An Interview With Mike Mills, Writer-Director of ‘Beginners’
"Beginners" is the second feature from writer-director Mike Mills, who previously made "Thumbsucker" and the little-seen-but-definitely-worth-it documentary "Does Your Soul Have a Cold?," a look at how Japanese culture views depression. His wife is "The Future" writer-director Miranda July, and like her film "Beginners" is a touching, insightful grappling with how relationships work in your 30s when you're too old and wised-up to believe in the promise of storybook romance anymore.
"Beginners" comes to DVD today, and a second viewing reinforced all the things I liked about the film the first time. As the central couple, Ewan McGregor and Melanie Laurent are just right as two sensitive, vulnerable, artsy souls trying to give love one more try. But the film is as much a story about loss, with McGregor still reeling from the recent cancer death of his father (played warmly by Christopher Plummer) who decided to come out of the closet after the death of McGregor's mother a few years earlier. These family details come from Mills' own life, which gives "Beginners" an emotional intimacy that never once trips into mawkishness. Ultimately, "Beginners" is about how the search for love is often a struggle to make peace with the demons of our childhood, and Mills poignantly illustrates this by the seamless back-and-forth transitioning between the present (McGregor's relationship with Laurent) and the past (McGregor's relationship with his father).
This is a quiet but very affecting romantic drama, and I was happy to talk to Mills a little about the process of making an autobiographical film, what it's like being married to a fellow filmmaker, and how he decided on his ending. If you haven't seen "Beginners," watch out: There are spoilers in this interview.
Because the movie's very autobiographical to your own experience with your parents, was there a worry about exposing all those memories to an audience? Did you have any hesitation about that?
Oh, yeah. There's lots that isn't in there for that reason. There are moments that, for whatever reason, I just didn't feel like it would be good to put out in the world. And also the film naturally edited itself: I knew I wanted to make it about love and relationships. But the weird thing about grief, for me at least, was when each of my parents died, for a year or two afterwards I was pretty wildly brave -- just willing to take life on. I remember feeling, "This is the best chance I have to tell a real story about human beings that's deep and impactful. So I'm going to go for it." Maybe I was a little self-serious at the time, but I was willing to take all that on. "F--k it, I don't care if I get killed." [laughs] "I don't care [if] people tear this vulnerability apart. This is my best chance to really say something real, and I'm gonna do it."
It's funny because the Ewan McGregor character (Oliver) is the same way in the movie: He risks being unabashedly genuine. It sounds like he's like you in that you both had to be brave enough to be vulnerable and honest with your feelings.
In the fire that I was at the time that I made ["Beginners"], I didn't care so much about that. [laughs]. I didn't even see how much I was doing that. Weirdly, Ewan is very much like that, and I didn't know. Ewan is an incredibly sincere person who's willing to make himself vulnerable. That's part of why I cast him, but I didn't know how much he was willing to just be like, "I'm gonna be true to what I think this person's feeling. I don't care if I'm a movie star, I'm just gonna let it hang out." And that's what's pretty amazing about his acting. It's very subtle, but it's very emotionally strong 'cause he's really feeling it. He doesn't fake it.
You've said before that Oliver and Anna (Laurent's character) aren't based on your relationship with Miranda July -- instead, those characters represent different elements of you. I'm curious which parts of each character you're talking about.
When you make characters -- even when you're trying to make the most complex character -- there's still so much less [there] than a human has, you know? So it's like one small suitcase of everything in your life that you can make a character out of. Oliver and Anna are definitely pieces of me that you kind of just run with, and you take out some of the other pieces and just run with these three [characteristics] instead of the ten that make up you. And they're not me and my wife, although being in love with my wife made me really sensitive to how crazy love is, how it brings up all these things you don't want to deal with and don't want to talk about, and how all your ghosts come up to the surface when you're in a real intense love. It's not anything that happened with us, and Melanie's not Miranda at all. But I can think of so many people that I know -- friends, men and women, people of my generation -- that do those kinds of things in relationships that are my age and younger. And so I did feel like I'm writing about our generation a little bit. I kind of needed that to write it 'cause -- this probably sounds very hypocritical -- but I don't really want to write about myself. I want to write about us -- things that I can share, things that I feel unite me with other people.
I'm sure that making this movie helped you learn things about yourself and your past, but did promoting it do that as well? Did you learn anything from talking to reporters about the movie?
Six months into the writing process -- which took me three or four years -- you've already gone through a lot of catharsis. You've had some realizations or you see things a little differently or you're just more aware of this or that. Like, I wasn't aware of quite how irreverent and funny my parents were until I started really writing from their eyes. They would have this weird gallows humor. But by the time you've written the film, gone through pre-production, shot it and edited it, the learning curve for the director is largely over. [laughs] But then sharing it with people, that's a whole wonderful trip. For me, that was a lot about, "Wow, you can say really concrete, personal, specific things and images and they communicate. People really get it." So that actually was very heartening and very educational. This [movie] was a bet I was making. I didn't know if it was gonna work, and it worked. A lot. [laughs] You know, there's lots of people that, I'm sure, don't like the film and it didn't connect, but I was impressed with how much it worked. And that was more what I got out of it [than] what I got out of the interviews.
Did you always know that the film would have these two storylines going on at the same time?
