Mike Mills had a pretty typical childhood for a creative, misfit-type kid growing up in Southern California in the 1970s and ’80s: skateboarding, punk rock, art school. By the mid-1990s, he was a graphic artist with a penchant for groovy hipster minimalism,
designing posters and album covers for the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, and Cibo Matto. By the late 1990s, Mills was making music videos and showcasing his short films at Sundance. His 2005 debut feature, an adaptation of Walter Kirn’s coming-of-age novel Thumbsucker, suggested the first step towards a sort of Indie Cinema 101 career: a little quirky, a little edgy, a little brainy and sensitive, a little shoegazy and dreamlike in its approach in favoring vibe over storytelling.
Then Mills decided he wanted to make a movie about his dad. His father was a closeted gay man who came out very late in life, then passed away at the age of 80. He mined his own experiences and interactions in the story of a thirtysomething graphic designer wrapping his head around familial dysfunction, life disruptions, grief, love, and mortality. He approached the story in a way that was certainly personal, but wasn’t straight-up autobiographical. It was affectionate, authentic, unflinching, tender but not overly sentimental or twee. It won Christopher Plummer an Oscar at the age of 82. It was called Beginners, and suddenly, you felt that everything Mills had been doing up to that point — all the underground culture and art school influences, the love of clean lines and 21st century retro deco cool — had given way to something far more open and unique without altogether abandoning the work that had made his name. Welcome to the cinema of Mike Mills.
Three movies later, the 60-year-old former skaterat and Cooper Union graduate has established himself as both a humanistic filmmaker of the first order and a genuine original. He’d be the first to tell you that he had not set out to chronicle his family life, starting with his dad (Beginners), moving to his mom’s story (20th Century Women, 2016), and eventually tackling his own feelings around becoming a father (C’mon C’mon, 2021). Nor did he envision these films as being connected in any sort of way, other than the fact that somehow reflect and refract his own life while giving actors like Plummer, Ewan McGregor, Annette Bening, Billy Crudup, and Joaquin Phoenix some of the best roles of their careers.
But as Mills sits in a conference room in the Criterion offices in downtown Manhattan, a stone’s throw away from the famous closet, he’ll admit that they “make a very nice triptych. I wrote them in in a similar style, and now it feels like I unconsciously made them feel like they’re of a piece.” I’ll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills collects that trio of films, along with a handful of Mills’ early shorts like Deformer (1996) and his music videos for Air (“All I Need) and Talking Heads (“Psycho Killer,” featuring a beautifully unhinged Saoirse Ronan), in a way that lets you chart Mills’ evolution and connect the dots. Mills may feel more than a little humble about getting the Criterion Collection box set treatment. The set also demonstrates exactly why he deserves it. (It’s available to purchase, online and on shelves, now.)
At what point did Criterion approach you about putting together a set around those three films?
It was around the time 20th Century Women came around; they were talking about potentially doing a Criterion release for that. But then the conversation turned into, “Oh, Beginners and 20th Century Women, they kind of go together.” And then later, after I made C’mon C’mon, they reached out again.
I had no intention for those three films to be seen as connected. Each one of those films was a gigantic mountain I had to climb, and had no idea if I’d be able to make the next one. So there’s no way you can plan that. But just because of the nature of my writing, I think they ended up being a very nice triptych. Kim [Hendrickson, the set’s producer] was the one who had the idea of, “How can we expand it?” She knew enough about my work to know how important the music videos and the short films are to me. I kind of adhere to an Agnes Varda model: the duration of the film doesn’t equal its importance. The shorts are how I became a filmmaker, and often I don’t know, just some of my favorite things as well.
It’s interesting to see this stuff together as the as a whole, instead of just the sum of its parts. You look at Deformer next to C’mon C’mon, and you can see they came from the same person…
I hadn’t watched Deformer in a long time. That was the second thing I ever made — I didn’t know jack about what I was doing. [Laughs] But when I rewatched, I was like, “Oh, it’s all those same moves I like to do now. A lot of portraiture, a lot of objects as an important context and framing for a person, a lot of how a sense of place defines a person. It’s basically all my films in miniature.
