The Press Box - Ep. 239: Interview With ‘20th Century Women’ Director Mike Mills

Episode Date: January 19, 2017

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey sits down with the artist and director Mike Mills, who opens up about his latest film, ‘20th Century Women,’ and what it's like directing a movie largely inspired by his mother (1:37), his decision to set the movie in the ’70s (14:25), and choosing the best songs from his childhood to score the film (31:42). 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 show on iTunes by going to iTunes.com backslash The Ringer or find it wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to a channel 33 podcast about the movies. My name is Sean Fennacy.

I am the editor-in-chief of The Ringer.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 sudden 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 him. And it's sort of a 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, you know? And maybe that's part of my intention. But, yeah, it's hard to, like, pitch it. A lot of the movie is obviously based on your personal experience. A lot of your past two films have been deeply autobico. graphical. You know, your second film, 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 by my dad coming on and then dying. And I started right after he died. So I was like intoxicated by grief. And grief can make you very brave and very willing to risk everything. Like, for real. So you're on, you're on drugs, you know. And And so I was unsober when I made that. And then, 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, you know.

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 could be good to share with strangers, that can be communicable, you know. And then this came after that, and I had a little bit of my mom at 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, like an Amelia Earhart, Humphrey Bogart person in the 70s raising a punk rock kid. Yeah. There's all these problems there in. It's like weather veins for every decade.

Yeah. And also like she's very much a fish out of her historical waters in real life. And then, you know, 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 catch a slice of them, you know. 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? this and then how did you determine what would end up on the cutting room floor so with 20th century specific um well so 20th century woman is more from a distance than uh beginners beginners

beginners was kind of like fresh memories that 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 that of your childhood sure and so these are like more like lore a little bit um but then all the details of dorothea's life like um that she wanted to be a pilot that she She's the first woman to be a draft person at the Catana Corporation of America, that she carved rabbits from red water shipped down, that she smoked Sam's. That's all my mom straight up. That she did stocks every morning.

That she, when she died, she was worried about Y2K and, you know, it got water and put 18 grand of gold coins in the Macaumontecito. That's this very exactly, you know, 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 they they lose a little bit of them like every year you know and your ability to ring 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 and i don't really think of actors that doesn't work for me doesn't help me write and

And it doesn't work technically, like you never get the person you thought you were going to get. Sure. 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 the 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, the process is so long, at least for me, that 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, you know?

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 to say what I fucking think, you know. And I always get to that spot. And that's actually where I really write from. Yeah. I know a lot of writers who can identify with desperation and the knowledge of failure going forward. Yeah. I have a certain amount of time before the plane hits the ground. Just try to get the scene done. 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, there 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 observe, doesn't have to be my life. Greta's characters based a lot of my sister, Elle's characters based on a lot of women I knew.

So at, like that. 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, it comes from friends of mine. Okay. So in that way, she's lots of women. But anyways, having real people or 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 Benning wears it. She goes Dorothy, the protagonist, I guess, of the film. Yeah, 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? It's not for me. It's a little bit of everything. It's also cheap.

And my movie's Tier 1 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 really unique and special and it adds a little bit of magic to give them to a net bending. And then 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 Arklight Theater or whatever, they don't know about it. That's fine. They don't need to know about it. 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 an 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 I saved 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 presents 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 this 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 move,

about them and making a movie about someone sort of the opposite of abandoning them, it's a move in the right direction. Sure. You know, and it's just like, 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 of filming, like, recreating my dad. And it's like, or scenes in like... a hospital or anything like that. If you ever had anything like that happened to you, you should make a movie about it because when you make a movie about it, you're completely in control. 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 not as quite as personal and 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 an interview with your interview, you know, is it at this stage, does it give you a more closeness to that feeling, or is there more separation now, 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, you, you, you, you,

