Mike Mills and "What 'Film' Is" By Jonathan Marlow September 20, 2005 - 3:48 PM PDT "Film is a conversation between you and people via a screen." Graphic designer, music video and commercial director Mike Mills has made his first feature, Thumbsucker. In a wide-ranging and candid talk with Jonathan Marlow, he recalls the challenges and triumphs, confesses to an obsessive love for one film and speculates about his wide open future. JM: After meeting you at Sundance for the premiere of Thumbsucker at the GreenCine/RES Magazine "Art of Storytelling" party and again shortly thereafter at the European premiere in Berlin, I see that you've been busy. With all of the collateral material around the film - posters and so forth - obviously, you have a habit of working all the time. MM: That's the way I am. It's much easier... Actually, that's only one small part of what I've been doing. I have a first draft done for my next script, which I started just after Berlin. I have a Japanese clothing line that I did a second version of. I guess I'm a workaholic and I'm fairly prolific. In doing these Thumbsucker posters, the reason there are so many is because I have a hard time just doing one thing. If I let myself go, "Okay, there's ten," they come much easier. It's not so important, especially my kind of stuff. It's not about creating a belabored, long drawing of something. It's more of a quick idea. I showed them all of the designs and they're like, "Well, we like them all." So that's how this multi-panel doing-many-things world started. I guess I'm lucky that they embraced it rather than saying, "This is annoying." JM: All of it fits very nicely because Thumbsucker is unconventional. The way that you're marketing the film should be unconventional, too. MM: Spread the word... JM: Someone else read the book and passed it along to you. Is that right? MM: It was my friend Bob Stephenson, who's one of the producers. He didn't even read the book, he just read about it in Spin Magazine, and then I read it and... You wanted to know how I got interested in it? JM: First of all, he thought that you would be good for it. MM: Yeah. He just read teenagers, sucking thumbs, suburbs. All the kind of... Even though he's my friend, he does stereotype me. The reason it connected with me is sort of a longer story. Six months before, my mother had passed away and I was really at the time of my life where I was like, "Okay, it's time to start. It's time to start being me, doing something that's more..." I mean, I've been doing stuff that's "me" before, but trying to take that to the next level. I started writing a script that was horribly maudlin and way too serious, too heavy and way too self-pitying and all that. Bob showed me Walter [Kirn]'s book and I started to read it. I was just so fucking jealous of how authentic, real, sincere and funny it was. It didn't take itself too heavily and it opened all of these doors with its humor. At first I was just jealous. "How did he do that?" Just wishing I was a more talented person. Then I said, "Yeah," and I convinced everybody to let me adapt it. I started adapting it and I realize, "Wait... This isn't my family, this is me. I am so Justin and this is so my relationship with my mom." It became a very cathartic, very personal journey for me. All the facts with my family and me are completely different than the one in the movie, but the emotional architecture is actually quite similar. I think my unconscious kind of brought this thing to me to work out some stuff. Now this next script I'm working on is completely personal, even more about me and my family and my world... and more revealing. Now I can see it as this path that I've been on, looking back. The thing that really got me, you could just smell it was real, the book. And you could smell that it wasn't just someone fucking around with you. It was someone showing you stuff about themselves that was maybe a little hard to show, but doing it in a way that you can see the ridiculousness of life. How odd and strange and funny life is. That to me... I love that combination of funny and sad together. To me, that's the way it always happens... JM: Were you always very insistent on doing the script yourself or was it something that you had kind of passively introduced... MM: When people were first sort of showing me the book and what the idea was, they were like, "Mike, why don't you do this?" I was like, "Who's going to write it?" At first, I wasn't at all considered a writer. No one even thought of me writing it. No one even thought that was an option. I hadn't proven myself at all. So when I started, luckily, Bob Stephenson, my friend and producer, was totally behind it and helped me very much in the writing of it. He was my main first editor. That's why it wasn't financed at the beginning. That's why it had to be done for free for a couple of years. No one thought that was a good idea at all. I think it's from doing music videos, where you come up with your ideas. To me, coming up with your own ideas is perhaps the most important part of directing. To not write something that you know is going to be so important or to not adapt something that you think is going to be so