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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Rebecca Miller talks about her new movie "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," directing her famous husband, and the inevitable questions about her legendary father.
Mar 25, 2005 | "I warn you, I really don't want to talk about my father," said Rebecca Miller, sitting down across from me at a Manhattan restaurant. It was a rickety start to our interview, which trailed directly after one she'd done with "Fresh Air's" Terry Gross. Gross had apparently put Miller, the writer and director of the new film "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," in an uncomfortable Vulcan mind-meld on the subject of her dad, the playwright Arthur Miller, who passed away in February.
A brunette who is beautiful in a thin, pre-Raphaelite way, Miller appeared slightly menacing; her eyes focused on mine like a suspicious housecat who would rather scratch a proffered hand than sniff it. I assured Miller that we didn't need to talk about her father, yet.
But she wasn't done. "It's just that A, that's really not why anyone would go to see a movie," she said with exasperation, "and B, I resent it when someone hasn't thought about a thing enough that they can talk to someone about the thing they're supposed to talk about." Miller gave a pointed so don't fuck with me or I'll tell the next reporter how unprepared you were laugh and managed to un-puff herself enough to order a tomato juice.
Miller, 42, is one of those almost comically hyphenated professionals, though the painter-actress-screenwriter-novelist-director does tend to wear only two of her hats at one time -- three if you count the time she adapted and directed her second film, the 2002 Sundance Grand Jury winner "Personal Velocity," from her own novel. At least her varied vocations obscure her also being a multi-hyphenate celebrity relation: the daughter of Arthur Miller and his wife of 40 years, the late photographer Inge Morath, and the wife of actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
"The Ballad of Jack and Rose"
Directed by Rebecca Miller
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Camilla Belle, and Catherine Keener
Day-Lewis stars in "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" as Jack Slavin, a terminally ill father who has raised his 16-year-old daughter Rose (Camilla Belle) alone on an abandoned island commune. As he prepares to die, Jack invites his girlfriend (Catherine Keener) and her sons to move into his and Rose's utopia, and Rose's jealous devotion to Jack becomes fierce, dangerous and, yes, downright incestuous.
Miller was born in 1962, the year her father's second wife, Marilyn Monroe, died. Her parents had met on the set of Monroe's last film, the Arthur Miller-penned "Misfits," where Morath was a still photographer and he was in the final throes of his marriage. The family lived in Roxbury, Conn., in what Miller said was "then real country" -- though it was also home to artists like her parents and sculptor Alexander Calder. "I remember the bulldozers as they made their ineluctable advance across the landscape," she said. "I would weep, really cry, when I saw a house go up."
Some of that grief is reborn on-screen in Jack Slavin, a rigid conservationist, though Miller said her interest in commune life came from memories of her half-brother, 16 years her senior, who "experienced the '60s in a very total way." When she was a child, Miller visited her brother on the commune where he lived, and "idealized that way of life." She noted that while she pulled her inspiration for Jack from the leftist radicalism of the 1960s, she's not sure that she hasn't created a very conservative hero. "You have people who are radical Christians, all the way on the other side, who [like Jack] don't want their children to have contact with the outside world," she said.
