The Big Picture - Interview With ‘20th Century Women’ Director Mike Mills | The Big Picture (Ep. 2)

Episode Date: January 19, 2017

Mike Mills’s past two films — Beginners and 20th Century Women — have both been semi-autobiographical. Beginners focuses on Mills’s father, who came out at age 75 shortly before his death, while 20th Century Women is based on Mills’s mother as a way to look at the 1970s. On Channel 33, Sean Fennessey talked to Mills about his experience making the films, and how he blends his own childhood with his art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode is brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network. With the NFL playoffs in full swing, make sure to check out the Ringer NFL Show. Each week, the Ringer's Robert Mays, Kevin Clark, and Danny Kelly break down everything you need to know about the NFL postseason. You can subscribe to the Ringer NFL Show on iTunes by going to itunes.com backslash theringer or find it wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to a Channel 33 podcast about the movies. My name is Sean Fennessy. I am the editor-in-chief of TheRinger.com. And I'm quite lucky to be joined today by the writer and director Mike Mills as a new movie out called 20th Century Women in theaters January 20th. Mike, thanks for sitting with me.

Yeah. How are you today? Good, good. Glad to be here. So this is a great film, an interesting film, slightly difficult to describe. Have you figured out your log line perfectly yet? No. I mean, the easiest way to do it is, you know, there's a set in 1979 and there's a middle-aged mother of a 15-year-old kid and she recruits these two

sort of unlikely women to help her raise them. And it's sort of the story of a boy being raised pretty much solely by women and with a fairly strong feminist perspective. But that doesn't do it justice. It's a, I guess, somehow I created something that defies being reduced down. Maybe that's part of my intention.

But it's hard to pitch it. A lot of the movie is obviously based on your personal experience. A lot of your past two films have been deeply autobiographical. Your second film, Beginners, is about your experience with your Beginners, is about your experience

with your father. This is about your experience with your mother in a lot of ways. Did you have any apprehension before you started writing this about diving back in so deep into your personal memory? Well, my dad, so Beginners, it was about my dad coming out and then dying. And I started right after he died. So I was intoxicated by grief. And grief can make you very brave and very willing to risk everything, like for real. So you're on drugs. And so I was un-sober when I made that. But I liked it.

I liked the whole process. And I used personal material not with the attempt to just make a memoir, but to find something real to share with other people. So the intention all the way along the line is to find parts of it, the story, that can be good for a movie, that can be good to share with strangers, that can be communicable.

And then this came after that, and I had a little bit of my mom in Beginners, and I just sort of was, she's such a film character in herself, and such an unusual woman, my mom in Beginners and I just sort of was, she's such a film character in herself and such an unusual woman and she's so interesting in relationship to history and I'm really interested in like people, portraits of people that are very historically specific and about how history shapes us.

So she's like really apt to talk about that. Being someone who's born in the 20s and having me in the 60s and being like a Amelia Earhart, Humphrey Bogart person in the 70s raising a punk rock kid. There's all these problems there. It's like weather veins for every decade. Yeah.

And also she's very much a fish out of her historical waters in real life. And then when you're making a movie about people that exist, people are so much bigger, longer, more complicated than a film version of them. Even if you're trying your hardest to capture them, you're going to capture like a slice of them. So it's not like you're showing everything.

And that somehow makes it easier in a way. And then just knowing that it's my version of them that's being cinematized, you know, it's not a documentary. If I was doing a documentary about them, that would be more daunting in a way. Yeah, I'm really interested. I have a few questions about sort of the nature of accuracy, especially when you're dealing with your parents because you see them through this very specific prism. Yeah. How did you research your own life to do this? And then how did you determine what would end up on the cutting room floor?

So a 20th century specific? Well, so 20th century woman is more from a distance than beginners. Beginners was kind of like fresh memories. I had a real grippiness to them and a concreteness. These are sort of like your family stories. You know, like you probably, everyone has family stories of your childhood. And so these are like more like lore a little bit.

