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ne of the surprise hits at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was Miranda July’s debut feature, Me, You and Everyone We Know, a touching, quirky and often comedic film that revolves haphazardly around sex, both for several kids just beginning to figure things out, and for adults rediscovering the pleasures and pains of intimacy. But no one should have been surprised — July has always shown an inimitable talent for exploring the most private dilemmas of her characters, often focusing on the challenges of finding connection despite the hidden demons and embarrassing idiosyncrasies that keep us apart.
July’s body of work is extremely varied — she’s made albums, short films and videos, performance pieces, audio art and a Web-based project that invites people to undertake random assignments designed to spark public creativity. She’s also the creator of Big Miss Moviola, a video chain letter for female filmmakers that endeared her to a generation of girls nationwide in the 1990s. More recently, July, who grew up in Berkeley and attended U.C. Santa Cruz for two years, has been writing fiction and screenplays, honing her talent with language and character detail, the keys to her enthralling narrative forays.
For Me, You and Everyone We Know, July wanted to make a feature film that really worked — not an art film, but an engaging narrative about the unlikely romance between a hapless shoe salesman named Richard (John Hawkes) and an Elder Cab driver who wants to be an artist (July). But it goes way beyond any traditional romantic comedy to become an eccentric character study of the denizens of a neighborhood, including Richard’s two young sons, a pair of precocious teenaged girls and Andrew, the older guy the girls try to seduce.
The film played in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance, and earned July a special jury prize for Originality of Vision, as well as gushing praise from critics across the country. The film will open in theaters in June. — Holly Willis
Your film deals with the sexuality of kids in a fresh way, without being patronizing or romantic. To some extent, this is a taboo area — what was it like going into this territory with your young cast members?
I didn’t feel any shame when I was writing, and when I was working with the cast, I tried not to bring a sense of shame into our world. I took my cues from them. Once I said something about the “dirty part” of the script — I was just searching for a vocabulary — and six-year-old Brandon [Ratcliff] corrected me, “It’s not dirty, it’s gross.” I have to say that Brandon was the only actor who I had to approach in a different way, because he was in a marvelous place of pre-acting, a place everyone else is trying to get back to. Carlie [Westerman], who is ten, was perhaps the wisest person on the whole set.
The film also deals a lot with relationships — and in some ways your work is often about the ability of idiosyncratic characters to connect with others.
Yes, that’s right. This also pretty much sums up my goal in life, to move beyond my own strange-feeling self and make meaningful contact. And of course one way I have done this is through my work — but the movie is also about the limitations of the creative, fantastical world. Everyone in the movie has it, they are all believers, and this both propels them and keeps them apart.
I remember an early reader told me that if the character of Andrew [Brad William Henke] went anywhere near his daughter he’d have him arrested. He suggested I end the movie with Andrew going to jail. This kind of stunned me, like somehow his daughter would be safer if this fictional character went to jail. Although I haven’t thought about this very consciously, I suppose that a lot of these characters are actually metaphors for feelings, feelings that I have. That’s the great thing about art — a feeling, like fear or desperation, can become a person, and that person, in all their fictional complexity, can have an impact on that feeling. At least in me, and hopefully in other people, too.
With work in two Whitney Biennials and the Guggenheim and an amazing body of experimental media art, what made you decide to make something as seemingly pedestrian as a feature film?
Oddly enough, when I was in high school, this is what I imagined myself doing: directing movies. I thought of all the other things I do as a form of directing movies — some of them were for the radio, some for the stage, some short, some more abstract, but all satisfying that initial conception of inventing a world. I am dying to do all of that again, applying everything I learned this year. But I also have a plan for my next movie, and this one seems really wild to me right now, wild like performance.
Also, when I made Nest of Tens [a short film], I was actually quite conscious of wanting to make something that would be like a feature. I see that movie in a really rudimentary way as having some of the same elements as this movie. It’s a very simple version of it, and deals with the same issues — adults and children with a certain amount of power, and however that’s used. And since then, my understanding of myself, why I’m interested in these things, and the people around me, as well as other people’s childhoods, has really added on, so I feel like there is a lot of people’s stories in here, you know, and that I’ve kind of breathed my own anxieties and hopes through all of them.
You’re credited with helping director Wayne Wang on The Center of the World, for which you supposedly offered advice on shooting the sex scenes — what did you actually advise him to do?
Ha! Not much. We had several long talks about sex but I’m not sure if I had any impact on that movie. Except for the fact that Molly’s character was once a car door unlocker and that was a job I had.
What’s writing like for you?
It’s very fluid. It’s very intuitive. I’ll be writing a story and have these two ideas and I won’t know how they connect and then it just seems magical to me: “Of course, he’s her son!” or whatever. And I really have faith that there is this one truth and I have these clues and if I trust them, they’ll lead me to the almost already written story.
Because of the performance part of me, I guess, with the script, I’m doing all the lines as I’m writing them — I’m saying them, so I’ll say the same line again and again until I realize how it’s said. Even something as simple as a seven-year-old saying to his brother when they’re doing an Internet chat, “What are you going to put?” That’s so simple, but writing “put” instead of “write,” just that — I really enjoy that. When I’m writing fiction, I’m reading it for rhythm a lot. I hope I can apply that to a whole movie, the rhythm — it’s very important to me for the performance, that you don’t feel bored at any point.
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©2005 Holly Willis and hooksexup.com.