Connecting with Miranda July
Words: Holly Willis
Photo: Autumn de Wilde
"I don't think the whole poop thing is really grabbing people."
So said producer Gina Kwon to first-time feature director Miranda July, and she was probably correct: excrement definitely inhabits an in-between zone. Necessary? Yes. The stuff of interesting artwork? Sometimes. The foundation for a feature film pitch? Uh, no. Better to focus on the stars. Or the unusual plot. Or an emerging artist's exceptional promise. Financiers are an uptight bunch after all, a fact that July, an experimental filmmaker, video artist and musician, learned the hard way when she and Kwon began taking July's first feature film script, Me and You and Everyone We Know, to investors.
"My pitches were getting weirder and weirder as we tried to accommodate the realities of everyone we talked to," July says. "It's not an easy movie to describe...."
In person, July crackles with a fierce intensity that seems at first to emanate from her clear blue eyes. But at the same time she seems entirely ethereal, like she could drift away at any moment. She's sitting in what used to be her living room in a small bungalow in LA's Echo Park. It's early summer, 2004. On one side of the room is a pale green wall and on the other, a few even paler green sheets that shield the windows, keeping the space serene and cool, even as the hot sun beats down outside. Six wooden folding tables with six telephones neatly divide the stark room into workstations that, during the coming week, will be filled with busy crew members and interns. On one wall, 13 neatly hand-lettered envelopes indicate studio departments: location, art, costume, camera, and so on. Everything is tidy. Efficient. Ready for the intense conjuring of July's magical artmaking. Production starts next week on the film, and July is aflutter with nervous energy. Spying a drooping lavender plant ("It was supposed to soothe Gina," she explains), July plunks it into the bathroom sink where she can soak its dusty soil, then settles down to talk about the movie.
July took her producer's advice regarding the poop. She didn't use to take advice, mainly because she wasn't doing anything that could be construed as advisable; nobody had really done what she did, and rather than prompting guidance, her activities more often provoked people to scratch their heads and marvel. In 1997 she produced her debut album 50 Million Hours a Mile, which features a series of fictional stories told in her tremulous voice. The Binet-Simon Test album followed a year later. July also created the Big Miss Moviola project in which she invited female moviemakers to send in their short videos; she'd send back a compilation tape with nine other shorts by women as a video chain letter. And she made videos herself. In Atlanta, she plays both characters in a story about a girl swimmer hustled into competitive sports by an overbearing mother. The Amateurist counts as one of the strangest shorts ever, with July playing both a devoted analyst and the object of scrutiny seemingly being studied via a surveillance camera in a short film about numbers and obsession. July's uncanny ear for language and her intense embodiment of her characters mark her films as singular achievements.
And then there's her performance work, combining video, sound and July's own concentrated presence. And her audio work -- the Whitney Museum, for example, commissioned a piece called The Drifters, a series of short dialogues and monologues that entranced the 2002 Biennial's unsuspecting visitors as they floated up and down on the museum's elevator; it was hard to disembark because you didn't want to leave the stories behind. And then there's her collaboration with artist Harrell Fletcher, Learning to Love You More, in which the pair posts "assignments" to a Web site, inviting people to do odd things that, perhaps, unleash moments of creative inspiration. Assignment #43: Make an exhibition of art in your parent's house. Assignment #38: Act out someone else's argument.
The stories July tells often center on youths, and the time in life when boundaries between the self and the world are still fluid, when who you are gets prodded and poked into some respectable form. Many of her characters are kids squirming under the weight of their parents; some are girls and some are boys. All become uncomfortably real. July also favors stories about slightly odd characters, people desperate to transcend their own complex psyches in order to find ways to make meaningful contact in a world that feels alien to them. How do you connect with others, in spite of the idiosyncrasies that make you you?
These are the questions that drive Me and You and Everyone We Know, a project that collects all of July's diverse talents into a new constellation.
"One of the things about the time it took to get the money for the film was that that was time that I couldn't just make it," says July. "I've written things and performed them the next week sometimes, but while I was waiting all that time for financing I was making the screenplay better." She hastens to add that she still honors improv and a quick pace, but the long haul of the feature film let her sink into a project in a new way.
Another lesson learned was the value of collaboration. For the first time, July had extensive feedback on her project, and she figured out ways to accept what worked and reject what didn't, all while honoring that slippery thing called intuition. As an example, she talks about working with her cinematographer, Chuy Chavez. "There were certain conversations early on that we had that made me realize that there were a lot of differences between us but we had a certain feeling about our art -- we kept saying to each other, 'This is a really weird idea that is horrible so I don't think this is what I want to do, but...' And then we'd say the thing. And this to me was so experimental, so much from a really important place."
That "really important place" may be the key to July's particular genius. She taps into something so intensely internal, and then shows it to us in all its strange, weird glory. And while seeing what she has to offer can be deliciously peculiar, at the same time the experience is infused with empathy. This is certainly true of Me and You and Everyone We Know, in which the characters in a neighborhood collide, repelling and attracting each other in a series of encounters. All of the characters -- from the hapless, recently separated shoe salesman (John Hawkes), to his new love interest, an Elder Cab driver and struggling artist (July), to various kids just figuring out the basic elements of sexual desire and life in general -- are at once intensely idiosyncratic and yet entirely identifiable.
Further, July takes taboo and transgressive subjects -- like the "poop thing" shared inadvertently between a child and an adult who meet online -- and makes them complex and significant, not scandalous or titillating. Taken out of context, there are other moments in the film -- a clumsy blowjob, self-immolation, explicit sexual overtures made to a pair of adolescents -- that should be incendiary, especially in a conservative American culture, but they're depicted with a benevolent acceptance of human foibles that prohibits knee jerk outrage.
While July is often celebrated as a queen of experimental media, her feature film was lauded at Sundance not for being unusual or strange, but for being a great movie. Does this mean July will be Hollywood's next filmmaking darling? Probably not. She describes her next project as "really wild, wild like performance." But she definitely has one part of the Hollywood act down: "The question I'm most commonly asked these days is, 'What's your next project?'" she says. "By that people really mean, 'What's your next script? And will it have stars?' I just lie and say 'yes.'"