But then all the details of Dorothea's life, like that she wanted to be a pilot, that she's the first woman to be a draft person at the Container Corporation of America, that she carved rabbits from Red Watership Down, that she smoked Sam's. That's all my mom straight up. That she did stocks every morning, that when she died,

she was worried about Y2K and got water and put 18 grand of gold coins in the bank of Montecito. That's just very exactly from life. When you're writing something like this that is personal, but also you're hoping millions of people will see it. Millions. I like millions. I like your ambition. Tens of hundreds. Do you picture your mom saying it? Or do you picture a movie star saying it? Is it just something that is more abstract than that? Well, my mom died in 99. so i'm writing this i started in 2011 so she's been

gone for a while so if i concoct her up in my head which i did a lot when i wrote it it's you know i'm even aware that this isn't mom this is you know my best attempt to remember mom but that's that's one thing that's very sad about losing people in grief and stuff like that is the farther away you get from when they died they you lose a little bit of them like every year you know and your ability to bring them up so even as i was writing i knew that i was dealing with a odd version of my mom that wasn't really exactly her um and i don't really think of actors. It doesn't work for me. It doesn't help me write,

and it doesn't work technically. Like, you never get the person you thought you were going to get, you know? And so there's this weird hybrid that's going in my head, and sometimes, to be honest, I'll be sort of flirting with an actor in my head over this three-year process of writing this script,

and it'll kind of come and go you know and that might work for a week and then often I'll be like ah crap I just kind of wrote a bad version of the film I just saw them in right right so I'm not sure it helps at all how do you avoid that how do you avoid colliding the business element of thinking about who's going to be in this role with doing something that stays true to you well because when you're writing you're you're the process is so long at least for me that it sometimes i don't win that battle and i am trying to cast someone castable in my head and they're infecting my script for me ultimately writing gets to this place where it's like, okay, I can't do this.

I'm completely screwed. And this is my last film if I get to make it. And I shouldn't be doing this and I'm screwed again. So since this is my last film and I'm screwed and I have nothing to lose and the plane's going down, I might as well just say what I fucking think you know and I always get to that spot and that's that's actually where I really write from yeah I know a lot of writers who can identify with the desperation and the knowledge of failure yeah going forward yeah I have a certain amount of time before the

plane hits the ground let's try to get the scene done you know I read that an early version of the movie included a father figure character and that eventually you decided to remove that character was there any concern you know about creating a little bit of distance from the actual part of your actual experience where your parents were living together versus what you ended up putting on screen well that wasn't why the father left out and the father figure that was in the film, they were divorced. My parents were never divorced. It was already like away from my life.

Okay. And I do like when things are things that I observed. It doesn't have to be my life. Like Greta's character is based a lot on my sister. Elle's character is based on a lot of women I knew. A lot of women. She's three. Okay.

And then some of her details come from women that I interviewed now or when I was writing who were that age then. Okay. So like her period story or her losing her virginity story come from friends of mine. Okay. So in that way, she's lots of women. But anyways, having real people are things I've observed. I really like that. I really like it's like a slightly journalistic slightly documentary approach and it gives me like a north pole but I have someone out

there that I'm trying my hardest to understand and to capture and to bring to life that this gives me a mission I find much more positive you know you know I read that the wooden rabbits that your mom carved and her jewelry you know Annette Bening wears it she plays Dorothea the the protagonist I guess of the film yeah is that also to sort of make you feel comfortable like you're doing something that is more documentary-esque or is it just for authenticity how do you make those choices uh it's not for me it's for um it's a little bit of everything it's also cheap and my movie is tier one movie like every dime you have to think about like every dollar so if i can get some free jewelry yes it's amazing that's my mom's bracelets and they're perfect and they're they're really unique and special and it adds a

little bit of magic to give them to a net bending and then that net bending is willing to wear them yes it's enchanting the whole situation and adding like a gravitas. But no one needs to know that. The people in Arclight Theater or whatever, they don't know about it. That's fine. They don't need to know about it. Should we cut this out of the podcast?

