Mike Mills has built a career and an aesthetic out of finding moments of quiet vulnerability, usually the type of things people would be too embarrassed to even acknowledge, and presenting them as totemic evidence of the world's beauty. With his latest film 20th Century Women, he's outdone himself, and not simply because there's a hilarious and strangely moving scene where Greta Gerwig's character turns a dinner party into a treatise on the importance of not getting freaked out by the menstrual cycle.
Mills got his start working in New York's hippest galleries and doing videos and graphic work for the Beastie Boys, Pulp, and Sonic Youth before graduating to filmmaking with his 2005 debut, Thumbsucker. In his 2010 follow-up Beginners, he told the story of his father coming out of the closet late-in-life; Christopher Plummer won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the role.
20th Century Women, which has earned Mills an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, tells the story of Mills' mother, a loving but inscrutable person whose unconventional approach to parenting includes exposing her son to feminist texts and trying to appreciate the music of Black Flag.
Starring Annette Bening as his fictional mother, Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning as stand-ins for his punk-loving sister and various female friends, and newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann as a young Mills, 20th Century Women is rich with naturalistic performances, oddball humor, and the music of the Talking Heads. Through the use of Mills' signature mix-and-match approach, the film tackles everything from dismantling the patriarchy to the war between hardcore punk and New Wave to the difficulty of truly understanding anyone.
Mills opened up to Esquire.com about why he couldn't be too precious about his past, his love of mixed media, and how having a child with his wife, filmmaker Miranda July, influenced his approach.
[youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JnFaltqnAY&t=11s[/youtube]
Even though Mills' last movie, Beginners, was based on his father, he didn't feel like he had to make 20th Century Women to keep his mother from feeling left out.
There's a character in Beginners who is loosely based on my mom, too. So I had a moment of her. My mom really is a wild character, and Beginners really just gave me the taste of working with personal material as a way to make a movie for strangers. Some of the most personal, unexplained, concrete details about my dad's coming out that I put in that movie, really communicated the most universally, in my experience of touring around with the movie. And I enjoyed that. And I love it when other filmmakers do that. It's my favorite kind of movie.
It just sort of emboldened me, and I had the scent of "oh, there's a lot to my mum, and my mum really is at least as much of a story as my dad." And also Abbie, who is also based on my sister—she had cervical cancer and went to New York—a lot of the facts about her are based on my sister. And [Elle Fanning's character] Julie is based on all these girls I knew as a kid. So, I just like that process of things I've observed, almost more of a journalistic approach, of combining fiction with real history.
No one in the cast felt weird that they were essentially playing important people in the director's life.
I'm the host of this weird party, and one of the first things I have to do as a host is really de-preciousize it all. I'm never asking anyone to mimic anyone. I tell the actors stories about these people, but always with the caveat: "Just use what's interesting. We can't get precious about this. Use what helps. We're making a movie. We're not doing therapy."
And Christopher Plummer and Annette Bening—they have such chops and experience. They're totally fine being in that situation. The kid in this movie has my biography, but I purposefully cast someone who doesn't look like me. I'm not interested in having someone recreate me.
It wasn't painful to watch such personal, emotional moments from his life play out again on screen.
I'm sure I got my heart broken a million times, but there's nothing really unique or really particular about that. But the last line in the movie, about how I'll never be able to explain my mom to my son, that's incredibly personal and real.
Sometimes, I'll see the end of the movie and think, "Holy shit, that's in the movie. I thought that was just in my head." Or towards the end, "I thought that was the beginning of a new relationship with her, but maybe that was it. That was as close as we ever were." I can still feel shame about not having a better relationship with my mom, and I'm surprised that I said that out loud. I do feel like when you get to that place of embarrassment or revealing something you're not comfortable with—that's often the most potent, best stuff to share.
He's a sincere artist who makes sincere art. He's not too concerned about cynical, snarky audiences who dislike his work.
That's their right, obviously. My first job was at McDonald's, and the thing they taught me there is, "The customer is always right." So I can totally understand that. And even people that aren't super snarky and emotional-phobics will find me too sincere or just not like it, and that's totally fair game. If someone is super snarky about something I made vulnerable about myself, that's their karma. That's fine. That's the game.
He's married to an iconic feminist artist. Tackling feminist issues and a female perspective in this film felt important, but he was cautious.
I definitely don't want to let Miranda down. For the feminist part of the question, as a cisgender, heterosexual man, the most I can be is a decent ally to feminism and to women that I love. And this film and my feminism really comes out of being a son and a brother. My mom and sisters were really the ones who tried with me, gave love to me, and raised me, and whom I adore. I witnessed a lot of their struggles as women with men, with the patriarchy and with so-called sexual liberation, which could be this extra burden on women. I feel like I was privy to so many conversations because of the structure of my family.
I'm definitely worried about writing this as a man, writing about a woman's experience, and trying to build into it... I love it when Julie says, "This is your version of me. That's not me." I was trying to do that in the script—show his limitation.
