In the name of the daughter

Miller's ever evolving career began with a voracious childhood appetite for the written word. She remembered being assigned "Moby Dick" when she was 11 while the rest of the class read "Little Women." "I was really turned on by it in every way," she said of the Melville novel. "It's a story an 11-year-old kid would be interested in. It's not like [the teacher] gave me 'The Golden Bowl' or something." Miller said she was later influenced by Russian writers -- Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Gogol -- because "there's something about their sensibility that I find close to my own. They clearly capture rapidly fluctuating emotion in a beautiful way." During a post-college stint as an actress -- she had parts in "Regarding Henry" and "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" -- she toured in Peter Brook's 1988 production of "The Cherry Orchard," and she thinks that if a viewer were looking for Chekhov in her new film, they might find it. "There's a sort of lightness to the sadness," she said.

Miller majored in painting at Yale and exhibited her work after graduation. "Painting was a wonderful job for me," she said. "It was very physical and quiet and contemplative." But, she said, "the part of me that's a story-teller wasn't satisfied." So she started making movies, though oddly, they did not tell stories. Her early cinematic projects were "totally non-narrative, based on my dreams, very idiosyncratic; they were on loops and I showed them embedded in the wall or in triptychs." The lasting influence of this period -- when Miller was merging painting with film -- is evident in the films she's making now: "Personal Velocity" contains lengthy montages of still photos, and "Jack and Rose" opens with a spiraling shot of a flower.

Miller likes her films to surprise viewers, to "get under people's skins." When I told her that I found the relationship between Jack and Rose repellent in part because the chemistry between 46-year-old Day-Lewis and 16-year-old Camilla Belle was so strong that it was easy to root for the father and daughter characters to get it on, she said, "That's exactly what [the movie] is supposed to do. You're invited to lose your balance."

Despite the disconcertingly surreal effects of her work, Miller said she is much more tethered to reality now that she's a mother. "Dreams and art, that was my life," she said of her younger self. "I was interested in reverie. I wasn't needed by anyone." Giving birth, she said, catapulted her back to this planet. "I think that I became more earthy, less ethereal. Because it was all about blood and flesh and reality." Plus, she said, "the expectation of being needed is ultimately extremely satisfying."

Miller claimed that she had recently heard there were fewer female film directors than there were women in any other profession, including "welding and science." Her identity as a woman has often eclipsed her identity as a professional, she said: "Just once I'd like to be invited to be on a panel with a man on it. I wish there could be some acknowledgment that women are part of the larger tradition of filmmaking and not ghettoized all the time." Miller routinely works with a group of women she described as being "like sisters" to her, including cinematographer Ellen Kuras, producer Lemore Syvan, casting director Cindy Tolan and editor Sabine Hoffman. "I guess having them around makes me understand better why men hire men," she said. "It's just easier with your own sex; you understand each other better." But, she was clear, "I like working with men. My production designer Mark Ricker is a man. I would be open to having a man cut one of my films."

"The Ballad of Jack and Rose" marks the first time that Miller has ever worked with her husband, though she first sent him an early draft of the script 10 years ago, before they'd ever met.

"I sent him the script thinking he was the right man to play Jack," said Miller, who has gone through 33 drafts of "Jack and Rose" in the decade since she began it. "I thought he was the best actor who existed, and Daniel has something that makes people side with him," she said, explaining that the power to move the audience to empathy was crucial for such a combustible character. But back in 1995, he turned her down. "He wrote me this very sweet note explaining that at that moment he was not ready to experience everything he would need to experience to play Jack." The character, full of terminal illness, guilt about the way he's raised his daughter, obsession with the land, a violent streak, and possibly incestuous feelings for his offspring, does seem like an awful lot to sign up for.

Next Page: "Daniel's not really capable of doing anything simply as a favor"

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