important... Why? How is that showing you as a director? JM: It would take away from your investment in the entire project? MM: How could you invest if you're not integrally involved in the creation of the idea that you're going to be shooting? How can they be separated? A part of my brain can't understand how you could direct without writing it. JM: And yet, you were initially considering the project thinking someone else might write it? MM: Well, no. I was being approached. It was just my friend Bob and me; we're not like a company or anything. Bob hadn't produced anything before. The conversation was between me and Bob. JM: This was what year exactly? MM: Around 1999. JM: After you finished Paperboys? MM: I did Paperboys after. Part of the reason that Paperboys was shot in Minnesota was because the book was set in Minnesota. I just happened to do it in Walter's hometown, by accident, in Stillwater. So part of Paperboys was research for Thumbsucker. Everything I did from 2000 on is actually research for Thumbsucker. Every camera choice on every video and every commercial Joaquín Baca-Asay, my DP, and I worked on, we were like, "Okay, what are we going to toy around with now?" Lots of the things didn't actually end up in Thumbsucker, but that's what made all of those projects interesting to do. We were sending ourselves through school. JM: How much of an influence has RES been in getting you out and finding an audience? There's a kind of look and feel behind - not just you and the rest of the folks at Directors Bureau - but everyone associated with both design and filmmaking in a way. I don't want to call it a "school" but, in a way, there is a relationship. MM: RES has been huge for me. It's weird. Being a graphic designer, you kind of work in isolation and you're alone. Even when the work's out in the world, it's very alone. As graphic designers go, I've had a very celebrated graphic designer-ness. I have shows and people know about my stuff. It's a largely anonymous world. Then RES showed Deformer, one of my very first films. It's about [skateboarder] Ed Templeton. I don't know when it was, but a long time ago. 1998, 1997, something like that. Then you go see it in a room full of people and you learn, "Oh, this is what 'film' is." Film is a conversation between you and people via a screen. I'm still learning that. I really learned that at Sundance this year, which was crazily emotional for me. Shockingly so. Part of me really doesn't like Sundance at all. The hype of it, the business and the industry and, as a director, preparing for Sundance, it's the most nasty, stupid bunch of arguments you're ever going to have in your whole life... "You need to be driven in a Hummer from the premier to the party where Snoop Dogg's playing..." "What? I'm not going to be driven in a Hummer. Why is Snoop Dogg playing the party for Thumbsucker?" All these fights like that, and you're like, "I hate this." JM: [RES Editorial Director] Jonathan Wells and I discussed these issues while we were preparing for the GC/RES party. It all seemed to increase in levels of insolvability. MM: Then you have your first screening and something magical happens. I would love to not have liked Sundance, but something magical happens with the audience that they're able to provide for you. All these people go... People really do go to Sundance. I didn't think that they did, but I met them and they do go. It's like this incubator from when you were born to being out in the world. It was really intense and RES was the kind of building block of that and it continues to be. My relationship with Jonathan and all those people... I always think of it like what you said, from the outside it must look so lame that I'm always in RES. RES has been so nice to me. I would hate me and them if I wasn't me. I could taste that. next >>> Index "Film is a conversation between you and people via a screen." "I've purposefully disassociated my 'design-self' from my 'film-self.'" "I'm really into surprise and corruption of purity." "I just got so hypnotized by that film." "I don't have a lot of hopes for the system." back to past articles

Jonathan Marlow In addition to his persistence in acquiring obscure films for GreenCine, Marlow is a writer, filmmaker, curator and occasional critic. Not necessarily in that order. He is also a dedicated skeptic. February 6, 2007. Mark Savage & the D.I.Y. Aesthetic by Jeffrey M. Anderson February 3, 2007. Seeing the Humor in Sexual Identity by Michael Guillen February 2, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Five - The 1970's by Eddie Muller January 29, 2007. Smokin' Aces with Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven by Sean Axmaker January 26, 2007. Include Me Out: Interview with Farley Granger by Jonathan Marlow January 25, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Four - The 1960's by Eddie Muller January 19, 2007. Charles Mudede: Zoo Story by Andy Spletzer January 19, 2007. Mark Becker: Merging the Personal and the Political by Sara Schieron January 19, 2007. Micha X. Peled: The Lives of the Sweatshop Youth by Hannah Eaves January 16, 2007. Djinn: A Taxi Driver Dreams of Perth by Jeffrey M. Anderson view past articles