People like to talk about it and that's fine too. But it's free. There's also a lot of furniture in the movie that's from my house and paintings and the amazing bedspread. One, because my parents had amazing taste, it's totally indigenous to my portrait of them it's the right stuff and i can drive it down to my volvo you don't need a teamster to bring it down you don't have to pay a rental for my house so like i saved like like 10 plus grand just there you know

was it ever surreal to walk on the set and be like this feels awfully familiar to me it's kind of a weird way of having presence with them you know i find it sort of heartening and i come from my family who i guess in some mostly unconscious mostly unspoken ways kind of like abandon themselves a bit you know my dad tried to pretend he wasn't gay and my mom early it's not part of the story but she tried to pretend that she wasn't jewish and dad tried to pretend he wasn't gay, and my mom, it's not part of the story, but she tried to pretend that she wasn't Jewish, and she tried to pretend that she was fine with that, and they both abandoned key parts of themselves. And I think as a kid of theirs, I sort of psychically sensed all that. So then to make a movie about them, and making a movie about someone sort of the opposite of abandoning them, it's a move in the right direction.

You know, and it's just like generally benevolent vibe. It doesn't feel like exposing, it doesn't feel like raw. Even like filming my dad dying, and that really impacted Ewan. Like Ewan bawled his head off, like for real. And I did, but because of Ewan, not because I was filming like recreating my dad and it's like uh or scenes in a hospital or anything like that if you ever had anything like that happen to you

you should make a movie about it because when you make a movie about it you're completely in control yeah and it's not really happening and it's like really easy you know it's like people think it's like oh you okay I'm like I'm fine I'm directing a movie I love directing it's it's like, oh, are you okay? I'm like, I'm fine. I'm directing a movie. I love directing. It's like it's not as quite as personal as I think people think it is. I've thought about that even just while we're talking. You're being extremely honest and open about something that is obviously most people have difficulty even communicating about, let alone in interview after interview. Is it at this stage, does it give you more closeness to that feeling or is there more separation now that you've like created a piece of art or two pieces of art about these profound moments in your life? Do you feel closer to understanding what was happening at those times?

Well, I mean, the other part of this for me personally is like I've been in therapy since I was 28, right? And so in therapy, you explore yourself, not just in a solipsistic way, hopefully, but like studying to fucking figure yourself out and get out of this prison you made for yourself, right? And so I'm used to thinking about this. And then I kind of feel like I've been talking like this for years, not just this movie. And I feel like if you're being interviewed and someone's taking the time to listen to you,

you owe it to that listener to be straight up and not just self-promoting. So since I make these movies about personal life and what it's like to be a parent or a child or deal with all these issues, I kind of feel like it's my part of the contract is to add something hopefully honest and revealing to the human compost pile you know uh and um and like ginsburg does that a lot i love ginsburg in interviews um

uh james baldwin does that a lot i love james baldwin interviews so i'm kind of chasing my heroes a little bit also when i talk like this you know know, or try to be open. I mean, you make a movie like this, you can't not, how could you not, how could you all of a sudden be like, I don't want to talk about it. I don't know, people are funny there. Some people are more closed off than others, or they try to at least be a little bit more elusive about sort of what is true and what isn't true.

Yeah, maybe I'm not smart about that. No, no. You know the Elena Ferrante approach? Sure. And that new book, no. You know the Elena Ferrante approach? Sure. And that new book, it's all her letters and her, for those who don't know, she's this amazing Italian author who works under a pseudonym

who never reveals herself and doesn't want her real life. She writes from real life, but she doesn't want to talk about it. And she doesn't want to let her persona interfere with the work. The work is its own piece. She wants to respect the work by not talking about it. I sort't want to let her persona interfere the work the work is its own piece she wants to respect the work by not talking about it i sort of do the opposite i tell everybody everything but and i but i really i really respect her deal this is what makes sense to me

but it's an ongoing thing too i might not do it next time why did you choose 1979 as the time to set the movie uh partly because it's when when i was at age ish you know and uh i wanted to talk about my mom being that age and me being that age so that means it's around then sure somewhere in late 70s early 80s. And I want to talk about my real mom, so that means she's a woman that's born in 25. So that means if I want to talk about her middle age, you're somewhere right about there. And then 79 is really interesting to me

because it's 79. It's like, I feel like it's like the end of post-war America and the beginning of now. If I'm going to be like historically pretentious. Wow. It's the end of the 60s. It's the beginning of the end of the calendar culture. It's the beginning of the end of industrial America, the car. That's why I had the car burning at the beginning.

