“This has already happened to everybody all the time.”
Writer and director Mike Mills wrote these words on an index card when scripting the autobiographical feature Beginners. He needed to avoid self pity for the losses he experienced and then processed for his film.
Starring Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer, the new indie comedy is heavily based on the life of its creator. In the film, the parents of Oliver (McGregor) were married in 1955. Mills’ own parents were married in 1955. In the film, 75-year-old Hal (Plummer) comes out of the closet to his son Oliver and dies a few years later. Mills’ father also embraced his homosexuality at age 75 and soon thereafter died of cancer.
North by Northwestern sat down with Mills for a roundtable interview. The filmmaker and graphic designer talked about artistic influences, his father and the relationship between art and life.
About five years passed between your first feature Thumbsucker and Beginners. How have you changed as a filmmaker?
I got older, obviously. At least for me, getting older and getting braver have gone a little hand in hand. I used to be quite shy and conformist. For this film, to do those history sections — I’ve always loved that kind of stuff. I never had the brains or the nerve or the bravery to get it in a film. I love thinking in graphic terms, thinking in drawing terms, having sort of documentary aspects, having narrative aspects and blurring that all together. I think I did it the most I’ve ever done it.
This did come at a really specific time. I was in grief after my second parent died. I think that makes you kind of crazy and brave in a weird way. It made me really want to be me. I’ve loved The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the book [by Milan Kundera], since I read it when I was like 19. This film to me is really indebted to that. It has all the same modes. But it took me this long to finally do something that I feel like is a real expression of how important that book is to me.
What are your personal beliefs or opinions on the relationship between film and consciousness?
I’m trying to depict Oliver’s mental process, which is partly me, and I’m definitely really interested in interior lives. To me, that’s all there really is. The exterior world that we see and interact with is really our dream or a representation that we’re reading and interpreting. The film on a deep level is questioning what is real, and that word comes up a lot from The Velveteen Rabbit [references] to showing these pictures of the sun in 1955 and happiness in 1955.
You just specifically referred to “Oliver’s mental process,” and with a movie this autobiographical, people tend to talk about the movie in terms of you. How similar are you to the character Oliver? How do you respond when people blur the distinction?
I did a kind of crazy thing, so I get that people are inclined to do that. We all know that all fiction is really a documentary of that author. I’ve done it quite explicitly here. All the stuff with the dad, I went through all that. The job as a graphic designer, I’ve done a lot of that stuff. But if you just saw the film, and you meet me, Mike, the longer you spent with me, the more you’d be disappointed, the more I’m different from Oliver.
Oliver is just one sliver of me that I turned into a story, and when you turn it into a story, that’s already one abstraction, one untruth, one distillation. And then Ewan plays it. That’s another transformation. Ewan’s much more handsome — his charm, his spirit, psyche and soul. If anybody else played it, the Oliver that people see would be a different person. Obviously there’s a lot of me in it, and also, it’s not me. When I see it, I don’t think that’s me.
What effect did making the movie have on you personally?
People often ask if it was cathartic, and I had to go look up that word. I know what it means, but to me, cathartic means a cleansing or resolution. You got it out of you now. It’s not like that. Having your parent be gone, every year I have a different perspective. I’ll cry about something I’ve never cried about before. I’ll be happy about something I’ve never been happy about before. It’s an ever-changing, unresolved relationship that continues.
In Beginners, there is Oliver’s relationship with his father and also his relationship with Anna (Melanie Laurent). What do you see as the connection between the two?
From the get go, that was the story to me. It was about people trying to figure out how to love and how to stay in love. That conversation was one that I was having a lot with my dad when he came out and before he passed away. The film is really a continuation of that conversation. It’s Oliver figuring out how to love Anna, and his memories of his dad’s love, both his marriage and his new gay life, are the two of the main models or influences. I describe is as a two-way street: the memories of his father are teaching him how to love Anna, and the love he’s having with Anna is making him be more sympathetic or more understanding of what happened with his dad.
With the fractured chronology and the vintage jazz music, I was very much reminded of Woody Allen’s films. Was that a conscious influence? Were there any other artistic influences as you made this film?
A ton of influences, and Woody Allen is one for sure. Annie Hall, Stardust Memories and Manhattan. Amazing naturalistic, organic acting, and it’s quite funny. The fractured chronology comes more out of The Unbearable Lightness of Being or [French New Wave filmmaker] Alain Resnais. It’s very [Jean-Luc] Godard to me. Godard will talk in many different voices in one film. It’s like a collage, and I love Robert Rauschenberg. That’s been one of my great loves since high school, the idea that you’re taking all these pieces of life and putting them together.
How do you make a movie for an audience that is also very personal?
To me, the best way that I can figure out how to do a movie that’s really for an audience is by using concrete, personal details. Things that are very authentic and specific that I know and can report on intimately. That authenticity is what will make it communicable to strangers.