Mike Mills reflects on his feelings-forward approach to filmmaking • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

There are so many great lines in the movie, but one that always stands out is “Wondering if you’re happy is a great shortcut to being depressed.” There’s so much meaning there about the things we deny ourselves, and are scared to let ourselves feel. An interesting layer, though, is that the sentiment is technically true, but my interpretation of a lot of your work is saying that yes, sometimes we can get depressed, but that’s okay because that’s honest and we need to process that shit.

That’s really funny. You’ve tapped into an actual real dynamic of my childhood and my family, where my mom was, like, “I’m depressed as fucking hell, and here’s the agreement of our family: we’re not going to talk about it.” And if you do feel depression or sadness, you are in trouble. That’s the unspoken actual geometry of my family, and I’ve been making all these films to try to say, “Fuck, it’s okay.” Like in C’mon C’mon, saying “I’m not okay, and that’s a totally reasonable response.” That’s me talking back to that mom, really. You really do repeat yourself as an interviewer, as a teacher, as a painter, as a filmmaker, and I am constantly saying it’s okay to be fucked up, right? Even in Beginners, being queer is not fucked up, but my dad felt like it was.

It’s an interesting thing, having one parent who is a closeted man and another parent saying, “We can’t even think about our emotions and the shit that we’re repressing.”

There’s an acting coach person I used to go to a lot named Joan Scheckel. I was talking about my parents, and Joan’s like, “Ah, so much self-abandonment.” I thought, “What are you talking about?” and then I was, like, “Oh, yeah. Exactly.” Due to historical pressures and the history of family and the history of emotional pressures on them, what was available to them—self-abandonment of your honest, true self or your honest, true feelings—was at the top of the toolbox to get by and to live. Then I’ve come and made these films that are about unabandoning the shadow parts of both of them. Then I showed it to all these people and now I’m doing press about it and now there’s a box set about it, right? [Laughs]

How do your sisters feel about the films? I know one of them was the basis of Greta Gerwig’s character in 20th Century Women, right? When they see your work, are they thinking, “That’s mom, that’s dad. You really captured it,” or is it more complicated?

The main thing I need to say about my sisters is that they’ve been so generous with me. I’ll tell you one story. I was at my kid’s preschool; there’s a parent there, and her father’s dying. I’m empathizing with her, and I’m telling her about my dad dying, and she goes, “Oh, gosh, you should see this movie with Christopher Plummer. It’s called Beginners, I think,” and I was, like, “Oh, I made that movie,” and she says, “Oh, that’s so weird.” I tell that story to my sisters and my nieces, and they’re not laughing. I ask them, “Why aren’t you laughing?” and they all go, “That happens to us all the time.”

I’m making that funny, but it’s not funny. I’m the younger brother by ten and seven years, so they’ve always been taking care of me. In different ways, they’ve been super generous. One of my sisters, yeah, Greta’s backstory about cervical cancer, that’s all from my sister’s lived experience. I think the thing that is harder for them isn’t the parts that may be something that they did or whatever; it’s seeing my version of [our] parents, which is different from their version of [our] parents.

Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech is featured in the film, where he talks about how “owning things and consuming things doesn’t satisfy our longing for meaning.” In an earlier scene, Greta’s character is talking about her project of a portrait through portraits of things she owns, like birth control and cameras and other objects. To which Billy Crudup says that feels a little sad, and he doesn’t know why. How did you approach that spectrum of our relationship with objects and the meaning they hold for us?

There are a few artists, Hans-Peter Feldmann and Christian Boltanski, who have done this project of taking all of someone’s objects, putting them in a museum or photographing them. I’ve always loved that, and it actually influences all my filmmaking in a weird way—that idea. I did a record cover for Sonic Youth, and I photographed Lee Ranaldo’s sock drawer and Thurston Moore’s record collection and all their stuff.

I do think it’s slightly subversive, slightly emotional, late-capitalism admittance. We do rely on these things for our identity and emotional lives. These things are a part of our lives. We do live in an object-filled world, and our curation of our objects and what we think they mean says a lot about how you can talk about us. To me, it’s not really different than what Jimmy Carter’s saying. There are two ways of saying a very similar thing. Then Koyaanisqatsi is also in 20th Century Women, which is about life out of balance. Again, it’s the same utterance.