THE Q&A: MIRANDA JULY, FILMMAKER

Ten years ago Miranda July was riding the L-Train through Chicago when she started thinking about a character she called "Richard". She soon felt this character drawing her to the cusp of an entirely new emotional world, one more subtle than the wilfully strange zones she had been exploring in her video and performance art. It was a place she tried to map out in quick pen strokes describing the details of Richard's life: "estranged father of two boys"; "shoe salesman"; "in love with an artist". When the train came to a stop, she tossed her notebook back into her purse, stepped out into summer, and thought again about her complicated new character, as if to pull him into focus. "Wow," she thought, "my first movie."

The capricious, low-key comedy, "Me and You and Everyone We Know", eventually premiered in 2005 at the Sundance Film Festival. Months later, the film won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes for best first feature. Next, Ms July took time away from filmmaking—and its high financial stakes—to finish a book of short stories ("No One Belongs Here More Than You", 2007) and design an interactive sculpture garden for the Venice Biennial ("Eleven Heavy Things", 2009).

In January Ms July returned to Sundance with her second feature, "The Future" (pictured below), a bittersweet romantic comedy (of sorts) narrated by a stray cat. Here the filmmaker speaks to us by telephone from her home in Los Angeles.

"The Future" is one of the most talked about films on the festival circuit this year. Is it a fun time in the life of this movie for you?

Comparatively, yes. I just had my first meeting with the U.S. distributor and I realised I'm done with the movie. Getting it to people is a whole new job. As far as doing something new to get the word out, I do feel I need to to reinvent the wheel [laughs]. Because when you've put so much energy into something you just don't want to cut any corners—you want to do anything you possibly can to invite people to see it.

I understand "The Future" began as a performance piece.

Yeah, I made this performance and when I was done with it realised it might be even more interesting in a less avant-garde context. It was called "Things We Don't Understand and Definitely Aren't Going To Talk About." It was about a couple at this turning point and the woman has an affair. But there were also all these surreal things like a talking cat and the idea of stopping time and talking to the moon and also a dance I did inside a shirt. All those things stayed in the movie.

At what point did it swerve in the direction of a screenplay?

This idea felt right because I was already over the hump—I didn't have to think of an idea and this was already pretty close to my heart. But I did start out thinking it would be a lot weirder: like the actual movie would have audience participation, which is still something I want to do one day. But gradually I let go of that and was like, okay, I don't have to radicalise the medium just this second. [laughs]

Speaking more generally about ideas: tell me what happens when you get one.

So I keep these notebooks—I'm flipping through one now: in every corner of every page there's a letter, an "n" for novel, a "p" for performance, an "m" for movie, "i" for idea—a generalised idea.

An idea for an idea.

Yeah [laughs], an idea I might have one day. Unfortunately, I have an idea here that's illegible, so it's either an "m" or an "n". I don't know if this is a movie or novel. But it goes like this:

"First half is from the woman's point of view. This man is someone minor in her life. At the start of the second half you realise the minor figure is the narrator of the second half and the man she was trying to find or was haunted by."

[Laughs] Now that's kind of big concept, you know. But it seems to be a good structural idea. Though quite often the note will be one little detail, like something I overheard or some story someone told me. So I have to be alert and realise, 'oh wait, that could be a whole movie.' You know?

Some of your earliest ideas were for plays you wrote as a teenager.

The first play I did was produced at a punk club and I wasn't actually in it. I cast adult actors to play me and the other parts and I rented chairs from a church. The play was based on my correspondence with a guy from prison. So the characters were me and this inmate who was my pen pal.

How did you begin your correspondence with the prison inmate?

There was a magazine that had a list of pen-pal addresses. I picked the name at random and I was lucky I got a guy who didn't take advantage of the situation. He had been in prison my whole life and thought he would probably die in there. It was a huge gulf we were bridging, which felt important to me. It was my first conception of humanity and the idea I could go beyond my world and still connect with someone.

Is that something you felt at the time, or is it in retrospect you see the importance?

I came into it from a teenager-y, lonely, alienated place. I had a sense if I could figure out how to talk to someone in just the right way, we could break through to some more profound level of communication. It could've been anything—it could've been ESP. I think my pen-pal being so far out of my world somehow made the connection seem more possible. It's like we were achieving that just by communicating at all. At one point we stopped writing and started recording our letters on cassettes. So those had a whole different level of intimacy, sort-of pre-Skype. [laughs]

Were the tape letters your idea?

No, they were his. Typing a letter was a big ordeal for him. He couldn't handwrite it because he didn't think his handwriting was good enough. I know he would write it then he would type up the handwritten letter. He may have run out of ribbons, as well. But I remember they had to be clear cassettes, because otherwise things could be hidden in them.

I wonder how all this early experience with audio tape impacted the way you write. What's your approach to writing dialogue, for example?

That's almost problematically easy. You can just write a bunch a dialogue that has no point but is addictive. Then in the end you're just trying to do these basic storytelling things around it that feel quite clumsy.

How much do you enjoy figuring out the craft of the various media you work within?

I like it a lot. I don't like it if I think there's a right way to do it, which I tend to do more with film than any other medium. But the rest of the time, I feel it's kind of exciting. It's sort of like the tapes I made when I was six: I'm usually not inventing something new, but at the moment I think I am.

I get the feeling your creativity is, for the most part, not inspired by other works of art and comes quite purely from the way you experience life.

It's a question I always wrestle with because I've observed enough at this point from knowing other artists that I'm not actually inspired by other work in quite the same way. I'd love it if when I watched a movie I actually noticed how it was shot. But I'm watching it like a child and believing it's all really happening [laughs]. And I'm entirely concerned with only what the filmmaker wants me to be concerned with—just the story and the characters.

It's so rare that I'll get an idea from simply watching a movie. I wish I could because on a movie set you're always trying to come up with references for a team of technicians and it's pretty handy if you can say "see how 'Sex, Lies, and Videotape' is shot? Let's do that." But mostly what I get from other media is a feeling of "I can do that!" I'll see a detective movie and, instead of thinking "I'll make a detective movie!" I'll think "I could be a detective!"

"The Future" by Miranda July is currently travelling the festival circuit

~ ANDREW STOUT

Picture credit: portrait by RJ Shaughnessy (for PIG Magazine); other pictures are film stills from "The Future"