You love a good inventory.
[Laughs] I like a good list. I trust a good list more than I trust a dramaturgical arc. Dramaturgical arcs are manipulation. A list is just sort of a list.
You’d played in punk bands, went to art school, designed album covers — you had a number of creative outlets. But you’ve also said that the idea of making movies was like going to the moon.
Right. I knew people who made skate videos. But it was like, ok — how do you actually do it?
At what point did you start thinking “Not only do I want to make movies, but I can make movies. I could actually do this?”
When I was going to school at Cooper Union, everyone was very interested in how to get out of the rarefied art world, how to get into the public sphere, how to not just be encased and encoded in sort of art-theory stuff. But I went there to art school to be an artist. Filmmaking was just not a world I knew about. I did see movies by Fellini, Antonioni, and all these things that continue to influence me today. But those films was also just very far away, even if they were artistically more interesting to me than something like Jaws or Star Wars.
Then one afternoon, I saw The Thin Blue Line [the Errol Morris true-crime documentary] on the Upper West Side. I was 27 years old, and I remember walking out of that and saying, I could do that. Because it’s so essayistic and so like a list. Also I was living in the Lower East Side, going to Kim’s Video — I’d go to the Godard shelf and just work my way through it from left to right. Jim Jarmusch was a big influence as well; I used to joke with a friend of mine that we were living in an unmade Jarmusch movie, because we unemployed and living in the same neighborhood you’d see in his films.
And I did have sort of a weird gateway drug in the form of Spike Jonze, who I knew through skateboarding and the Alleged Gallery. I met Lance Accord — who’s now a director but he was just a cinematographer at the time — in this very random kind of New York way, and we ended up doing an EPK for Frank Black right after he’d left the Pixies. He loves driving, so we rented a big Cadillac and just filmed him. So I got in sideways that way, and through my music-world connections from doing record covers.
I went back to the Rolling Stone interview that you did when 20th Century Women was released, and you were trying to describe the film. You said, “Okay, have you ever heard the 1940 recording of ‘As Time Goes By’ that Rudy Vallee did? Now put on the Buzzcocks song, ‘Can I Touch It?’ Those two records that are playing in your mind right now? That’s the movie.”
[Laughs] That’s funny. It’s a pretty good description of my childhood household overall as well.
Music has clearly been a foundational thing for you, and there are two of your music videos (for Air’s “All I Need” and Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer”) on the set. But how much does music play into the nuts and bolts of your filmmaking — when you’re writing, when you’re on set, when you’re editing or figuring out how it’s going to inform the feeling you’re chasing in a story?
I mean, before I was a filmmaker, I was an untalented punk rock musician. Music was my first creative joy. I still play piano every single day. I’m not very good at it, but I love it more than anything.
When I write, I tend to listen to music on loop in noise-canceling headphones. I’ll listen to maybe one song for, I don’t know — a day, a week, an afternoon. I’ll hear this one change in Cate le Bon song, and it’s like, that’s the feeling. That’s the what I want. It was The National for a while. That’s how I ended up doing that project with them (2019’s “I Am Easy to Find”).
Music is really about just sort of shaping time. And it taught me a lot about filmmaking because I came to it from a very static, non-time-based mind, you know. So for me, drafting on the feeling you have listening to music, or what happens to me with playing music, has been one way I’ve taught myself how to play with time onscreen, you know? When I feel like my films are doing well — when I’m sort of happy with how, say, a five-minute scene is going — it’s usually because it’s functioning like music, even if there’s no music playing over it. There’s some kind of energetic flow to it that’s not dialogue-driven or because of an edit. Something else is happening.
Can you think of specific examples for specific films?
I remember when I was writing C’mon, I was constantly listening to Frank Ocean a lot. I was just such a Frank Ocean Blond-head, I was just listening to that constantly. There are Frank Ocean songs that you hear and go, “Where am I? Is this the chorus, the verse or the bridge?” There can be four separate parts to a Frank Ocean song that don’t recur, you know? I would study those types pf things to make my weird American dad kid movie. In terms of the DNA of my movies, yeah — they’re completely linked to music.
