Mike Mills: ​‘Film­mak­ing isn’t ther­a­py for me, I don’t cry on set’

Mike Mills’ new film, 20^th Cen­tu­ry Women con­cerns the lives of three Cal­i­forn­ian women in the late 1970s. Here, the writer/​director talks can­did­ly about the process of recre­at­ing real peo­ple on the big screen.

“20^th Cen­tu­ry Women is all based on real peo­ple. Dorothea is based on my moth­er, Abbie’s char­ac­ter is based on my sis­ter and Julie is based on my first girl­friend and a bunch of oth­er girls that would sneak in to my bed­room at night. I was raised in a matri­archy. Dad was around but he wasn’t real­ly present. So I had this very strong moth­er, these very strong old­er sis­ters and so I kind of grav­i­tat­ed towards women. In a way it feels very nat­ur­al. It feels more nat­ur­al to me to write female char­ac­ters than male char­ac­ters. A lot of my emo­tion­al­i­ty or my true inner life is real­ly easy to trans­pose on a female char­ac­ter. Actu­al­ly writ­ing them is a lit­tle trick­i­er. And try­ing to be right and try­ing to be aware of my lim­i­ta­tions as a het­ero­sex­u­al, cis­gen­der male guy, I can’t real­ly have the life expe­ri­ence of my mom and all these dif­fer­ent people.

“I wrote Begin­ners when my dad had just died, so I had a lot of fresh mem­o­ries. My mom died in ​’99, so the mem­o­ries were much more pas­sive. For her I had to just study all these ​’30s and ​’40s films because that’s what she watched. It real­ly brought her back, because she had that kind of anti-author­i­tar­i­an humour that all those women had back then – just wise­crack­ing all the time. She was very Hawk­sian in the way she spoke. And very Bog­a­rt, too. She said all the time, ​‘In my next life, I’m gonna mar­ry Bog­a­rt.’ Then I kind of realised my mum is Bog­a­rt, she was very butch and had a lit­tle trans qual­i­ty to her. She want­ed to be a pilot, was a con­trac­tor, nev­er did any­thing feminine.

“I involved my sis­ter, Meg. She helped in the recre­ation of my moth­er. She does real­ly great astrol­o­gy read­ings where she gets like the exact time of your birth and does your whole chart. Annette Ben­ing [who plays Dorothea] and my mom are both Gem­in­is and I found that real­ly inter­est­ing. It all sounds a lit­tle new age‑y, but what is film but a very long mag­ic trick? And I find it help­ful to be alive to the mag­ic that is in act­ing and that comes from fill­ing your film with real objects. Annette wears my mom’s jew­ellery, lays on my mum’s bed­spread, stands in front of my mom’s paint­ing. I do feel like that enchants the whole space.

“As a direc­tor I’m try­ing to feed my actors and I’m not very pre­cious about it. I’m like, ​‘Here’s this sto­ry, here’s this object, by any means nec­es­sary for you, Annette, do what­ev­er you like, run with it. The things that don’t relate, that don’t feed you, don’t wor­ry about it, you’re not mim­ic­k­ing my moth­er. I’m just try­ing to enable and help you and give you some­thing you can con­nect with. Some­thing that stirs your soul.’

“The names have a peri­od qual­i­ty to them. There are cer­tain names that are pop­u­lar in dif­fer­ent times. If you were born in the ​’20s there were a lot of Doroth­eas. But then that’s very specif­i­cal­ly a ref­er­ence to Dorothea Lange, the pho­tog­ra­ph­er. In Begin­ners there’s a shot of a hand hold­ing daisies, and that real­ly is my mom’s pho­to and that’s a Dorothea Lange pho­to. So it’s sort of like a per­son­al tie from that movie to this movie. It just fits her real­ly well, like her kind of mas­culin­i­ty, the sound of the name. Like William, I feel like William has a soft­ness to him and sort of like an old fash­ioned-ness, and it’s both the name, the peri­od and just the actu­al sound of the word. I think it real­ly is important.

“Hav­ing your par­ents die rel­a­tive­ly ear­ly and all the issues of hav­ing a gay dad, they prompt a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ties to speak about all this stuff and to analyse it. I find it empow­er­ing to just talk about. I write about per­son­al mate­r­i­al because I feel like it’s my best shot at mak­ing a good movie. It’s my best hope to deliv­er a unique and authen­tic com­ment on what it means to be a human. I’m not try­ing to make a mem­oir. It’s not ther­a­py. I’m hap­py to put very per­son­al slant on things because I feel like it charges the film, and the films I love tend to do things like that. In a way I’m just kind of emu­lat­ing Felli­ni, and ear­ly peri­od Woody Allen.

“I find that per­son­al stuff has a charge to it that com­mu­ni­cates to strangers. It’s often the most con­crete, spe­cif­ic stuff I put in my movies that ends up being the stuff peo­ple talk about. I don’t cry on set. Actu­al­ly, I cried on set a lit­tle on this one just because the act­ing was so great and I love shoot­ing so much. But it’s not ther­a­py for me and I real­ly don’t want it to be, ​‘Peo­ple all over the world please watch me have ther­a­py’ you know. I’m afraid of that.”