It's the beginning of the end of the working class and the middle class's real importance and our sort of more left-leaning version of America. Going from Carter to Reagan is a real sea change. It's the beginning of the personal computing explosion, like Apple's about to go public in a year. Saddam Hussein just became president of Iraq. The Islamic revolution just happened in Iran. Are you researching and trying to arrive at all of that information before you start writing? Are you saying, why is this the right time?

Well, I know when I started, I knew I wanted somewhere in there, somewhere between 77 and 82. And then I do a lot of, I love Wikipedia. And I love researching, I love that a script gives you permission or a job to go research whatever you want. And then when I found Carter's speech,

and that was in the summer of 79. I was like, well, that's so amazing to the themes I can already feel that are gonna be central. Yeah, you're talking about the crisis of confidence Yeah, or one of the main parts of he's talking about how we've lost meaning in our lives Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. And all my characters are trying to figure out who they are and the meaning of themselves and the meaning of their lives. So I was like, oh, that's exactly what I'm interested in is how our small personal stories are shaped by and fight against the larger historical story that's going on, larger historical tendency.

And then 79 is interesting. A lot of Cornelius Scott's film then came out later, but it was filmed then and just life out of balance. You have flashes of that movie in your film. It's kind of sampled

inside my movie and labeled. But Cornelius Scott's is talking about life out of balance. The Queen, David Bowie song, Under Pressure is 80. But I feel like right around there, people all talking about this crisis of confidence, this future shock, the world going too fast. And it's so sweet to think of us thinking that in a pre-digital age, that the world was going too fast.

Yeah, there's something meaningful about a group of people sitting around and watching that Carter speech. I think especially given where we are at this moment, it feels almost alien to imagine that. But the way that you portray that scene is really interesting because it gives us a lot of insight into Dorothea and how she sees the world. And a lot of the people in the room are cynical about Carter's optimism and his thoughtfulness. And she's quite moved. Was that a moment in your life? Did you land on that? Or did that feel like a part of these fragments of history that you were trying to stitch together?

It's both. My mom loved Carter because he wore jeans in the White House and he was the peanut farmer president. My mom, being like a depressionary kid in that time, America is much more socialist, is much more anti-authoritarian. If you look at all those movies from the 30s and 40s, all the humor is so anti-authoritarian. If you look at all those movies from the 30s and 40s, all the humor is

so anti-authoritarian. Look at Bogart. He's constantly finding the man and the powers that be. And he's a huge movie star. And my mom was infused with that kind of sensibility and politics. And so Carter, of course she loves him. He's unpretentious. He's a working man. My mom loved working people. In making a portrait of my mom, Carter is easy to associate with her. It's in her orbit. Then finding that speech just made it perfect. I don't remember watching that speech at the time. I knew about that speech, but i can't remember how

i knew about it um there's a great book called the cultural history of punk rock and it's a lot about just like 70s stuff and how carter is like the president of one boredom and two punk and and three kind of like a matriarchal president. He's not a patriarchal president. And the 70s is kind of like a feminine decade. He was an empath, yeah. And doubt and inner life and spirituality and just not patriarchal strength. Talk about hearing Trump on the radio today.

It's a completely different dynamic. I was just reading about Carter actually because he sold the peanut farm that he built from the ground up before he took office, which is something obviously President-elect Trump is not doing. Any coincidence that your movie

is opening wide on Inauguration Day? I don't think so. That's in the hands of the geniuses of Day 24. When that was set, it seemed like Hillary was going to be president. Yes. I will say that. So I don't know if they were thinking about that. Am I doomed now?

Could be more resonant or less. It's hard to say. We were talking about Hillary a lot because we're thinking all this up in September. Like the actual release of the movie, August, September. Yeah, it's really... I wonder if anyone could ever do sort of an autopsy of my movie and see what it's meant. I'm curious about how you eventually landed on this cast.

