Mike Mills is a filmmaker, artist, human being that I could talk to for hours. I feel close to the way he frames human experiences through objects, music, design, cultural asides to comment on what's happening in the world and how that reflects personal characterizations. He keeps his characters close and then zooms out to acknowledge the rest of the world before honing back in on his particular people. This technique removes any navel-gazing critiques because it doesn't feel like a gimmick but a genuine extension of his own experience in relation to the personal stories of his father's coming out to him as an 80-year old man in Beginners and now, his mother's ask of his female friends to help raise him to be a good man in 20th Century Women.

20th Century Women boasts an appealing cast of women and the men who listen to their guidance, dance with them and ponder their sudden moves of applicational distance. Annette Bening reps Mills' real-life single mother, here going by the name of Dorothea. Greta Gerwig stars as Abbie, a punk rock photographer who rents a room in Dorothea's house. Elle Fanning is Julie, a free love teen neighbor who sneaks into the house to talk about the trouble she's involved in. Billy Crudup is William, the de facto man of the house because Dorothea's ex-husband has fled (the flip of this coin is Beginners, where Christopher Plummer reps Mills' real-life father, much later in life). And newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann stars as Jamie, a skateboarding teen who reps Mills' young experience of his introduction to art, music and feminism from the women in his life.

The year is 1979. The place is Santa Barbara, California. Mills' simple story is enhanced by immense detail to time and place and how specific essays, books, music and mixed tapes provide a new worldview. And how that worldview can run counter to the larger world outside of these gifts. Mills' script features a mini-biography for each character and how they got to where they are in the story. The Great Depression, cervical cancer, lack of college education, commune living, psychologist parent, etc. They're small asides, but the asides add personal circles to characters who already feel fully formed. The extra attention is Mills' expanding heart for the people who shaped him.

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Image via A24

Recently, I got the chance to speak with Mills about how this film responds to Beginners and how film has fallen behind all other artforms in terms of gender representation. But we spent most of our conversation talking about the importance of DIY artistic communities because the week we talked, the Ghost Ship tragedy had just occurred the weekend before and the body count from the warehouse fire was still rising. The DIY scene was formative to my own life experience, because I started a few spaces, played in a band in many of them and worked for a record label that lost members of its family to the Oakland fire and though it's a different time period, that basement underground culture is heavily featured in 20th Century Women.

With how personal Mills is with his films, I decided to make this interview slightly more personal and talk about what his film made me reflect on at the time: DIY, punk, and the exploding teen underground. This also felt appropriate, because his approach to time and culture shaping characters and himself is something I feel expand my heart when watching his films.

COLLIDER: First of all, I am a big fan of Beginners and 20th Century Women, so I’m wondering if—in between those films—did you attempt any other scripts or did going from a personal story about your father to a personal story about your mother feel circular and necessary for you?

MIKE MILLS: It wasn’t like it was circular and necessary but one definitely led to the other. I didn’t see me doing these two films in a row. When I did Beginners, it really just came out of the craziness that happened in my life. My dad coming out, my dad dying in the way that he did made me do Beginners and then in doing that movie I got a little whiff of my mom in Mary Page [Keller]’s character. There’s a brief moment of a woman based on my mom in that film and after touring that movie—I did so many cities—I did press and Q+A’s in 10 U.S. cities and all over the world and it was really interesting to see that real concrete observed memories that I didn’t explain, that are just completely portraiture of my dad, those were the scenes that communicated the most with the most people and I loved that. That was really a beautiful thing to be a part of as a filmmaker. I had real proof, like this works.

When I was doing my press tour (for Beginners), I started doing this movie and I wasn’t sure what it was and I work in a really long weird way but I wanted to make something about the weirdness, I was kind of like my mom’s little husband. I was the only straight man in the house I was my mom’s partner when I was a little younger person and then I have two older sisters who are like 10 and 7 years older. So I was very much raised in this matriarchy or raised by women and a dad who is really sweet but just not present when I was a kid. So I had the idea that I wanted it to be about that but it took me years to kind of like sew in all the pieces.

Yeah, it makes complete sense.

Personally I’ve got a lot on my mind this morning, I worked for K Records for about four years...

MILLS: Very cool.

