Interview: Miranda July

The day before we speak, Miranda July sends me an email. “You’ve spent far too much time holding things together that don’t belong together. Today they come undone and you let them. Good luck.” Whether her prediction was correct is between her and however many others received it – July has set up an ‘oracle’ service to promote her second film, The Future, and if you sign up she’ll send you your future twice a week. From anyone else, this kind of whimsy would be completely unacceptable. From July – the writer, director and star of the film – it’s all just par for the course.

You’d be familiar with Miranda July from any number of vantage points. You might own her acclaimed book of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You. Or perhaps you’ve submitted an assignment for her online arts community project, ‘Learning To Love You More’, or bought a pair of pillowcases she scrawled on for Melbourne’s Third Drawer Down boutique (‘Here you will dream of endless kissing’; ‘Here you will dream of people you admire exposing your fraudulence’). If you’re a real die-hard fan, you’ll have copies of the girlzine she published in college, Snarla – or Joanie4Jackie, the filmzine she went on to make. But for the purpose of this article, Miranda July is a filmmaker; and following 2005’s Me And You And Everyone We Know, The Future is her second feature.

“The first time, every single thing seems like a huge deal – because it’s The First Time,” July says tentatively, down the line from her hometown of Los Angeles. “So the second film was easier in the sense that everything felt quite familiar and less scary… [On the other hand], I was looking for money for The Future in the heart of the recession while, frankly, my first movie came out kind of at the very end of a golden era for indie film making.” It’s undeniable that the buzz of the first helped the reception of the second; The Future premiered to a full 1200-seat room at Sundance in January.

The Future is the story of Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), a couple of 35-year-olds who decide to adopt a sick cat. With 30 days until Paw Paw arrives in their home, they’re struck with a pretty relatable Gen X realisation: they haven’t become the grownups they intended to be, and won’t get a second chance. So they quit their jobs, turn off the internet, and give themselves a month to get it right. For Jason that means taking each opportunity that comes his way and each coincidence as a sign, while Sophie, who wants to dance for a living, promises herself she’ll upload a dance per day to YouTube. In a nod to the kind of creative block July admits to being terrified of, Sophie is paralysed and can’t complete the first dance. Failing, she runs away from both Jason and herself – and the 30 days tick past in a very unusual way…

The Future differs from Me And You And Everyone We Know, not only in tone (where the former is funny, romantic and hopeful, the latter, while no less funny, is dark and filled with existential angst), but in how it plays with the surreal. By now you’ve already heard that it involves a talking cat, but the film also features a personified moon, a crawling t-shirt, and an extremely difficult relationship with Time. The idea for the movie can be tracked back to a performance piece July wrote in 2006, ‘Things We Don’t Understand And Are Definitely Not Going To Talk About’ (she has an Eggers-esque knack for titles). But because performance offers a lot more freedom and fluidity than film, one of the challenges for July was finding a way to translate the surrealism of the piece into a movie – and knowing when to hold herself back when it didn’t quite work.

“Performance is much looser,” she explains. “Plus, you have to be very careful about which surreal things really carry a weight of important emotions – and which ones are just super cool.” This, for July, is what it’s all about. For her, the fantastical, the dreamlike, the unreal concepts and characters are a way to embody an emotion, rather than just portray it. Hearing a character say, ‘Stop the clock, I can’t stand to hear this’ is one thing; actually watching him stuck in time while his partner moves on is another.

With The Future, July also holds tight to her longstanding fascination with strangers. Her ‘Eleven Heavy Things’ sculptures at the 2009 Venice Biennale included a white podium just big enough for two people to stand on, with scrawled text: ‘We don’t know each other. We’re just hugging for the picture. When we’re done I’ll walk away quickly. It’s almost over.’ For ‘Learning To Love You More’, the online crowd-sourcing project she began in 2002, she would post regular assignments for anyone who stumbled upon it, like ‘Draw a picture of your friend’s friend’ and ‘Take a picture of strangers holding hands’. In Me And You And Everyone We Know, July plays Christine, an artist whose work involves narrating the lives of strangers in photos, and in The Future, Jason goes door to door to meet them.

“I fear that if I get too lost in my own version of life, then I’m going to miss something – like, something pretty big,” July explains, when I ask what it is about strangers she finds so inspiring. “And it’s so easy [not to]. All you have to do is talk to someone you don’t know – ideally out of your world – and suddenly you’re faced with, ‘Oh right, this life I’m living? This is just one story that I tell myself again and again, but it’s surrounded by all of these simultaneous stories.’ And that’s kind of the best feeling. I mean, it’s hard to hold that in your head for very long at a time, but it’s worth trying. Again and again.”

[Published in BRAG issue 414]