Becoming Mike Mills: Inside the Two Decades and Unexpected Path Leading to ‘Beginners — IndieWire

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

Becoming Mike Mills: Inside the Two Decades and Unexpected Path Leading to ‘Beginners — IndieWire | AIPROPX

Because those three films are so autobiographical — " Beginners " is based on Mills' father coming out at age 75, " 20th Century Women " is about his unconventional upbringing in Santa Barbara with his mother — and accomplished works, they've come to define his filmmaking career. But spread over the Criterion discs — each featuring one of the three headliner features — are the director's lesser-known shorts, music videos, documentaries, and interviews, which paint a fuller picture of his development into that critically acclaimed auteur. In a longer interview with IndieWire, Mills went deep on his pre-"Beginners" career, and how he went from post-art school East Village graphic designer to finding a passion for documentaries to music video director, along with a discussion of how his next film will be a diviation from his prior work, why the box set is called "I'll Remind You of Everything," and how doing the box set helped changed how he saw his own career. Related Stories At 24, John Singleton Became the Youngest Director to Be Nominated for an Oscar — and He Only Got Better Criterion Channel's December Lineup Will Help You Survive the Holidays

IndieWire: Starting with "Beginners" (2011) we know your work for its strong autobiographical roots, but the biggest take away I gained, as a fan of your work, from spending time with the box set is your evolution as filmmaker over the 15 year leading up to that film, and in many ways I found that to be more revealing in understanding and appreciating your work. So, just to start with, can you bring us back to 1996, when you graduated from art school at Cooper Union, and how "Deformer" [a 2000 short documentary about skater turned artist Ed Templeton] came about?

Mills: I graduated earlier, to be honest, like '89, '90. So "Deformer," I'm so glad that's in this box set, because that's the second thing I ever made.

I went to art school. I studied with this man named Hans Haacke, who was a big conceptual artist, and really trained everyone to get outside of any concept of art, like painting and sculpture being the only thing that art is. So a lot of attention and energy around entering the public sphere, not just living in the rarefied bubble of museums and galleries and that world. So, we all graduated with a passion for that. That led me into doing graphic design. I did a lot of record covers. I worked for Tibor Kalman at M & Company [a New York-based graphic and product design firm], and I was trying to bring an art level [laughs] of rigor or pretension to that world, and knew I wanted to keep going, or I wasn't done somehow.

And I had seen a lot of documentary films. I was a huge fan of Charles and Ray Eames' short films. I taught a class on them at Cooper Union.

Mills: Yeah. But they're pretty weird. They're really experiential.

They get categorized as educational, but that doesn't really give a good sense of what they are.

Mills: Yeah. And in a weird way, like the little essays in "Beginners" or "20th Century Women" are kinda Eames-y. I didn't go to film school. I wasn't like a film nerd. I did see a lot of films in art school in the Friday night free class, where you see all your typical — like I saw "8 1/2" and [French director Alain] Resnais and all those things. But then I saw, "The Thin Blue Line" [ Errol Morris' 1988 groundbreaking documentary], and I was like, "Oh, I could do that," because it had this essayistic quality, and this observational quality, and this meta quality about the filmmaking itself, and it was still very visual, it was a visual argument, and so with all those things I just remember leaving the theater saying, "I could do that." Not as good as Errol Morris, but like it was a door.

And then I was living in New York City in the East Village, and in the '90s if you lived like around Third and A, you would see freaking Jim Jarmusch all the time , at the coffee shop, just everywhere. And me and my roommate were like, "Oh, we're in an unmade Jim Jarmusch film," because we're largely unemployed walking around trying to figure ourselves out. You know, "Stranger Than Paradise," "Down by Law," if you're not a filmmaker and you look at those, you're like, "Oh, I could relate to that kind of acting. I could relate to that kind of filmmaking." That's doesn't have all the Hollywood verisimilitude.

So it was those two things that got me going, like, "Oh, maybe I can enter this world." But it was totally by my own gumption. I just started asking every band that I was doing record covers for if I could do their video. I did one for John Spencer Blues Explosion. I did one for Frank Black, and then I did "Deformer" because I'm an old skater, I know Ed from skate culture from Alleged Gallery in New York City [famed art space founded by Aaron Rose known for bridging the gap between the art world and skateboarding, graffiti, zines, and independent art in the '90s], and I come from Santa Barbara, he comes from Huntington Beach, it's a very similar kind of like cult of happiness that isn't true [laughs]. And so I knew what Ed was talking about, I knew what his artwork was about, like deforming this false happiness, this false comfort, and I just went for it. But I had zero idea of what I was doing. And it's weird looking back at it how so many moves in it I still do all the time, like all the portraits, all the objects. The sort of like lyrical essayistic, but it doesn't have like a Brechtian distancing, it's trying to get close, but through kind of French New Wave-y methods.

There's an element of Ed being a product of Orange County, there's something almost visual about the conformity, and him being a product of that, almost him and his art being defined as being counter to that — and there's something about your exploration of how you captured that, that we would see further develop in your latter autobiographical scripted narrative work.

There's something there with a portrait of a person in his space, and how the conflic...