I know C’mon C’mon is about an uncle and a nephew, but you’ve talked a lot about it being reflective of your experience being a dad. Has your kid seen it? What do they think of it?
They just saw it a year ago, when we went to Berlin and saw a screening of it. They haven’t seen any of my movies. That was the first of their of my work that they’d seen.
Really?
They’d seen trailers, or they see me editing. I try to downplay the whole moviemaking thing in our in the house, you know. Like it’s not that big of a deal.
The desire to write that movie was my experiences being a dad to my kid, and a lot of the scenes are sort of based on our life. But my kid was nine when I made it, and I started writing when they were six — so I’m kind of writing about earlier experiences. They don’t have any memories of the scenes that I’m basing stuff off of. So they were like, “Oh, that’s funny. I bet that’s from us, isn’t it?” It’s like very meta to them, and they know enough. “Okay, so you made a movie about your dad, but it’s not really your dad. I mean, it’s based on things you saw with your dad, but it’s also Christopher Plummer. It’s a very muddy, mongrel situation.” Like they’ll literally quote that back to me! [Laughs] So this person has grown up with a lot of knowledge of how, when you make a movie that’s based on your life, it’s not actually your life.
It is very easy to see like there are bits of autobiography hidden in plain sight in your movies. But they’re not memoirs.
I remember the first time I read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, I could tell that this was a tether to a lived experience that’s kind of mysterious and unexplainable. I’m not queer man in 1955, but I got a real sense of his life and who he was even when he wasn’t being direct. I know he’s a controversial figure, but look at those Woody Allen films from the late 1970s — Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories. You just can smell he’s writing about his personal relationships. I like Neil Young more than I like Bob Dylan because I sense I’m getting some like report from his life in a more direct, more vulnerable manner. All of those types of things had a huge influence on me in terms of how you put yourself into your work without making it a memoir.
There’s just enough distance between the two.
Exactly. It’s a little like in therapy, when you’ve distanced yourself from this mood or behavior just enough to kind of like see it, appreciate it, maybe have compassion for it, maybe have critique for it, whatever it is. But I feel like that’s a really lucky thing to get to do. Or at least the bit that I’ve learned how to do it, I feel very incredibly grateful for.
My personal questions and mysteries are the motivations that keeps me going through all the minor and major humiliations it takes to make a movie. But there are things I’ll observe or hear from someone else that, if they feel like they resonate, get worked in as well. That whole thing about the kid wanting to be an orphan and talk to the parent like he’s an orphan in C’mon C’mon? That is a story from [The National guitarist] Aaron Dessner’s child; Aaron told me that one night, and I was like, “That’s fucking amazing! Can I use that?” He asked his kid, he said yes, and that’s how it made it in. There’s a fair amount of things I get from other people.
Has your writing process changed over the years?
It’s getting more instinctual. I’m like finally getting the hang of it a little bit — even though this script I’m writing right now is taking me fucking forever, so that has not changed. There’s still a lot of trial and error in my process.
Do you wish you were more prolific?
I used to feel a need to be more prolific until I was about 45, but not so much anymore. It really changed when I had a kid, where it’s like, I want to live my life. I want to be dad more than anything. I mean, with filmmaking… I got started late. I’m not gonna contend for the top shelf, you know? I’m just gonna try to do a few good ones, and have a career like that’s more like the Hal Ashby model than anything else.
Having a career like Hal Ashby is a pretty good goal to shoot for!
Right? I’m not gonna be Coppola, or Spielberg, or Scorsese. But Ashby? That a bar I could possibly hit. His films are amazing. I’d love to have made Harold and Maude!