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Image via A24

I know that your wife, Miranda [July], had a record on K before she became a filmmaker, that was pre my time there, but I was working Khaela [Maricich] and The Blow and all that. I was with K and an artist who we had worked with [Joey Casio] and also an intern that I had at the time [Edmond Lapine] unfortunately passed in the Oakland Ghost Ship fire. So this morning and all weekend, I’ve been reading many, many remembrances from friends. Obviously with K and many bands I worked with or played with or spaces I operated within this community, this morning I’m thinking of the importance of the underground scene which is something that is very prevalent in 20th Century Women. I was wondering if you could share how underground and fringe spaces are important to you for bands to find their sounds and art collectives to co-mingle and how they’re kind of necessary. And if we can protect those spaces because it’s kind of getting vilified a little bit in a lot of the press for safety reasons but missing the finer, prettier points of such communities.

MILLS: Yeah, well that’s such an important and real thing and I’m very sorry your community lost people to such a sad thing. I am with you. It’s crucial to have any place to be able to make things, or to develop an audience, or to develop a community.

In terms of my movie, bars in the 70’s were really boring and the vital communities emerged on the side of them because bars were really sleepy and unconnected to creativity. For me in southern California I wasn’t into the sun, beach, getting tan or any of that. So it was very alienating for me. A lot of my family as close as we were also there was a lot of shit going on underneath the surface that was very just not well and not spoken of. In terms of marketing, I was being told to listen to Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, and The Rolling Stones—all amazing performers—but they were people that didn’t speak to my problems. Then I heard about like The Raincoats, The Clash, and Siouxsie and the Banshees and this other community of music makers, which was so important to me. It sounds cliché but it gave me my emotional life, it gave me company.

Even though I couldn’t go to their shows I could occasionally go to an LA show of local rascals, like when I saw the The Dils in 1980. Going to see live music was a whole world that was something excitingly other in comparison to what the mainstream culture was providing for me. It really saved my emotional life. It’s how I grew up, it’s why I looked into going to art school, it’s how I figured out I wanted to be a filmmaker. These communities were my real school that overlapped with all the other little schools I went to.

As someone who lived in that time when Abbie (Greta Gerwig) gives him the mixed tape and turns him on to music, when Abbie gives him a book on feminism and turns him on to that, and then she teaches him how to dance, these are things that mostly women in my life did for me. But the transfer of that knowledge, that energy and worldview were some of the best things that ever happened to me. And some people are like, “Oh she gave him a tape,” but no it’s not just she gave him a tape, she gave him the world. And for people who feel like they’re given the world via a tape they go seeking out what’s around them to experience and they’re often led to the underground.

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Image via A24

Yeah, there’s one thing that you said that I do feel like my own personal education was learning how to maneuver through the art and music scene and work with bands, work with artists, when they’re starting new and it revealed new things that I thought I was good at that I wouldn’t have learned in school.

MILLS: Absolutely.

You brought up the music in 20th Century Women, it does include many favorites of mine during that period in which I was not yet alive but did help me grow up to be a better person as Abbie says about her mixed tape.

There’s a specific line of dialogue that I thought was really interesting and it speaks a little bit to the film in a circular fashion. The tactile line concerns The Raincoats and how you can hear their passion stronger than their musical capabilities and it makes their music better. But additionally, on a separate narrative of the film about how good men are receptive to women’s ideas, there’s something that’s interesting in that Kurt Cobain is the one who reissued that Raincoats album on a major label and also The Vaselines. He’s kind of one of the first major hard rock people who exposed men to non-mainstream female rock musicians. I was just wondering if that extra ripple was something you were playing with?

MILLS: Well that line that you’re talking about I do love that she’s talking about how they don’t have talent and that’s what releases their raw emotion, or gives them another gift by not having talent that’s so much what punk is about. Greta and I, we love The Raincoats. I learned of The Raincoats way before Mr. Cobain’s time and was turned on to them by women so I do really associate them with the girls that I knew, the women that I knew in the 80’s. But for curious kids a decade later, Kurt as a figurehead certainly was beneficial for many young men in discovering them. It’s interesting that you point that out, I think it definitely places you in a very specific time as a kid, which is something I love to know.