I think it's every performer that I already knew doing their best work. Oh, that's nice. How did you land on everyone? Well, it's definitely like a constellation. You can't cast any one of those people in isolation, right? And it all depends on who you

have, right? So it starts with a net. I needed to have my sun first, the center of my galaxy. And you just don't know if you can get someone like a net. And we had to send her the script,

and luckily she liked it. And she responded right away, and we had a great dinner. And she was very open to all the contradictions I put in the character, and just curious about her in a way that I really liked. And coming at it as a mom and as a middle-aged woman, and to me that's really important

that I have some sense, some kind of psychic sense, because you don't get to audition the person, that it's going to impact them or stir their blood or have some overlap with their life. So they're going to bring to this character their own chaos, their own inner stuff. And then, so once I had her i i've been thinking about greta a lot and that seemed great they seemed like a really neat duo yeah and that would like each

other they're different generations but they're both unusual women they're not totally just just traditional feminine women and and that myta's character is an artist, and Greta is a writer-director. Greta is a maker-artist person. So that just fit that person. And then Elle really suits it in a way that, to be honest, I didn't understand when I cast her. And that happens a lot, where casting is like finding lovers you don't know why the deep

reasons why you pick the people until later it's revealed to you you know and and I try to be alive to that actually when I'm casting um but when I met with her I said like you're so nice you're so happy you're so together this person's so broken apart and unresolved and unclear and, I don't know, like self-hating in ways. You seem so different than that. How can you do it? And she's like, oh, I just will. And I was like, that is a horrible answer, you know?

But like on the page, word for word, it's a horrible answer, right? It doesn't explain anything. But the way she said it, there was a certain kind of metal to her. There was a certain kind of strength that I was like, I don't know, my sternum bought it. And then once I got to know Elle, she's a lot like the girls I was writing about where they're very pretty, very blonde, and you can write them off very easily as sort of like sex objects or whatever. Just not give them the seriousness that they deserve. And I had female friends that were pretty like Elle and having complicated sex lives.

And I wasn't a sexual partner of their, but I was a friend who they'd come over in the middle of the night loaded and tell me everything that happened, these two girls in particular. And I would learn kind of the more complicated, dark side of it all not just dark but like their perspective and um l has so much depth and if you have her

follower instincts it often goes to a very heavy place you know and and um just a lot of what's the word like density you know and it's so and like um she's she's like wildly unromantic that character everyone thinks that like a girl like that would be and i'm talking like sexist tropes that we project onto women like that um and so l was an amazing soul to undermine these sexist tropes that everyone is projecting upon her. Did you want there to be something in common among all three of those women? You know, I think of the scenes where they are sort of interacting one-on-one, and there's a little bit of a shadowing image, even when they're disagreeing with each other.

I love that scene when Elle and Annette are in the car together when she pulls over to the side of the road. You're good at hiding stuff, huh? My mom calls it compartmentalizing. Apparently I do that a lot. Are you helping him? I'm trying. Really? What about you?

Have you thought about your impact on him? It's always about the mother. Like, do you think you've moved on since his dad? You know that you're not actually a therapist. I've had new guys, okay? No one appropriate. Appropriate? Guys you're not gonna risk anything with. Men you don't even really like.

Listen, you're 17, okay? Maybe you don't know what's good about these guys that I really like. Listen, you're 17, okay? Maybe you don't know what's good about these guys that I really like. I'm talking about you. You never seem into it. You can see them jousting in a very specific way, almost like they're equals, even though one girl's 17 and one woman is in middle age.

Well, I wanted them all to be really smart and not afraid to, I don't know, just be noncompliant. They're all pretty strong. That's the word. They're all strong, I think. I find Abby, Greta Gerwig's character, and Abedin's character to have a lot of similarities.

And that sort of proto-feminist, Amelia Earhart feminist, and Greta's sort of second wave feminist. And there are connections between those two strains of womanhood. And then Elle's sort of like a weird outlier. Like she's gonna be into Madonna in like four years,

and be that kind of feminist. And she sort of unnerves both the older women in the movie i i find and she's neither of those women can get a handle on her you know um and it's really fun to have these three different generations three different i don't know like micro historical perspectives at the same table. Have you taken the movie back to Santa Barbara? I'm curious how Santa Barbara is responding. There's not a lot of great Santa Barbara movies, I feel like. Yeah.