I knew I wanted ... Me and my dad were having these brand new kind of radical, much clearer, more informative discussions about relationships and love -- straight relationships, gay relationships, my generation, his generation -- than we ever had when he was a straight man. I knew that that was the turf that was really alive in me and made me want to make a movie. I didn't know what I was doing -- I didn't know if it was gonna be animation or a documentary. But I started writing memories, and I started writing about our kind of generation gap, different ideas of what you can ask for in love. It was really was about history, and how much history shapes our ideas. So I would say like three or four months into it, I knew I was writing these two strands.
But it's not just these two strands, of course. You really feel that the present and the past are both there inside Oliver at the same time -- and that one keeps feeding into the other.
And that's what memory is like, especially grief memory. You're just walloped by images and memories and things that you were just talking about with this person. They fill you, and in a lot of ways you're more in the memory than you are in the present -- especially, I think, in that first year. And especially with my dad. My dad's experience is so radical -- five years of this new gay dad who's totally different, then all of a sudden he's sick, and all of a sudden he's gone. That was a lot to absorb. For the movie, I wanted it to be not like flashbacks. I wanted it to be more substantial, like to have its own life. That's why I made it mostly in order. You know, like even the dad's story, it's told in order, so it would have its own emotional build so that it would feel more like a real film in itself.
Seeing it a second time, I was struck again by how little emphasis is put on the fact that Oliver's father is gay. In other movies, I can imagine that being a major element, but in "Beginners" it's very matter-of-fact, which I'm guessing was intentional.
When my dad came out, there wasn't a problem with him being gay. Sometimes there was a problem with him being, like, so sexually horny, being 75. Like, "Whoa, who is this guy?" But there wasn't an issue about him being gay. So it just felt true to me in my experience. And I liked making a film about a guy who comes out -- a dad who comes out -- but in a way that it's not a big issue.
The movie ends on a very ambiguous note with Oliver and Anna wondering aloud where they go from here. It's a hopeful but far from certain ending. Was that always your intention or had you come up with a more concrete ending earlier that you ditched?
I remember when I was writing [the script] ... you know, when you're writing, you're struggling. I remember I had different endings. But they were always kind of around that [idea of being] ambiguous. And so early on I kind of knew I was gonna get there. Who knows exactly if they're gonna stay together? But they're gonna try. That was my ending: The end is the beginning. That's kind of part of what led to me naming it ["Beginners"]. That's something kind of real for me, and I'm sure my film could be much more real and unsentimental, but I didn't want it to be this totally resolved ending for that couple. You know, we did shoot them kissing -- that last shot of them together, in the next frame they start leaning in and they kiss. And that kiss was a little too neat and pat for me. It resolved it too much, so I cut it from [before] they kiss.
"Beginners" is a great L.A. movie in that it captures a side of Los Angeles -- specifically, the Eastside -- that you don't see a lot in film. Was there a certain L.A.-ness you were aiming for?
If you ask me, the place that a story happens is as equal character. It's almost like an ecological viewpoint: These people are living in this piece of land, and in this piece of land in this time this is possible. For me, I almost think location first. It's time first -- what year is it -- then where are we, and then who is in it. So to me it's of primary importance. And then because I live here I'll be writing and then I'd go to the L.A. River, and I love the L.A. River and so it makes its way into the script. Or I discover Moonlight and that'll make its way into the script. Or I discover bookstores. And so it is all these things that are true for me and make sense together. You know, the dad lives in Los Feliz, Oliver lives in Silver Lake, she's downtown at the Biltmore, they go on a date to Elysian Park, when Oliver's driving on Sunset he's driving the right direction. To me, it's kind of like "Manhattan." In "Manhattan," do you remember the scene that starts off they're at that gallery, that building that had like four stories of galleries in Soho? And it totally makes sense that that's what [the Woody Allen character] would do on a Saturday. And then they're walking on, it looks like, West Broadway and then they're at Dean & Deluca. And it hugs the film. You know, it hugs the story and makes it have a texture and reality that are super-important to me. So I was trying to do an L.A. "Manhattan."
You just named one of my favorite films of all time.
Yeah, it was super-key for "Beginners" for me -- it's really amazing at combining very real emotional things while being very funny, and it's basically a talking film that's super-visual. It really hides its dialogue-driven-ness in that amazing Gordon Willis photography. That really influenced the whole dad part of my story. It was also big for me in trying to get money. [I'd say] "It's like 'Manhattan.'" And people were like, "Oh, OK."
Because you and Miranda July both make movies, I'm curious about much you discuss what you're working on with the other person.
We talk about things but not as much as I think people would think. We met each other -- I was 38, she was 31 -- and we were [already] kind of set-up in the way that we work. We love each other's work, but we're very different in the way we work and what exactly we're after. I think from the outside we probably look really similar maybe, I don't know. But from the inside, it's like, "Oh my God, she's so different from me." That's what I love. But it's not like we're sitting here ... Of course, we can worry and complain and hope and fear out loud to each other throughout the day. But she read my script, like, twice over the three or four years it took me to write it. She looked at an edit twice. And probably the same for me to her. Miranda is for me not work. She's life outside of the film, outside of directing, outside of writing. You know, let's go get ice cream, let's go for a walk, let's do anything but talk about filmmaking.
