Michelle Williams on 'Showing Up' and why Oscar rivalries aren't a thing in Hollywood: 'It isn't what I experience with my peers'

Sometimes, artistic success looks like trips to glamorous exhibitions and awards shows like the Venice Biennale or Oscars, complete with a champagne-colored carpet and a wealth of celebrity guests. But for another class of artist, success more commonly resembles a public showing of your latest work attended by family and friends snacking on a shared cheese platter.

That's the version of an artist's life depicted in Showing Up, the latest collaboration between filmmaker Kelly Reichardt and Oscar-nominated actress Michelle Williams. The Fabelmans star plays Lizzy, a Pacific Northwest-based sculptor trying to balance a dull day job with her true passion as she readies to premiere her sculptures at a local gallery. It doesn't help that her landlord and fellow artist, Jo (Hong Chau), is enjoying the kind of success she'd like to have.

"I wanted to show the process of working everyday and fitting art into life when you're also managing other things," Reichardt tells Yahoo Entertainment during a joint interview with Williams. "The film is about what it means to make work if you don't necessarily have an expanding audience, but you're still compelled to get up and do it every day. That's the hardest thing for any artist — the success of feeling like you did a good day's work."

Williams is only days removed from attending the Oscars herself — she was among the nominees for Best Actress for her role in Steven Spielberg's autobiographical drama — when she joins Reichardt for this interview. "I'm not entirely sure how to think about [the Oscars], because it just happened," the actress says when asked about whether events like the Academy Awards might give aspiring artists at home unrealistic expectations of the kind of success to expect as they pursue their own careers.

But Williams does note that in contrast to Lizzy and Jo's testy relationship, the supposed Oscar rivalries played by the press or on social media aren't necessarily felt by the nominees themselves. In the run-up to this year's ceremony, for example, the Best Actress race was closely dissected by outside voices breaking down the "competition" between Cate Blanchett and eventual winner Michelle Yeoh. And on Oscar night, a clip of Angela Bassett's visible disappointment after Jamie Lee Curtis was named Best Supporting Actress quickly went viral, with Twitter declaring that the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever star was "robbed" of a win. (Chau was also in the audience, nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Whale.)

"Luckily, I don't think that's what it feels like from the inside," Williams says about the public compulsion to frame the Oscars and other awards shows as a competition between artists. "It feels like being in a room full of people who share a common love, and that's the energy that exists actor to actor. If it appears like a competition, that's maybe what it looks like from the outside, but it isn't what I experience with my peers. I experience a lot of warmth, friendly feelings and support for each other's work."

In her own career, Williams has made a point of alternating studio projects like The Fabelmans and Venom with the kinds of low-budget independent movies that are Reichardt's stock in trade. The duo first collaborated on 2008's Wendy and Lucy, and later re-teamed for Meek's Cutoff in 2010 and Certain Women in 2016. Where Lizzy has to hold down an office job in order to make her art, Williams realizes she's fortunate to be able to make acting her "main hustle" so to speak.

"It feels very much integrated into my life," she says. "I don't work all that often because of having small children. [Williams has two children with her husband, Thomas Kail, and an older daughter from her previous relationship with the late Heath Ledger.] There's always a sense of anticipation and curiosity about what might come next, and then you spend so much time preparing than actually shooting for certain things. So acting doesn't feel that distant from the rest of my life."

Reichardt, meanwhile, alternates filmmaking with a teaching position at Bard College in upstate New York. (In an interview with Variety last year, Williams noted that the director receives health insurance via that job rather than through the Director's Guild of America due to the infrequency with which she makes films.) "I like teaching and I like where I teach," Reichardt says when asked if, in an ideal world, she'd be able to devote herself to her art full time.

"Many teaching situations can be really draining," she continues. "I have taught in places long ago where I felt beat down. Being an adjunct is really hard. But I'm now fortunate to work in a place that gives me a good energy. I love my colleagues very much, I enjoy working with the students and I get enough time off to make films. So it hasn't been a drag for me. It's certainly not as hard as digging roads."

Both Reichardt and Williams agree that Lizzy's main conflict isn't self-doubt about her artistic abilities. (All of her sculptures seen in the film are made by Portland-based sculptor Cynthia Lahti.) And the director says that the character even finds some solace in the "big black hole" of her office job. "There are small daily rewards connected to her job, and it puts Lizzy in a community that drains her, but also feeds her," she observes. "The things that are your struggles are also the things that can end up fueling your work."

Reichardt also thinks it's important to distinguish between "doing work" and "having a job," recalling that the latter didn't necessarily require the former when she was starting out. "My idea of being a young artist and coming to New York was always being broke, but that you'd have a lot of time to hang out and talk. And making art requires a lot of hanging out and talking about things with your friends. In today's world, rents are so high everywhere and I don't know how young artists today deal with it, because making your rent can take up so much of that time."

While it's often assumed in some circles — like Fox News, for example — that all filmmakers are part of an elite class removed from everyday concerns, Reichardt says that paying the bills and securing health insurance are and always have been major topics within her sphere of artists. "Those conversations take up a lot of space," she admits. "[Novelist] Jon Raymond wrote the script with me, and we kind of made it in our backyard. These are all places we're familiar with, and Lizzy and Jo are kind of a mixture of people we know. So it's a depiction of the world I live in."

"But let's face it," Reichardt adds. "It's a privilege to be able to have a life that's about making stuff. I'm sure there are a lot of people doing other things who would like to be making things. And if some people, like Jo, can spend more time working on their art than they do at a job, then that's a good situation."

Showing Up premieres Friday, April 7 in theaters.