Cara Nash
Having seen Miranda July’s charming 2005 debut feature, Me And You And Everyone We Know, which she wrote, directed and starred in, it’s difficult not to have preconceptions of what the filmmaker would be like in person. A touching comedy which explored the alienation of contemporary life, the film also revealed a major new talent in July, whose playful and offbeat style immediately endeared her to many, but also saw her garner just as many detractors, who were quick to dismiss her eccentric style as overly precious.
When FilmInk meets July backstage at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival, where she’s promoting her latest film, it’s a slightly surreal moment. Dressed in a colourful skirt and stockings, a light green blouse and a crochet scarf, with dark curls falling over her piercing blue eyes, it’s almost as if the filmmaker has stepped out of one of her movies. In conversation, July’s shy and thoughtful. She’s funny too, but like her films, it’s not in a knowing way. She’s completely sincere. But don’t mistake her for the characters that she plays. “It’s really apparent that people have a certain perception of me when I meet someone, and they ask straight away if they can hug me,” the actress laughs softly. “I never know what to say to that! It seems mean to say no, but on the other hand, they really don’t know me if they think that I’m going to want to hug a stranger! I have trouble hugging my own friends. Sometimes, I do realise that they have this whole thing going on in their mind. They want to hug Christine from the first movie, who seems so vulnerable, but most of the time, no one lets on, so it’s okay,” she smiles.
Playing Christine, a love-struck video artist pursuing a damaged single father, in the acclaimed Me And You And Everyone We Know changed the filmmaker’s life completely. But this shift to the spotlight wasn’t one that July was quite ready for. “When I think back to that time, I was newly self conscious,” she recalls. “I was learning how to handle all this attention that I wasn’t used to.” So, the multi-talented artist retreated from filmmaking for a while and worked on a handful of other projects. “I did feel pressure, and because of that, I decisively did the other things that I love to do. I finished a book of short stories [the well-received No One Belongs Here More Than You], and then I started working on a performance that eventually evolved into The Future. In a way, I tricked myself into the next movie, which was good. I never wanted to have that point when I was like, ‘I’ll now sit down and think of the next one.’”
Her latest film, which she also writes, directs and stars in, delivers on the promise of her debut. A shade darker than her first, but no less offbeat in its premise, The Future follows a thirty-something Los Angeles couple, Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), who decide to live out their dreams in the thirty days before their freedom is curtailed by the arrival of a newly adopted cat. Originally conceived as a stage performance called Things We Don’t Understand And Are Definitely Not Going To Talk About, her latest film explores that pervading sense of disappointment and restlessness that we feel when we realise that our lives haven’t panned out as we’d anticipated. “I’d burnt out the live performance aspect, but I wasn’t done with that story,” July explains. “I became very committed to Mike [Mills, director of Beginners, who July married in 2009] during that time, but along with that commitment came new fears, a new awareness of time passing, and questions about having a baby. Looking back, it’s amazing to me that I didn’t think about that stuff in my twenties, and yet it’s kind of beautiful. You get this finite amount of time to be blissfully unaware of just how short life is.” She pauses, before adding with a laugh, “Just to be clear though, my characters feel like their lives end at forty. I don’t feel that way at all.”
It’s clear that July’s in a good place in her life at the moment, but as an artist, she can’t seem to escape that small but niggling feeling of anxiety whenever she releases a creative work for people to pass comment on. It’s a notion that’s explored in the film, as July’s character, Sophie, a dancer, experiences a kind of creative paralysis. “It’s almost a self-paralysis,” July explains. “She’s put herself in a corner. That’s something that we all can go through, but we usually find a way out of it. This movie asks the question, ‘What if you don’t? What if you make it worse and worse?’ As an artist, I feel that my job is to keep finding a way out of that place: continually setting myself free and finding new ways to think about things. There are parts of me in both Sophie and Jason. Sophie is very goal-oriented and craves attention in an almost childlike way. Jason is the more meandering type who enjoys the process without knowing how it will turn out, which is the real creative process.”
Stylistically, the film contains plenty of July-esque touches, including a cat who narrates the film and conversations with the moon. It’s elements like these that see the words “twee” and “lightweight” often hurled about as insults when discussing July’s work, but what her critics often overlook is that beneath the stylish flourishes, there’s always a pulsing emotional core. Almost all of July’s characters carry a melancholy and loneliness that the director wraps in a gentle humour. “I like humour; it’s like my saving grace as a fairly anxious person,” July muses. “But often when I’m drawn to write or make art, it’s out of sadness. There’s something that I’ve been wrestling with that I just can’t resolve, or something I want that I can’t have, or some way that I feel absolutely small, so inevitably that ends up being in the things that I’m making.”
Having avoided the sophomore slump, can July see another feature in the near future, or is it back to more personal projects? “I don’t like doing everything alone, but I certainly look forward to that part when I’m writing alone,” July says. “I look at the directors that I know, including my husband, and I’m like, ‘Okay, these people really love being the host of the party’, whereas I experience major trauma just saying hello to that many people every morning. I’m definitely still finding my way. I second-guess myself a lot when I’m directing. I worry the whole time, and make myself uncomfortable. There’s a part of me that is dying to make a third movie, but that same part is thinking, ‘Oh fuck. I’ll drive myself crazy.’ But I do want to do it again, and get it right…”
Miranda July will participate in an Artist Talk titled “LOST CHILD!” at the Sydney Opera House on March 6 as part of the All About Women series of events, and at Melbourne Town Hall on March 7 presented by the ACMI and the Wheeler Centre. The ACMI will also screen The Future from February 25 to March 5.
