FRESH AIR
This interview was originally broadcast on April 14, 2011. Michelle Williams just received a Best Actress nomination for her performance in My Week With Marilyn. Kelly Reichardt’s frontier drama Meek’s Cutoff opens in the year 1845, on the wide-open plains of Oregon, where a wagon team of three families has set out on a journey along the Oregon Trail. After their guide, a suspicious man named Stephen Meek, tells them about a shortcut across the Oregon desert, the settlers, led by Michelle Williams and Paul Dano, become lost. Williams joins Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross for a discussion about the film, a dusty Western with long, sweeping shots of the landscape and virtually no dialogue. MORE