There’s a supplementary feature on the box set where you and filmmaker Kristen Johnson (Cameraperson) are discussing your career, and you have this wonderful phrase about your works being a way to get around “the failed project of knowing”…
The failed project of truly knowing your loved ones, yeah. Or at least holding the failure. Maybe that’s what it is. You’re never going to get to know them as much as you want. You’re going to misunderstand them, and there’s always going to be some void that that you just don’t see. People often say, “Oh, your film’s therapeutic.” I’m like, “No, not actually.” Really, if anything, I’m exploiting my therapy. [Laughs]
But there is a therapeutic thing happening that I didn’t totally understand at first, but I see now. It’s like I am kind of communing with my dead parents. I’m trying to come up with what the fuck they would say in this thing, or it’s like, “I know my mom wouldn’t exactly say that, but I’m kind of taking her energy and multiplying it.” So that communing with a person who isn’t there feels nice. My parents were gone relatively early in my life, and they’re the kind of folks that just didn’t tell you shit about themselves. So I have a lot of questions and a lot of hunger. There are mysteries with your loved ones. But movies are dreams and magic tricks, and I realize I’ve been able to hold on to the mysteries because of those movies. That part has been like nutritive emotionally in a way that I didn’t cop to before.
Do you feel like you know your parents better, or that you know your child better having made these movies? Or at least be able to see things through their eyes in a way that you wouldn’t have before?
Yeah. I have had to think about these people a lot, and then explain them to other people, and then have them transformed by these other people. That’s another whole magic trick that I don’t even understand. Like, you do your best job to try to capture some aspects of your father. You’re only going to get, say, 20 percent. Then you hand it over to Christopher Plummer, who does his version. and you’re like, “Well, I kind of learned a couple things about my dad in the way that Christopher was different but also the same.”
And then you have actors playing characters that represent you…
I still find it really weird when someone is playing a version of me, but…. You could say Ewan McGregor is playing a version of me in Beginners, or that Joaquin [Phoenix] is playing a version of me in C’mon C’mon, for example, but they’re also bringing their own instincts to things and playing around with the character. There are things that Annette [Bening] says about being a parent in 20th Century Women that represent how I feel about parenthood. But she’s coming up with her own character. I really encourage the actors to become authors, even when they’re representing something or someone that reflects my own experiences.
Is there a reason that [Mills’ debut film] Thumbsucker and [Mills’ 2007 documentary] Does Your Soul Have a Cold? aren’t in the set?
Thumbsucker is weird for me. I wrote it, but I adapted it from Walter Kirn’s book. To be honest, I feel like I learned a shit-ton making that movie, but it didn’t come out as good as I would have hoped. It’s my first movie. I love all those actors. I wish somehow I could just like have my relationship with those actors be on the box set, and not the movie. If we could somehow do that, that’d be great. [Laughs] But it was mostly just that these three films here naturally make a very nice triptych. I wrote them in in a similar style, and now it feels like I unconsciously made them feel like they’re of a piece.
What goes through your head when you look at this stuff now?
I don’t.
But you had to for this set, I’d imagine?
I had to go back and recolor them with the sound off, which is the only way I could do it. I heard Fellini say this in an interview once. When he had to go back and watch his films, he’d be like, “Oh, that’s the movie? I thought that scene was in it, and I thought that scene was out, and…” Like you remember them incorrectly. It’s funny, I can talk about someone else’s film forever —
— But talking about this thing where it’s like, “Here’s all your work, Mike” is a lot tougher.
Here are all the decisions you made. Here’s you, right? Don’t get me wrong, I feel so lucky to be able to have done this, and the body of work is so important to me. The shorts are in there because they’re really important to me. It is a body of work. And I think…[Pause]
I came from a family where people kind of abandoned themselves. Dad was a gay man who didn’t come out for a long time. My mom was at least as complicated as my dad, in terms of gender, mental illness, depression. They were both born in the 1920s. And they joined America.
“Joined?”
They co-bearded each other and they joined America, right? They entered into what was considered the American ideal. So it’s like a massive project of self-abandonment. And compared to them, I’m not that rogue. I’m not that brave. But I did this body of work that’s all about like them and us and whatever the opposite of self-abandonment is. I feel really grateful that these movies happened and I could do that for them and for me.
Do you feel like your relationship with filmmaking has changed?
Yeah. It’s so fucking hard. It’s so complex. There’s so many things I have to go write at one time. But I do feel like I’m about to make a good one. Any day now, man. It’s coming. It’s about to happen. [Laughs]
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