Well, there's some people who knew my parents still around. So that was nice. We had this screening there, and there's some people who knew my mom. So that's a trip, and it's at the theater that I went to as a kid. So that's a trip. And Santa Barbara looks the same. The places we shot look exactly like they looked. And I walked on all those streets as a kid.

Those streets are right around my house. So that creek, my sister hung out in that creek. So it's both very evocative you know i'm very um my childhood um and it's also a different place you know i left when i was 18 and i'm 50 yeah and my dad died in 2004 and we sold the house you know so we haven't had a house there for a long time or um and it's changed a lot so it's also a very different place but it's yeah I don't feel like incredibly connected to Santa Barbara in terms of just like when I'm there mmm like the things that are there but like those trees those the oak tree grove the beach the air the atmosphere

the wind the sound of the crows the sound of the tree you know i guess this is all like the landscape of my childhood that's very um like super interwoven with me i don't know exactly what's going on in santa barbara right i get you i don't know what everyone's really saying i wanted to ask you about the collage quality a little bit. I was thinking specifically of the beginning of the movie where you have water and a car on fire. You have talk of a dying man and then an infant. You know, you have a mother and a son.

And then obviously we talked about some of the films that you interweave into the piece, some of Abby's photography and the way that you use photography in your films. How do you make those choices? It's something you've obviously used throughout your career but it's really really refined and beautiful in this movie oh thanks um i i love it when other people do that like i went to art school didn't go to film school what films do they show at art school they show godard a lot so i'm obviously very indebted to him and like two or three things i know about her or pierre lefou like there's so many of his films that have like a great graphic sensibility to

them and a great sort of it's a dumb word but like multimedia in a sense and i went to school with like a conceptual artist named hans haka and there's artists like hans peter feldman there's artists like Hans-Peter Feldman, there's a lot of different conceptual artists who work in this semi-archival way, and that really excites me. And I like sort of, I find it very kinetic and kind of pop and exciting. This movie is a little different than I use a lot of text, like Judy Blume's book or The Road Less Traveled, and I credit them and the thing,

and Koyaan Squatsy, and I credit it on screen. I find that super exciting and disruptive in a really interesting way, personally, and it's deeply interwoven with the story and the portrait and constructing the world that is these people and their lives. But it's also like pointing out the fiction of my movie, and it's sort of just a disruption of the movie, what is it called, like etiquette? You know, the suspension of my movie, and it's sort of just a disruption of the movie, what is it called, etiquette? You know, the suspension of disbelief etiquette,

which drives me nuts, I guess, a little bit. I think it inevitably also just pushes people towards things they don't know about. If you put Koenig-Kotzke on the screen, people are like, what is that? I don't know what that is, and then they're forced to confront it if they like the movie.

Yeah, and there's a lot of great music in the film. The music's all historically accurate, and to me, it's another like the movie. Yeah, and there's a lot of great music in the film. The music's all historically accurate, and to me it's another text that I'm applying, and then people talk about the music in the movie. So another, I do think that we figure ourselves out in a relationship to cultural stuff. For me, music was such a key thing to understanding just my emotional life

or what I was feeling, which for me was a hard thing to figure out. There was no modeling for that inside my house. And so that's always been endlessly interesting to me. Was it hard for you to, I wanted to ask you specifically, there's a handful of songs, clearly songs that your mother loved and that were on in the house and songs that were really important to you in the late 70s, Buzzcocks, Talking Heads, Raincoats.

Was it difficult for you to choose the handful of songs that were really important to you in the late 70s, Buzzcocks, Talking Heads, Raincoats. Was it difficult for you to choose the handful of songs that were representative? I was thinking about if I had to put myself in that position and say these are the four songs that I listen to all the time. Yeah, and then certain things work. I'm not the biggest Devo fan, but oh my God, that song worked great in my movie. How is there not a television song or a patty smith song in this movie but those songs like don't sit back in your film right and then yeah i'd love to play television um uh what's it that their main song marky moon

marky moon but then you're like oh it's so lame to put marky moon in your movie in a way because you know what i mean it's like so name droppy or something but that that song can that song's amazing i've tried it and it's like it's like butter you know some of those long guitar parts but like patty smith is just not polite her her shit does not sit back in your movie yeah and it's like patty smith so you end up picking some things that are surprising in a way but like the buzzcocks, why can't I touch it? I was always, in my script, I was like, the end, Buzzcocks plays. I think that song is, for people who see the movie, is going to have a second life in a weird way.

