SYLVAN STREAK Reichardt, seen here with Daniel London, susses out nature versus nurture.

You might argue that it’s easier to make a film about high-altitude trysts shared by two men stuck on a mountain in 1960s Wyoming than it is to depict the tenuous bonds of a platonic friendship between them. The 30-ish protagonists in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy—Mark (Daniel London), a married man who’s about to become a father, and Kurt (Will Oldham), a freewheeling drifter—try to recapture the glory of their once close bond on a camping trip in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, a reunion marked by melancholy, tenderness, awkwardness and passive-aggression.

“I kept calling the film a New Age Western,” Reichardt explains at a café in Hell’s Kitchen. “The battle between the two men is this battle of openness, of ‘I’m more open than you are.’?” Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the genesis for the film came about while Reichardt was on the open road. “I had met [cowriter] Jonathan Raymond through Todd Haynes in Portland, Oregon. I had just finished Jon’s novel, The Half Life, before I left for a cross-country trip with my dog. It’s this very lovely book, so detailed about the environment, and there’s a couple of friendships in the novel. I got to Kansas and called Jon and said, ‘Send me a story that’s all exteriors that’s about friendship.’??”

Raymond sent Reichardt “Old Joy,” which was about to be published in a small book of photos by Justine Kurland. “In one of Justine’s photos is Bagby, the actual forest that we shot Old Joy in. I kept coming back to that photo while I was driving,” the director says. “I think all three things [Kurland’s photos, Raymond’s story, Reichardt’s film] are dealing with the American landscape in a particular way that are all independent of each other.”

The political landscape was definitely on Reichardt’s mind after reading Raymond’s story. “Jon and I were talking a lot during that time; it was leading up to the 2004 election. I thought the friendship could work as a metaphor for these lost liberals, who aren’t quite functional in trying to get at what they’re trying to get at,” she says. “Jon’s a really smart, easygoing person, so he let me play around with marrying Mark and introducing the dog into the story and having Mark listen to Air America. I would send him drafts and he would play an editor’s role.”

For his part, Raymond was delighted with the collaboration. “Kelly was an incredibly sensitive reader and was able to make some really great improvements,” he says. “There’s a particular form of male bonding that I was trying to get at in the story, which has a lot to do with the West Coast and liberalism and postfeminist ideas of masculinity. I was trying to find the sore spots in those kinds of very sensitive male friendships.” He certainly appreciates Reichardt’s “New Age Western” tag: “There’s a way in which the film depicts the polar opposite of a Sam Peckinpah kind of masculinity,” Raymond explains. “In that case there’s a tenderness inside the male violence that happens; in Old Joy it’s more like a violence inside the male tenderness.”

The “violence” between Mark and Kurt is often expressed in a too-long pause or a mildly condescending retort. Often Mark is somewhat baffled by Kurt’s life. “You’re never quite sure how close to homelessness Kurt is,” Reichardt notes. “He has a transient kind of lifestyle,” something that Reichardt is familiar with. “After I made my first feature [1994’s River of Grass], I was going to make this other film, and in the course of that I just kept giving things up,” she explains. “What ended up happening was that I lived out of a duffel bag for five years in New York, just couch-hopping. It really changes the balance in your relationships with people. What I tried to get at with Kurt is that there’s a time in your life where there’s romance in that kind of transient life. And then there’s a point where it just becomes questionable. But I was also interested in figuring out what draws you to go out with a friend like Kurt—what draws Mark, who could stay home and build a crib, to go out and have a day where you don’t know how it’s going to go. But there’s obviously something in us that draws us to that, whatever draws anyone to a road trip.”

It’s clearly something Reichardt is drawn to: Her next film, another collaboration with Raymond, she sums up as “a road movie. It’s a kind of modern-day neorealist film about a woman whose finances are very limited. It’s set in the desert—it’s exciting to think about where you’re going to shoot next and what you can say about your characters just by making them deal with a certain landscape.”

Old Joy opens Wednesday 20 at Film Forum. See review.