Mike Mills on "Beginners" and Making Stories About Ourselves.

Christopher Plummer and Mike Mills promoting "Beginners"Sometimes the beginning of awards season offers pleasant surprises. Such is the case with Beginners, one of the year's best films, which recently debuted on DVD and is now suddenly on the shortlist of potential Oscar contenders with early and surprisingly robust attention from both the Gotham Awards where it won the top prize and the Independent Spirit Awards (3 nominations including Best Feature). 

I had the opportunity to speak with writer/director Mike Mills recently about Beginners, his second feature. The film famously draws heavily from Mills' own life to depict the relationship between a lonely artist named Oliver (Ewan McGregor) and his gay father Hal (Christopher Plummer) who comes out late in life shortly before succumbing to cancer. Oliver does his own romantic soul searching with an actress named Anna (Melanie Laurent) after his father's death.

The film moved me deeply this past summer and I told Mills as much as we began to talk. I had just rewatched the film on the morning we spoke.

NATHANIEL: It's so fresh in my memory, but how about you? Have you watched the movie recently?

MIKE MILLS: No. You know, most of my friends are filmmakers. A lot of filmmakers I know, we never watch our films after they're done. They're like old lovers or old worlds we were in. Since I premiered it at Toronto in 2010 I haven't watched the whole thing straight through. I watch parts of it and when I do Q&As I end up watching the end a lot or I peek in. Parts of it are tolerable but watching the whole thing is slightly torturous. More than slightly torturous.

Because you've lived with it for so long?

MILLS: Yeah. I've seen it probably a hundred times in making it. It's not the same experience for me, obviously, as it is for the audience. I'm thinking of all the strings behind the puppets. Maybe in a few years. It's strange. It's kind of sad. My wife [Miranda July] doesn't -- I have a lot of director friends and none of us look at our movies. 

Well, Beginners is also so autobiographical. So is it at all harder to watch for that reason, than say your first feature Thumbsucker? 

MILLS: It's not -- well, I don't think so. While it is very autobiographical by the time I've written it, turned it into a story, cast Christopher and all these people, it is a story for me; it's not 1 to 1. For me, I'm the most aware of how much it is not my life. But having said that, I do watch the end a lot. So often, I watch Hal die. I've watched Hal die so many times. The section right after that where it talks about what you do when someone passes away, there are some very real things in there. The daisies at the end -- there's a black and white photo of daisies. That's my mom's photo. That part can really hit me. One, it reminds me of my mom. Two, 'whoa! I put something incredibly intimate and vulnerable in this very public thing.' It almost surprises me every time that it's in there.

"They're just personal photos, they're not art."

I was going to ask. It feels so personal. The very specific can become universal of course. But on the other hand, we are aware that it's based on your life. So...

I'm very happy to remember my dad. It's not like a painful thing. Even his death and even his illness and all of that, we had a lot of great times around that. We had more closeness than we had ever had. So most of the stuff I'm showing you in the film are positive memories, things I enjoy being around. To be honest, most of the stuff with the dad... I pretty much wrote down things my father said to me to the best of my memory. But by the time you've put it in a different place, you've put it into a larger fictional context, and you have Christopher saying it, I really don't go "oh, that's my pop". Do you know what I mean?

But those flowers slap me in the face. They kind of sneak up on my every time.  I worked on the father stuff so much and I got really used to thinking of it as the weird hybrid of personal and story.

[more on his fine screenplay, his art, and working with Oscar-buzzing Christopher Plummer]

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Two Men We (Still) Love

Yes, No, Maybe So: Haywire

Jose here with a new edition of Yes, No, Maybe So. Just a few days ago we brought you the trailer for Steven Soderbergh's Contagion and now here's the trailer for Haywire, a movie he will release a mere four months later. Apparently the whole retirement thing just helped to crank the creative juices inside him...

YES. Once again, that cast!

How did he handle two casts with these people? Can you imagine working with Fassy, Ewan, Gwynnie, Kate, Marion and Channing in the same year? Maybe they are the ones who are more like "can you imagine working with Soderbergh?".

Keep on reading for more awesome Soderbergh-ness...

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"The Link! The Link!"

My New Plaid Pants Meet Brienne, who'll be very important on Game of Thrones. Eventually.
Critical Condition asks what it will take to get Ewan McGregor an Oscar nomination? We've been asking this for years. He ought to have at least two by now (Moulin Rouge! and Trainspotting)
Tom Shone makes a sound ExPat confession about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. Heh.
Frankly My Dear remembers Richard Linklater's Slacker for its 20th.
Pajiba Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) will play Hervé "the plane! the plane!" Villechaize in the biographical My Dinner With Hervé. Like Pajiba I don't see a resemblance at all but Dinklage is a great actor so we wish him all the best in the role.
Sunset Gun recommends Over the Edge with Matt Dillon as a great time capsule and timeless rebellion teen film. I haven't seen this one but I'm now intrigued.
PopMatters I'm not going anywhere near Zookeeper but I'm finding the reviews somewhat interesting in a staring through thick glass kind of way. This one wonders which voice actor has the worst job in the film. That's a good question! 

Several blogs have been noting the revision of the Straw Dogs poster -- the original version is to your right where Alexander Skarsgård is mysteriously inside of or ramming into James Marsden's eye (ouch!) rather than reflected in his glasses. Poster design is so half-assed these days, right? It looks much better (to your left) now all black and white and reflected. BUT while they were revising shouldn't they have come up with their own design rather than just recreating the original poster from the 70s Dustin Hoffman film?

Poster design is just so frustrating in Hollywood. The internet reminds us every single day --  and usually several times an hour -- that there are abundant graphic artists out there with the talent to make this another golden age of movie poster design and it just never quite happens. Hollywood, which runs on images, doesn't trust the visual literacy of its clients.

Maybe they shouldn't. I mean I'm sure you've all heard someone look at the rare illustrated movie poster and say "is that a cartoon?" but it's still sad-making.

Review: "Beginners"

Have you ever found yourself wincing in premonitory fear that a gay character or theme will be mishandled by filmmakers or actors? Set those worries aside when approaching the expressive charming BEGINNERS. Though the story about a lonely bachelor artist Oliver (Ewan McGregor) and his newly-out dying father Hal (Christopher Plummer) is fictionalized, it has the stamp of the exquisitely personal about it. It's handmade, in other words, never to be mistaken for a movie made by committee. Writer/director Mike Mills' (Thumbsucker) own father came out of the closet when he was in his thirties and the film is an obviously loving tribute from son to father.

Gay characters in the movies are sometimes little more than caricatures and depictions still largely fall into "types". Older gay men have it especially rough in media representations; if they aren't altogether invisible they're desexualized or depicted as lonely and pitiable. Beginners won't have it like that. One could argue that it's practically heroic in its willful embrace of wholly human characters, no matter their age or sexual preference. Hal is played with lively curiousity by Christopher Plummer with that customary dark twinkle in his eye. It's actually brilliant casting since Ewan McGregor is such a kindred spirit when it comes to those mischievous undercurrents...

Read the Full Review @ Towleroad