There's going to be people who are going to understand it. Yeah, and it very much fits. It looks so real, why can't I touch it? It tastes so real, why can't i touch it tastes so real why can't i taste it you know um that's that that's sums up the movie in so many ways it resonates right now too yeah um so you've done these two extremely um deep and thoughtful looks at your parents how do you figure out you want to keep making films how do you figure out where to go from here given that i think you must feel proud of these two movies right

um i feel very lucky you know making movies is a very vulnerable making thing and even if it goes well you get bad reviews and you get hated on and or you don't get what you thought you should get. You know what I mean? So it's like a roller coaster ride. But ultimately I sleep at night. And I don't sleep. About my movies, I basically sleep at night. Basically?

That's not even totally true. I can get anxiety ridden and self-hating on a dime. But I feel lucky. I'm glad I made them. Put it that way. Proud's almost too strong a word. But I'm glad I made them. I feel really lucky I made them.

It's such a huge cultural privilege to get to make movies and to make a personal one. It's crazy. And that they did well enough and that I do have a lot of nice responses from people that's really meaningful to me. It's really meaningful. And in my life, I feel like,

well, if I'm good at anything, apparently I'm decent at this, or I've made some connections with strangers. And that's super rewarding. Are you excited or looking forward to any of the additional awards things to come? That's always a very, sometimes a fraught question. Yeah. I think we're not, I'm not sure how well we're going to do in all that world.

Yeah. I think like people are talking so strongly about Annette getting nominated. And now that's not even for sure at all. So it's interesting. That's part of like this roller coaster ride I was talking about. You just don't, it's just an odd scene. Do you validate at all against those things

or do you try to ignore them? How do you engage with it? Oh, it's a total mixed bag. Like whenever you do get something, it's really fun. Yeah, yeah. And it helps your film a lot. So it's all great.

And then when you don't get them, you're like, shit. I was really proud of the script when we didn't get nominated for the WGA thing. I was like, oh, that hurts. And I joined the WGA on this film. I was like, glad I paid those dues. So it totally wallops you. It is a rollercoaster coaster ride you try to just like rest on the few good things you have then it's hard to it's hard to have anything feel meaningful

and to understand what your film really means to people or how it's going over and then as a director of course a lot of people come to you oh nice film but it's like it's like you're the groom at a wedding like what is what are people people going to say? Only a real brave person comes up and goes, that sucked. Well, I think specifically you find yourself in an interesting position where people, you're so honest about the fact that this is about you and about your experience too,

that it would be doubly cruel in a way to confront you with that. People do tend to save it for online. Or some reviewers let me have it for sure. Are you the kind of person that will sneak into a theater just to see how people are feeling about it that happens more at the beginning like um and when you know part of the editing process is so much sitting in theaters with people watching it and by the time i finish my son makes like it's like painful to watch the movie like i but i like watching little bits you know it's very nerve-wracking i see the end a lot because i come for q and a's oh that makes sense are you at peace with the end

now do you i've always liked the ending so that's a good thing and uh uh like we premiered at the new york film festival and it was really hard for me like i could stand behind a closed door and listen to people laughing or not laughing. But yeah, it's really hard to find meaning. And then like once in a while there's a review or something or some friend said something or some other filmmaker said something. Often for me, that's other filmmakers. And they'll say something really genuine and like, okay, I'm going to hold on to this one. Like I'm going to hold on to this email or whatever they said. But then you find

yourself discrediting it in your head, you know, or any negative thing you hear, you kind of glom on to it. And so it's an odd process. Well, Mike, thank you for being here. Let me say with sincerity that I loved it as well. And I hope a lot of people see it. It's a great movie. It's 20th Century Woman. Thanks so much. Oh, thanks. And I hope a lot of people see it. It's a great movie. It's 20th Century Woman. Thanks so much. Thanks, Mike. Yeah. you