figure yourself out and get out of this prison you made for yourself, right? And so I'm used to thinking about all this, and then I kind of feel like I've been talking like this for years, not just this movie. Right. 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'm making these movies about like personal life and what it's like to be a parent or child or deal with all these issues, I kind of feel like it's my part of the contract is to like add something hopefully honest and revealing to the human compost pile, you know? And like Ginsburg does that a lot. I love Ginsburg in interviews. 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, or try to be open. I mean, you make a moment. You make a moment. You make a movie like this, you can't not, how could you not, how could you all of a sudden be like, you 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's true and what isn't true. Yeah. Maybe I'm not smart about that. No, no. You know the Elena Ferranti's approach? Sure. And that, you know, that new book, it's all her letters and for those who don't know, like 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 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 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? Partly because

it's when I was at age-ish and I wanted to talk about my mom being that age and me being that age so that means it's around then 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 our 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. 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 is real importance and our sort of more left-leaning version of America. You know, 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 the president of Iraq, the Iranian, the Islamic Revolution just happening 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, you know, 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, oh, that's so amazing to the themes I can already feel that are going to be central. Yeah, you're talking about the crisis of confidence speech. Yeah. Or one of the main parts of always talking about how we've lost meaning in our lives. 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 Coenoste was filmed then. Came out later, but it was filmed then

and that just life out of balance. You have flashes of that movie in your film. It's like kind of sampled inside my movie and labeled. But Conno Scuzzese is talking about life out of balance. The Queen David Bowie song Under Pressure is 80. But I feel like right around there are 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 is going too fast, you know. 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. Yeah.

You know, she's quite moved. You know, 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. You know, if you look at all those movies from the 30s and 40s, there's all the humor is so anti-exhaughts. authoritarian look at Bogart he's he's constantly finding the man and the powers at B and he's a huge movie star you know and my mom was infused with that kind of

sensibility and politics you know and so Carter of course she loves him he's unpretentious he's he's a working man my mom love working people so in making a portrait of my mom Carter is easy to associate with her it's like in her orbit. And then finding that speech just sort of made it like sunk, made it perfect. But I don't remember watching that speech at the time. And I knew about that speech, but I can't remember how I knew about it. 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 three, kind of like a matriarchal president. Like he's not

a patriarchal president. And the 70s is kind of like a feminine decade. It was an empath. Yeah. And doubt and and annual life and spirituality and just not patriarchal strength. Like talk about like hearing Trump on the radio today. Like

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. You know, that's in the hands of the geniuses at A-24. When that was set, it seemed like Hillary was going to be president. I will say that. So I don't know if they were thinking about that. And what that, is that, am I doom 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 in the movie, August, September. And, 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. 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 son first, the center of my galaxy. And you just don't know. if you can get someone like Annette 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 from as a mom and as a middle-aged woman and like like 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 restore their blood or have some overlap of 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've been thinking about Greta a lot

and that seemed great they seem like a really neat duo and that would like each other They're different generations, but they're both unusual women. They're not totally just traditional feminine women, and that my character, Greta'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 but when I met whether 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 And I was like, guys, it's 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 stern about 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. does 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 there, 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 L has so much depth and if you have her follow her instincts it often goes to a very heavy place

and and just a lot of what's the word like density you know and it's so and like she's like wildly unromantic that character everyone thinks like a girl like that would be and I'm talking like sexist tropes that we project onto women like that.

And so Elle 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 you can know, 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. Yeah.

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 rule. 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. I'm talking about you. You never seem into it. You can see them jousting in a very specific way, like almost like they're equals, even though one girl's 17 and one woman is, you know, in middle age. Well, I wanted them all to be really smart or, um, and not afraid to, I don't know, like just be non-compliant, right? And not, they're all pretty strong.

