portlander Fred Armisen. The lively gala was held in honor of not only raising funds for the museum — one of the largest in the country and now the new home to Guillermo del Toro’s MOMA-launched “Pinocchio” exhibit — but also in kickstarting PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater, set to open in November. The space will serve as a venue for film exhibition on Portland’s east side as well as a stage and screen for XR, performance, dance, live music, animation, and drag performances. (The Tomorrow Theater takes over for what was the long-running porn house, the Oregon Theatre, retaining many of its architectural and aesthetic quirks.)

Haynes kicked off the evening to present an award to Raymond, who’s co-written the screenplays for Reichardt’s many adored indies about ordinary lives drifting in limbo — “Showing Up,” “First Cow,” “Meek’s Cutoff,” “Wendy and Lucy,” and more.

“I think of Jon Raymond first and foremost as a novelist and short story writer, but Jon’s work in film over the last 15 years has produced one of the most extraordinary runs of unbelievable amounts of work — and beautiful work — and it was an incredible honor for me to acknowledge it,” Haynes said of fellow Portland resident Raymond, who along with his film scripts has written six books including novels and short stories. “What I’m really talking about is this relationship Jon has with one of the most amazing filmmakers I know, Kelly Reichardt.”

“Jon and Kelly are a thing. I feel like I’m sort of a fly on the wall to what occurred between this remarkable partnership, and so there are things I observed in the relationship over the years…

Haynes described Raymond as an “incredibly, cool smart guy, handsome. We became very tight. We got really really close, but Jon had never met Kelly. I’d known Kelly for a million years. She came to visit me in Portland, and Kelly is this incredibly witty, incredibly vivacious, gifted artist, and I introduced Kelly to all my new pals in Portland. Of course, Kelly and Jon deeply connected and bonded, and before I knew it, there was a short story Jon had written called ‘Old Joy,’ and Kelly who had debuted as a feature filmmaker in 1994 hadn’t made feature films in about seven, eight years, started thinking about adapting ‘Old Joy’ into a feature.”

From there, Haynes said, “The two of them basically just made this remarkable debut together as a partnership, shot in Portland, about the intimacies of an old friendship between two men, and the film was a revelation, and they very quickly realized they had something in common, this sort of sensibility in Jon’s writing and Kelly’s as a filmmaker had met each other, had found a voice, this sense of place. This sense of the individual colliding with their environments, and this would continue in film after film after film. Very shortly after that, there was a short story of Jon’s called ‘Train Choir,’ and I had just finished working with Michelle Williams on another movie [‘I’m Not There’],” and so he made the introduction.

Such were the origins of Reichardt’s 2008 Film Independent Spirit Award nominee “Wendy and Lucy,” starring Williams as an itinerant Oregonian whose life is falling apart amid financial hardship on the road to Alaska.

Haynes turned to talking about Reichardt and co-writer Raymond’s 2019 “First Cow,” the bucolic buddy movie A24 released to universal acclaim quite literally just before the pandemic.

“Jon turned to his debut novel and in a record time, an amazingly short span of time, Jon and Kelly developed this script for ‘First Cow,’” which paired Reichardt and Raymond with cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt (who stepped in for Ed Lachman on Haynes’ new film “May December”). “The world that was created in this movie was so indelible, and this again was about an enlightening relationship between two men… and before you knew it, they were doing another film: Kelly’s most recent film, ‘Showing Up.’” (A24 released that film earlier in the spring.)

Before presenting the prize to Raymond, Haynes said finally, “It’s incredible to think that during this entire time, Kelly was making these sort of cinematic histories of the Pacific Northwest … never having permanent residency in Portland. I’d always lived in the Northeast [of Portland]. Then, Kelly got a place in the Southeast a couple blocks from Jon, and then Kelly and Jon could walk to each other’s house, hang out, and have dinner. It’s amazing when you have friends like this who you love so much who just keep making one amazing film after the next, in your own backyard, watching this unfold.”

Haynes returns to the fall awards conversation with “May December,” starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, his first narrative feature since 2019’s “Dark Waters.”