Auteur Miranda July talks innocence, Me and You

Miranda July’s debut feature Me and You and Everyone We Know has gotten rave reviews worldwide, winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the prestigious Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, a delicate, touching and funny exploration of the human heart, is being released throughout the summer by IFC Films. Recess Film Co-Editor Brian McGinn caught up with July while she was in Los Angeles.   RECESS: So how did you get the film made? MIRANDA JULY: Well, I wrote it and then I went to the Sundance Labs [the filmmaking institute in Utah]. I applied three times and got in on the third time; that was 2003. I went to the… lab in June of 2003, and there I met Gina Kwon through one of my advisors. She became my producer, and we sent the script everywhere and had a million meetings and tried to get financing for it for about nine months. Then we worked out this partnership between Film Four… and IFC and the summer of last year, we started shooting. R: Wow, it obviously had to be disheartening to take so long [to find funding]. How did you stay focused during that period? MJ: Well, it’s actually an insanely short time to get financing. [For] most people it takes years or at least a year, so we were pretty lucky. But, you know, I was rewriting the script the whole time and making it better. We knew we would make [the film] that summer regardless of how much money we had. I mean, we were prepared to make it for $200,000 if we had to, so it was just more like constantly not knowing what level budget we would have. But I never thought: “Oh, I’m never going to make this movie.” I’ve been making things with so little for so long that that’s just not where I’m coming from. R: You’ve been doing a lot of Q and A’s after screenings and talks and stuff. Have you had the chance yet to just walk by a theater, see if it was playing and just go buy a ticket and sit in the back and watch people’s reactions? MJ: I keep meaning to do that, I want to do that. Yeah, I mean, my friends joke about what kind of disguise I might wear when I go. But yeah, I was in Santa Barbara last weekend, and I kept saying, “We have to see if it’s playing here!” because it would be perfect to go to some town that’s not where I live and see how its going across. R: You’ve talked before about how innocence is to you kind of like an art form, and it really seemed to me that was so evident in this film, in every character there was some element of innocence at some point. MJ: I don’t know if I meant it then, but I would say that it starts with staying innocent as you’re writing it, which means to not be judging yourself while you’re writing, and to not be necessarily thinking of the world that already exists, but instead to just let yourself create that world. I mean, that’s kind of, that is a discipline. Anyone who’s e-mailing and making phone calls and interacting—that’s not really a very innocent [thing] in the way that I’m talking about it—it’s hard to bring out the more fragile or subtle parts of yourself, and you kind of have to work to protect that [innocent] place and certainly protect it enough to create a whole movie that lives in that place. R: You talked about discipline in regards to keeping yourself grounded while you’re writing—staying outside of the “normal” world. How hard was that for you, when you have a background in creating pieces that expand on reality while keeping true to real emotions? Does that come easier to you now? MJ: You know, this movie was much more completely grounded in reality than anything else I’ve ever made, except for maybe some short stories, so… there wasn’t an external influence, but [it] was me wanting to use the best of what making a movie has to offer, which is a wide audience. And it’s—at least with your first movie—maybe not the place to completely show [all of something]. If you’re going to try to show something magical the best way to do that… is through daily life, instead of literally getting abstract. So that was a particular discipline for this movie: to stay grounded in daily reality and not give myself the kind of freedoms that I do with my performance work or sound work. R: There was an essay that was published last year by Alexander Payne [Director of Sideways] about the state of independent cinema and of the country as a whole. It talked a lot about how people go to the movies to find out things about themselves, who they are, where they’re going and where we’ve been as a society. Did you write to elicit a feeling of self-discovery in your audience and yourself? MJ: I don’t know. I mean, that could mean so many things, I know what I love is to go see a movie or a band or read something that just makes me feel like the world is relevant to me, and that makes me want to make things. I wanted to make a movie like that, that gives people more space to be in.