Interview: Miranda July

From the July-August 2011 Issue

Also in this issue

Balancing Act By Tony Pipolo

Suffer the Children By Scott Foundas

All Movies Great and Small By Amy Taubin

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After you finished your previous film [Me and You and Everyone We Know], you said in the press kit that you had no urge to make another film. You did a book. Moving from project to project is sort of an art-world way of looking at things. You played some other roles. How would you describe your relationship to cinema, specifically, in terms of your other identities?

Oddly, it’s what I’ve wanted to do the longest. In high school I didn’t think I wanted to be a performer, I thought I wanted to be a director. I thought of my early performances as live movies, in that they would have been movies if I could have figured out the technical aspect at the time, which I couldn’t, being only 18. Directing is the big thing for me. I think the other aspects came much later. At least fine art and fiction; that stuff came after, but film was at the root of everything I wanted to do from the beginning.

Living in Los Angeles last year I took a class with the opera director Peter Sellars. Something Peter was always talking about was what he called, “the night journey” in the sense that it’s at night, lying awake in our beds, perhaps looking at the person lying next to us, that we are faced most clearly with the anxiety of our own existence. Your film has this “night journey” feeling, night as the mise en scène of failure, paralysis, and mortality. But then, on the flip side, your persona is also light and quirky and spaced-out. It’s uneven.

I know what you mean. I think people who know me would probably say that’s very me. I take everything very seriously and am willing to move into darkness readily and fully. But even though I feel like that’s part of what I’m supposed to do, in another way I’m kind of silly. That’s the other side, which is getting a kick out of really simple things, like words, or faces, or almost anything. I like to think that’s my saving grace. There’s no end to how light things can be. During moments making the movie I remember thinking, “This is stupid, I have some really ridiculous stuff in here,” and it’s confusing because a lot of the material comes out of a darker place. But I can’t go straight toward darkness. If I go straight toward it and make, say, something like a Michael Haneke film, I know I’ll miss the mark.

I read an article recently in which you mentioned liking Haneke.

I’m definitely a fan. He’s one of those people who makes me think, “This makes what I’m doing look really dumb.” But it’s probably better that I’m not like that in my life. I don’t have his matter-of-factness; I can’t get there without the humor, without the everydayness, even if I’m trying to get to a more painful, almost wordless place.

You sort of have the face of a silent actress in your two feature films. There are some funny lines, but you don’t use verbal zingers so much as image zingers. There’s a plasticity to your comedy, which is more like European absurdism.

Can you give me an example of European absurdism?

There are images in your film that are visually comic in the way that certain images from Godard are visually comic, rather than verbally comic. Like when you have the short lady open just the upper half of her front door for Josh.

I’m not the most educated film buff. Some people said certain things were like Jacques Tati, but I had never seen any Tati. Then I did, and I was like, “You’re right! I love this!”

Well, there is a Miranda July rhythm. You move through the film at a pace that is your own. Hamish Linklater (who plays Jason) even seems to have some of the same mannerisms as the character of the older brother played by Miles Thompson in Me and You and Everyone We Know. But if you think of filmmakers that have a certain touch, that auteur thing, they inevitably get the question, which you yourself raise in the film: “Is this or is this not my cup of tea?”

I’ve always come up with names for all the people in my movies and books. They’ve always been characters in my mind. But it’s true in these last two movies—and I’ll be damned if I do this again—I play a woman that is very much like me. In other things I’ve made, which people haven’t seen, I have played characters that aren’t like me at all. I remember thinking, “Why aren’t I playing one of the women in my short stories who aren’t artists, who are in no way trying to make something?” I guess it’s that girl, who was in the first film, and who’s not really me, but is me, who has had a big impact on my life. I can’t get away from her.

Hamish has done a lot of Shakespeare. Did that have an effect on your approach?

I was always thinking, “This is not about realism, it’s about rhythm, and that resonates with my own touchstone.” By the time I shoot I have absorbed the lines of each individual character to the point that there’s only one correct way to do it. This can be problematic for everyone, myself included. It’s a big part of why it ends up feeling not totally natural, but I find it appropriate.

In the film it feels “the future” is the time when the two characters will treat each other a bit more compassionately. But we’re set five years prior, before Sophie and Jason reach “real” middle-age, at which point we imagine they will have settled again out of fear. In that sense, the older character of Joe (Joe Putterlik)—the man in the moon—he feels more substantive, because of his age, and because you can read his pain

When I was writing the script I was focusing on Hamish’s character, and then I took a break and started interviewing people selling stuff out of the penny-saver classifieds. The idea of meeting strangers who didn’t have computers was something I had on my mind. Also, I was thinking how in L.A. you never brush past anyone outside of your own world. Just to prove it could be done, I told myself it was okay to go outside of my social sphere.  I interviewed 13 people and Joe was one of them, and afterwards I thought he should be in the film. But we (Hamish and I) knew he was at the end of his life, and he died at the end of last November after the shoot. So that changed everything. It’s a challenge; how do you work a real person into a fiction and then back out again. In the end I gave a clumsy version of Joe’s mortality to Hamish’s character.

Often when people have affairs it’s because they want to get out of their bourgeois relationships, because they want to rebel. In your case, your fantasy is…

[Interrupting] . . . to get in.

Exactly. Your fantasy is more middle-class than the situation you’re escaping from. You’re dreaming of a barbecue in the valley and ice cream in bed.

Well, it’s as though Sophie has a little too much time on her hands and she calls up the void within. You can have an existential crisis, where you can’t do the thing that you set out to do, and so you look for the first opportunity to break up with yourself and get away from the identity you had planned. In Sophie’s case, to not have to face this void is to be watched all the time.

On the one hand it’s totally narcissistic, and on the other hand it’s contemporary. The endless live feed of voyeurism seems to be the main way our society fills its free time. 

Well, it’s a handicap and a blessing. Most directors in the independent film world are making works about themselves, but they have various ways of hiding it. I like movies where it feels like the person had to make the movie to make sense of their life. It’s awkward and kind of uncomfortable, but the pleasures are huge. I’m living and dying up there. It makes it a little bit less like a real movie and more just like the thing that I’m doing.