That's the word. They're all strong, I think. I find Abby, Greta, Gerwick's character, and a Benning's character to have a lot of similarities. And that sort of proto-feminist, Emilie 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 going to be into Madonna in like four years, you know, and be that kind of feminist, you know? And she sort of unnerves both the older women in the movie, I find. And neither of those women can get a handle on her, you know. 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?

curious where this how Santa Barbara is responding there's not a lot of great Santa Barbara movies I feel like yeah um well there's there's some people knew my parents still around so that was nice we had we had the screening there and there's there's some people who knew my mom so that 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 like like 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. Wow. So that creek, my sister hung out in that creek. So it's both very evocative, you know, I'm very, my childhood. And it's also a different place. I left when I was 18 and I'm 50.

And my dad died in 2004 and we sold a house, you know, so we haven't had a house there for a long time. And it's changed a lot. So it's also a very different place. But it's, I don't feel like incredibly connected to Santa Barbara in terms of just like when I'm there, like the things that are there, but like those trees, 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, 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 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. I love it when other people do that. I went to art school, then 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 Pierla Fu. 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 that sense. and I went to school with a conceptual artist named Hans Haka and there's artists like Hans Peter Feldman there's a lot of different conceptual artists who work in the semi-archival way

and that really excites me and I like sort of, I find it very kinetic and kind of pop and exciting in this movie is a little different than I use a lot of texts like Judy Bloom's book or The Road Less Travel than I credit them in the thing and Coyan Squatzy 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 in 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 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 Kainikotsky on the screen people are like what is that I don't know what that is and then they're forced to you know 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 and to me is another like text that I'm applying and

then people talk about the music in the movie so then another like I do think that we figure ourselves out in a relationship to cultural stuff like for me music was such a key thing to like understanding just my emotional life where what I was feeling which for me it was a hard thing to figure out, you know, and 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 want 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 representative?

I was thinking about if I had to put myself in that position to say, these are the four songs that I listen to all the time. Yeah. And then certain things work. Like, I'm not the biggest Devo fan, but oh, my God, that song worked great in my movie. And 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, what's it, their main song.

Marky Moon? Marky Moon. But then you're like, 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 song is 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, it's just not polite. Her shit does not sit back in your movie.

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? That was always in my script. That was like the end, Buzzcox 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 more people who are going to understand it. Yeah, and it very much fits, you know, it looks so real,

why can't I touch it? It tastes so real, can't I taste it? You know, that's, that's, it sums up the movie in so many ways. It resonates right now, too. Yeah. So you've done these two extremely 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? 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 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 him put it that way okay proud's almost too strong word but but I'm glad I made him I'm luck I feel really lucky I made him it's such a huge cultural privilege to get to make movies and to make a personal one is like 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 like in my life, it's like I feel like, well, if I'm good in anything, apparently I'm decent at this, or like I've made some connections with strangers.

And that's like super rewarding. Do you, 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 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 it all against those things, or do you try to ignore them? How do you engage with it? Oh, so Tullamix bag, like, whenever you do get something, it's really fun. Yeah, yeah. And it helps your film a lot. 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 like,

I joined the WGA on this film, you know. I was like, glad I paid those dudes. So it's, it totally wallops you. It is a roller coaster ride. You try to just like rest on the few good things you have that 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 and you go oh nice film but it's like it's like you're the groom at a wedding like what is what are people going to say only like only like a real brave person comes up and goes like that sucked you know well i think specifically you find yourself 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 yeah

in a way to confront you with that. People do tend to save it for online. Or like some reviewers, let me have it for sure. Do you ever, 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. 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 stomach, it's like painful to watch the movie. But I like watching little bits, you know.

It's very nerve-wracking. I see the end a lot because I come for, Q&A's. Oh, that makes sense. Are you a piece with the end now? Do you, 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 the closed door and listen to people laughing or, you know, not laughing. Um, but yeah, it's really hard to find meaning and then like, once while there's a review or something or someone, some friend said something or some other filmmakers said something. Often for me, that's, 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 you just, any negative thing you hear, you kind of glom onto it. And so it's a, it's an odd process. Well, Mike, thank you for being here. Let me say that with sincerity that I loved it as well. And that I hope a lot of people see it. It's a great movie. It's a 20th century women. Thanks so much. Thanks, Mike.