by FilmInk Staff
In C’mon, C’mon, from writer-director Mike Mills, Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, one of those nice guys no one thinks to give a second look. He’s kind of slubby, a bit downbeat. Every so often there’s a spark of wit, and even, when challenged, a twitch of anger, quickly taken back. He’s childless, lonely, but his job takes him round the States, and out of himself.
Johnny is making a radio documentary. It’s about kids. He asks them what they think about, well, important things… and they give him the kind of unfiltered honesty kids are expert in.
When his estranged sister Viv (Gaby Hoffman) hits a crisis, Johnny’s job merges with his family-life. She asks him to take care of Jesse (Woody Norman), her boy, a smart but kinda weird eight-year-old while she sorts out her marriage.
Uncle and nephew end up on road trip and Mike Mills puts a unique serio-comic spin on an unlikely friendship.
Like his most recent movies Beginners (2010) and 20th Century Women (2016), C’mon, C’mon, is semi-autobiographical. Yet here, Mills achieves a spellbinding emotional atmosphere. The day-to-day rituals of work, play and child-rearing and their pressures are never trivialised or romanticised, and the film earns a genuine warmth.
Shot in New York, Detroit and New Orleans in a beautiful monochrome, an infinitude of subtle greys, by Robbie Ryan, Mills told FilmInk this week, that he sees the film not as an essay on ‘friending/parenting’ but “a fable.”
Below he talks about what that might mean and the making of the film.
Filmmakers are often accused of pretentiousness when they elect to use black and white. Here it sets the mood so perfectly it’s hard to imagine the obvious alternative.
“Oh, I’m totally pretentious. [Laughs] Some of my favourite movies are in black and white and I always wanted to use it. We shot using a colour sensor; but on set we never saw the image in colour.
“The idea was to create a contrast. There are two strands in the film. One which is about the documentary that Johnny, Joaquin’s character is making and that’s a real documentary. Like all those interviews with the kids, they are all real kids, all the answers are true, and we filmed them in their homes and schools.
“Joaquin had to do them as interviews; he was quite good at it, but he was very wary of the power differentials when you interview someone.
“We had thirty-seven shooting days. It took from October 2019 till the end of January 2020. We had a lot of breaks because we had to keep moving to these different cities
“It was good to have these breaks for my kid actors – I did not want to overheat that person.”
The idea of the intergenerational relationship; not necessarily surrogate parent/child is pretty primal, isn’t it? It’s also an established tradition in film, tv, and literature, drama?
“That’s another strand…That’s about the kids and the adults and it’s an ancient image. It’s a fable, like a story book.
“To me black and white takes you out of reality and into story. It’s not reality, it’s about reality. That was something I was interested in and never done before. I put ‘Clair du Lune’ (by Debussy) on the soundtrack [to emphasise that].”
The film never positions Johnny as a ‘possible father’ to Jesse; a key to that is the casting. Where did you find Woody Norman?
“We found him in just the normal way through the casting process. Which was quite a miracle. He was ten when we were shooting. He’s from London. So, he’s doing an American accent the whole time. Without a dialect coach or anything.
“People would ask me, ‘what’s it like working with a child?’ and I’d joke: ‘You mean Joaquin? Gaby?’ [Laughs]. He wasn’t really different to direct than the adults.
“Woody is a very solid person. He knows what he thinks. He super knows what is true for him. He has a deeper rudder than what I do in some ways. A very confident young person. He was super intelligent, and he understood everything we were trying to get to in the film. He wasn’t afraid of Joaquin which was kind of amazing. He was very funny, as funny as Joaquin.
“They had a great partnership and that’s one of the things I did as a director. I encouraged that partnership.”
The film is very ‘lived in’. The situations, the dialogue has the surprise of real-life. There’s one bit where we discover that Jesse likes to role-play as an ‘orphan’.
“It definitely comes from me and my kid. It comes from a lot of my experiences parenting.
“But being a parent, you are around a lot of smart mums and teachers and adults who are really good at trying to get and give, kids, full respect.
“These people, they see kids as developmentally different but not less than you. Their concerns, their worries, their needs aren’t less than yours. I find that quite revolutionary if you take that seriously and try to be fully empowering and embrace the fullness and individuality of each kid… it’s quite a thing. And we are really trained not to do that, as adults.
“So that’s a big theme.”
Yeah, in a way that’s Johnny’s journey, isn’t it? He’s struggling with the generational barriers of responsibility and care and all those ingrained obligations because his first impulse is to give Jesse respect and space… Meanwhile he’s under the influence of Jesse, and that resets his emotional responses… and all this is captured in a very unhurried way, with no fake ‘plot’
“I’m not a super iconoclast. I don’t want to make people unhappy. I’m not that punk.
I like it when people like my movies. But I guess I am doing it to my timing.
“I’m a person who works out to Satie piano music, right? So, I’m pretentious and I’m slow. [Laughs]
“But I enjoyed having some space and room in a movie. It is set to how I like to see things, and the pacing is like a human pace but I’m not trying to make a big statement with that [technique].”
The film very much feels like anything can happen. How do you achieve that?
“I really love to discover as we go along. I really hope I’m discovering as I go along or getting smarter about my project or getting deeper about it. On the floor [shooting], I don’t want to be too cold and locked into something I wrote a year ago.
“Hopefully it’s growing, progressing and I’m really open to actors messing with the lines or playing and I want their full authorship and self in there in the film.
“We’re obviously trying to get away from clichés and tropes and the actors were all about making things unpredictable. I had a great team mates to make that kind of vibe.”
A few US critics seem to think that the film is a statement about the ‘perils of modern parenting’…
“Well, I feel like whatever the director intended is one of the least interesting things about the film. It’s the least important. It has no real bearing on how the film should be seen. Everyone who has seen the film is as much an author as I am.”
C’mon C’mon is in cinemas February 17, 2022
