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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
I know you've changed a few details about the story, but you've really tried to capture the essence of Kirn's novel.
I think the spirit is very much the same. I really liked the book, and it was the right project at the right time for me. My mother had just passed away -- this is in 1999 -- and I was looking for something that spoke to that sense of, you know, "Life is short. What are you doing?" This seemed like the way to go to the next level. I was actually asking myself, "What are you doing for the world?" What I hope to achieve in this is something like what Hal Ashby achieved in "Harold and Maude" -- something that creates a big space, opens up a different perspective that's a little more permissive, you know?
Walter Kirn is a literary legend, on his own sort of small scale. Were you apprehensive about meeting him?
Oh, I was scared shitless. You read that book and you just know, that's gotta be him. That's gotta be things that happened to him. So you expect him to be really protective and he just wasn't. My favorite thing about our relationship was after I was smelling how bad this was going to be -- I had already gotten 20 or 30 noes -- he was over at my house and I was wondering if this was a message, all these noes. He was like, "None of us really knows what we're doing. We're all just guessing. That's all it means to be human." I was like, "Whoa, wait a sec." So I wrote it all down, and Keanu's whole last scene [as Justin's orthodontist-guru] is something Walter told me in my house. The whole project was full of that kind of mirroring and transference -- people becoming like fictional characters, and characters becoming like real people.
On some level, I still have this mythology about independent directors -- you know, you have to suffer and starve for your art. But people like you and Spike Jonze and Jonathan Glazer and Michel Gondry are coming out of making TV commercials, getting paid serious money, and then making good movies. It's an exciting shift, but to an old college Marxist like me it's also disturbing. I mean, you guys are corporate whores, right?
I had that same viewpoint. I went to Cooper Union, I was a student of [German conceptual artist] Hans Haacke. I was a punk-rock skater kid, but I was bourgeois. I grew up in Santa Barbara, where my dad was a museum director. I was doing record covers for the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth, so I was in a commercial environment in some ways. But we all left art school hating art museums and galleries, trying to find some way to work in the public sphere and still be somehow subversive. We thought, well the visual glue of the public sphere is design. If you fuck with that you're doing something powerful. This is 20-year-old thinking, but we believed it.
And then, here comes Spike Jonze. I knew Spike from skateboarding and the Alleged Gallery [a legendary downtown Manhattan art space], and he kind of fucked me up. He could be best friends with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, bastion of independence, and do whatever frickin' ad he wanted. And he shamelessly self-promoted. And he was doing really good work. So who cares what category he's in, right? Whether he was doing a commercial or not, it was really mind-melting.
I wanted to do film stuff and didn't have any film training, I didn't go to film school. And I wanted to do it with a certain legitimacy. I wanted to do it with a certain level of production values, with a certain mainstream-ness. I didn't want to be ghettoized into independent-land. I wanted to play with the big guys. So that meant I had to use tools that were really expensive.
I have no problem with doing videos; videos are totally artistic and wonderful and great. Doing ads is a whole different story, and I was very uneasy about it. I rationalize it as: It's my film school. The first time I made a Nike ad I had no fucking idea how to shoot a medium shot or a wide shot. I was asking people on the set, and pretending I knew how. I really felt Robin Hood-ish: I was stealing from the man.
Eight years later, I don't feel that way anymore. I'm blue chip. I'm a coveted commercial director, and it all feels like something I talked myself into. I did learn a lot, it did get me where I am. I got to practice making "Thumbsucker" for a number of years. I bought a house. And, you know, I just retired. I came to another one of these things: "What the fuck am I doing? I can't be reading Thoreau and doing an ad for DuPont. It just does not work." So I quit. I don't have a great rationalization for it. I kind of like that I don't have a great rationalization for it, and that I'm going to say it in print.
Well, you come out of this directing a movie with an incredible cast. How did that happen? I mean, you seem like a great guy, but it's not like Vincent D'Onofrio and Keanu Reeves run to the phone because Mike Mills is on the line.
Well, it was years in the making. Think of any film production company in America, including Sony Classics -- they all passed on the script. And in Europe. It took almost two years to get all those noes. And simultaneously the script was going out. You know, Elijah Wood was going to be the kid, and Scarlett Johansson was going to be the girl. It was spreading -- they're telling other people and they're telling other people. With the bankers, it wasn't going well. With the actors, it had this completely different life.
You were in danger of becoming the author of one of those legendary unproduced scripts.
Totally. Very much. Tilda Swinton didn't even read the script when I first met her. Luckily, she knew about me from videos. She was in L.A. a few years ago and she met me, and we just hit it off. The thing that interested me about "Thumbsucker" was looking at all our flaws and foibles and secrets, and not treating them as failures. Tilda is a complete activist for that idea, so we had an intense bond right there. To be honest, I think she liked me, or what I was saying, more than she liked the script. But once Tilda is on board, it sends up a certain flag: OK, this is probably performance-driven, and it's definitely not this quirky, weird, odd thing that "Thumbsucker" says it is.
Keanu was looking for something small, some way to get away from "The Matrix," and he liked Tilda. Tilda was a valuable commodity in his eyes. So that was kind of the way it worked. Vince Vaughn loved Vincent D'Onofrio. And Vincent D'Onofrio, knowing that he'd be working with Tilda, felt very comfortable. I mean, Vincent and Tilda, improvising together over a period of weeks -- it's like psychoanalytic heaven! So Tilda was the tentpole that supported everything.
