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Back and Forth with Miss July Miranda July on "Me and You and Everyone We Know" Written by [ Richard Sharp ] "I actually came up with the movie while I was here in Chicago on the El train," says Miranda July of her recently released IFC Film Me and You and Everyone We Know which just garnered a well-deserved Camera D' Or at Cannes. "I was doing a talk at the Art Institute. And afterwards, I took a train over to a friend's house. It was about a twelve minute train ride, but and I sort of thought my way through everything during the ride. When I got off the train, I turned to my friend and said, 'I think I got it, I think I'm gonna make a feature.' It was like 'I don't have any money, but writing is free.' So Chicago does have this sort of magical quality to me." Me and You and Everyone You Know is a funny, poignant, minor miracle of a film about a cast of adults and children who struggle to conquer desperation and extreme alienation, going to often ridiculous and hilarious lengths in the hunt for human contact. Filled with a complex, insightful and slightly bizarre sort of mature hope and humor about life, relationships and sex, it has the beautiful, confident, yet emotionally fragile 31-year old writer/director's distinctive signature all over it. July is literally a one woman art phenomenon, having developed video installations that have been featured at MOMA and the Guggenheim; websites featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial; and countless live performance pieces delivered in galleries around the world. Her one-woman radio dramas have been featured on NPR, her short stories in The Paris Review and the Harvard Review, and her heartbreaking gonna-break-in-half-any-minute-now eyes have graced covers of countless culture and film mags. Then there's the acting (Alison McClean's Jesus' Son), the albums and the video chain letters (Miss Moviola). July moves at a highly-driven creative warp speed that few of us can comprehend, and even fewer could ever keep up with. Talking to her in the midst of a lengthy press tour, you get the feeling that the pace and productivity is something she most definitely needs. "My feeling right now is I'm sending a lot of energy getting used to and adjusting to things, and I don't really have the time to make things, to create things, which is sort of how I make sense of the world. So I'm a little bit of a loose cannon right now. Like my first interview of the day today, it was like the guy on every question was sort of like 'oh God, I hope she doesn't cry.' Since then I've gotten into a little more laughter and things like that." July credits her wild and varied creative efforts largely to a deliberately unconventional upbringing in Berkeley. "My parents were kind of intellectual. They run a publishing company. They instilled this idea that there are interesting people and there are not interesting people. There's interesting things and not interesting things. It was a kind of pressure that made you want to be one of those interesting people no matter what. God forbid you somehow end up being normal." Leaving Berkeley for school at UC Santa Cruz, July dropped out after a year and a half to pursue her multimedia projects and devote herself to community arts projects, like the women's filmmaking initiative Joanie 4 Jackie. "I was already doing what I wanted to do, so I just kept doing it." Work on one of her early experimental films, The Amateurist, proved particularly fruitful, and July garnered grants from several prominent national arts foundations, as well as a Silver Globe Award for New Visions from the San Francisco International Film Festival. One of the first straightforward feature films July was involved with was Wayne Wang's Center of the World, an intensely sexual film about a dot-com executive who splits for Vegas with a stripper on the cusp of an IPO. Though July got a story credit for the film, she doesn't seem to take much stock in it. "Well, I have a much bigger credit for that than I deserve. Paul Auster saw a performance I did in New York and he talked to Wayne and suggested I would be a good person to talk to since they had a script they were working on. They had a woman who was a central character. So I flew in and met with Wayne and just sort of chatted with him. You know about being a woman my age, and sex and my experiences and he recorded that. Anyway, I never saw a script and hadn't seen the movie, but one day I got a phone call from someone with the film and they asked for the spelling of my name for the credits. I was like "what is my credit?" She said, "story by." I was like, "well can I see the movie? What's it about?" So, I'm not quite sure why that happened, but oh well. We talked about doing sort of a parallel project like Smoke or Blue in the Face, but I think that's just about when I decided that I was going to direct a movie on my own. Even though Wayne and Paul are good people, I didn't want to have these men define my path, who were already established. Few artists or filmmakers have forged such a willfully DIY path, carving out an inimitable niche in multiple forms of media with meaningful, highly personal work. Yet for "Me and You…", July received fellowships from the Sundance Institute, where she immersed herself in a highly collaborative environment. "At Sundance, they don't polish up what you do, but they definitely give you their two cents on your script. Being self-taught and never even having an art critique or a mentor, I was old enough to think that 'wow, it's cool that one could get help' on anything. It's like free money or something. On the other hand, I was also old enough that I was not very pliable. I wasn't easily seduced by other people's solutions to my script problems. I got help identifying some of those problems, then I rewrote and rewrote. But a lot of it was confidence, knowing that all of these professionals thought that this was really good, they took it seriously." It's more than just the folks at Sundance taking July seriously these days. Both reviews and returns for the film have been decidedly positive despite a strange and somewhat unnerving script that is, in spots, as challenging and transgressive as a Tod Solondz film (only with a far more sympathetic narrative bent). Roger Ebert has ruthlessly championed the film and picked it as headliner at his annual Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign-Urbana. IFC has also backed the film with heavy promotions, putting the talented Miss July in an appropriately unique spotlight. "I got to the hotel room today and this must be the crowning jewel of all the press tour hotel rooms I've been in. And then I was sitting at this table staring at this Evian bottle and I looked closer and I realized I was looking at myself and John Hawkes with our heads peeking through the water. There are promotional stickers of us pasted to the bottles in this room. It really kind of freaked me out. My whole body went through this weird head rush. If I'd had a friend in the room I would have been like wha'?! I mean, I know I'm not dreaming this." < <> > Written by [ Richard Sharp ] [ Home ] |
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