But then there are times when I am talking from a woman's perspective. I interviewed a lot of women, like my sister. I tried to use as much of her voice as I could, and I encouraged Greta to interview her, and they had a different conversation, one more about sex. My mom is kind of trans in a weird way. She's very butch. She's a mystery to me, because she was a secretive person. When I got stuck with her, I watched a lot of films, and I felt like Humphrey Bogart was the biggest help. I think my mom really modeled herself off of Bogart. So weirdly, that man helped me get my mom's voice right.
He doesn't like to identify as a feminist.
I don't think I can call myself a feminist. I can call myself a male ally to feminists, and it's not up to me say if I'm actually achieving that or successful at that. That's up to the women around me and the women I'm accountable to.
What is feminism? It's a belief that women are at least equal, and deserving respect, and there's systemic power plays going on in the patriarchy, right? I grew up in a matriarchy. It didn't call itself feminist, but it was a very woman-centric world and a woman-empowered family. My dad was gay, and he never really took the mantle of the patriarchal figure in the family, so all those dynamics and power plays are a little askew.
Becoming a father helped shape his writing and his vision for the film.
My son was born premature, so I experienced some of the issues and complexities of it. And Julie's sister has cerebral palsy, and those are things I've come across as being a dad. Everyone has issues with pregnancy. Pregnancy isn't an easy thing... It's a completely natural, beautiful thing, and it can also be a complex thing. I was really happy whenever I was talking about pregnancy in my writing. I felt like it was central. That and clitoral stimulation and sex from more of a second-wave feminist perspective, or my best attempt to make it more from a woman's perspective. The whole thing is risky. And I'm sure there are feminists who don't want me to call the movie 20th Century Women.
Shampoo and Harold and Maude director Hal Ashby is a major influence on his work.
Well, I love Hal Ashby, and I was just hanging out with Warren Beatty. We were talking about Shampoo, which was interesting. I know him through Annette, obviously, and I'm lucky enough to get to hang around him. God, he's just got the most amazing stories.
I love in that movie that Nixon is on the TV. It just historically contextualizes the movie in a way that movies don't do, usually. Usually, the Hollywood movie formula is to take a movie out of time. I love that he makes it specific. Even in Harold and Maude, there's an anti-war protest. It's very subtle, and it's woven into the fabric of the mise-en-scène. I definitely love that. I think my movie isn't just a letter to a time that's gone; it's about how all of our times slip out from under us. Our personal biographies and our futures surprise us, and our big societal futures surprise us.
I do feel like [Ashby was] trying to create a space where there is a little more wavelength for this emotional vulnerability stuff. I felt like he was doing in a '70s version, but I definitely feel like my emotional vulnerability and willingness to make that part of the movie is indebted to how much I love Hal Ashby films.
Jimmy Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" speech plays a role in the film—not just to ground it in the period in which it's set, but also to establish the theme.
It's so fucking perfect. It's so perfect for describing the period, the themes of the movie, the sense of crisis that was being felt then. It's really hard to explain to people that there was this crazy vacuum of meaning, and it's in the speech—but not in the movie—that he said, "We thought we were the country of the ballot, not the bullet; we thought the Presidency was a thing to respect until Nixon; we thought we were a country of right until Vietnam." [He was saying] some crazy, maybe non-America things and admitting certain shortcomings. It's very profound and beautiful. When I read the speech, I just had a hunch that I can do my favorite thing, which is to transpose or mix-up the personal and the historical. I got the sense that he can be describing my character's crisis of meaning and crisis of who they are—how can I be me and free and alive right now?
Even though the film is set in 1979, it's more about the world today.
I finished editing it in the spring and the summer. I changed part of the Carter speech to include "we've lost respect for government." That came in response to Trump. But before that, I wanted to make a movie that wasn't a nostalgic trip backwards, but showing the seeds of so many of the things that are alive now. I feel like [the Talking Heads'] music is so relevant right now, so I foregrounded them, and I was always picking things that relate to them. I feel like the way that they wrote about feeling overwhelmed by what we then called "mass media," the way they felt overwhelmed by the fracturing of the family and the fracturing of all these things... I mean, little did we know about the Internet.
I felt like 1979 in a lot of ways was the beginning of now, from the Islamic revolution to the energy crisis and our changing relationship to oil and the Middle East to personal computing, the music that was happening, so I was excited to make that linkage.
His previous film earned Christopher Plummer an Oscar, and he's nabbed his first for Best Original Screenplay for 20th Century Women. But mainstream fame and fortune was never his intention when he started out as a visual artist.
Well, it wasn't my goal to get an Oscar. I went to art school at Cooper Union in the '80s... and we (my friends and I) started to think that the art world wasn't enough. It was too rarified and moneyed and too talking to an insider group. We all wanted to be artists, but is the art world too much of a closed circuit? We wanted to be in the public sphere. We were pretentious. So I started doing graphics and something outside of the art context. And the goal, really, was to be a part of popular narrative or popular discussion, to have a seat at the grown-ups table, in terms of culture.
So having that exposure and validation… that helped my weird movie about my gay dad get a seat at the mainstream table—a tiny seat. I felt very honored by that, and very lucky. And Christopher Plummer had an award coming. I thought he was very good in my movie, but it's Christopher's award.