Image via A24
Image via A24

For me, the women who introduced me to The Raincoats wouldn’t call themselves feminists because feminism [at the time] wasn’t associated with the punk scene like it should naturally be. So what Abbie’s saying is kind of paraphrasing that great Greil Marcus essay called “The Process of Punk” and it’s kind of a lot about what you’re talking about in general. He’s saying, the process of punk is someone who’s nobody— someone who’s not famous—someone who’s not talented, that figures out that they want to say something. And they want to say something to the audience, a community, and the community wants to say something back to them and they like it and they have more to say in response or on their own, and that is the process of punk. To me that is also describing K Records, that is describing so many of the scenes that have come up. It’s really beautiful. That essay came with (The Raincoats’) Kitchen Tapes, one of their later compilations. You should look at it, it’s kind of like Greil Marcus at his best and I even just love that phrase, “the process of punk” like I could even just have easily named 20th Century Women that: "The Process of Punk."

I was actually wondering if you see that in your filmmaking? Is it a punk process?

MILLS: Well, my first love was skateboarding and then that turned into punk music and music in general. I’m not lying, I used to sit in my room in the dark listening to music very loud for hours and it was kind of how I started to figure out who I actually am. It was music that provided my company, my personal space, and gave me the bravery to try and figure out what I wanted to be. So all of my creativity is that of a frustrated musician.

Like punk, skating culture is also very D.I.Y. or self empowered. You’re not waiting for anybody to tell you that you’re professional or valid. So both those cultures just gave me the experience that so many people got, by just saying, “I’m going to do it; nobody needs to tell me that I am ready to do it.” Then I what I told myself I’d become is an artist and I went to art school and then what I told myself I’d be was a filmmaker.

I didn’t go to film school and I didn’t get into the artform in the “right way.” I didn’t come up through the ranks and I do think it’s because I came from that scene where you don’t need anointment, you don’t need the money, you don’t need a professionalized person to say that you are valid, you just gotta do it. Now, when I went to art school I was supposed to become an artist, yes, but I got into filmmaking cause I wanted to get out of the smallness of the art world. I thought the art world was kind of talking to itself—especially in New York, where I went to school—it’s a very monied, fancy culture that I just couldn’t relate to. So that’s kind of the punk attitude, like when you got to a certain level, it wasn’t punk enough. My scene just got too rich, fancy and weird. Me and a bunch of my friends got into graphic design and then filmmaking as a way to get out of that and do something that’s a bit more wild and in the street than in the refined space of high art.

Since this film is about women imparting new information on a young man, let’s talk gender a bit. Do you feel like current conversations about gender now are advancing within all the creative fields we’ve discussed? What kind of work do you think could be done and how much responsibility do men have in joining the conversation or stepping aside at a certain point?

MILLS: I went to college from 1984 to 1988 and I’m actually [currently] weirdly looking at my school right now. I went to Cooper Union in the Lower East Side, so that’s just a trip to have this conversation right now. Anyways, gender conversations weren’t really happening in the art scene, the music scene, at that time. Opposing Ronald Reagan was such a big deal in New York and so was fighting against AIDs. Our activism, many of the artistic community’s activism was in that realm. Focus goes to one or two big tickets items at a time and for my time it was Reagan and AIDs.

Act Up wasn’t just about fighting against AIDS; it was a strong queer presence. Under the larger tent of AIDs activism, queer identity and queer power was such a part of the conversation then. I feel like that is what echoes between that time and now. In terms of the different gender ideas now they’re more open. We’re having more fluid ideas of genders and the relationship to art, of course. I’m working right now in the film world, we’re talking about the film world and to be honest, the film world is weirdly particularly backwards on a lot of these things or, at best, it’s just stuck in the past.

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Image via A24

To be a man making a movie about women is such a trip to a lot of the norms in the film world, you know. It feels like so Gender Studies 101 to try and be a decent male ally but in film it’s a surprise to a lot of people. All I can hope for or try to do is create something decent for the women that I love in my real life and whom I’m writing about and to the community of women that I’m with and that I aspire to be a good ally. But in film, that language, which sounds so 101, is treated as if it’s the first time anybody heard it and it’s definitely not the first time. This is a very common issue in other scenes, and that discussion and action has been happening, but it just feels completely foreign in this scene. I feel like the film world has the most work to do for gender equality and gender representation when you compare it to art, music, and literature and I guess it’s because it’s so related to money or something, it costs so much money to make films.

Ultimately, when it comes to film culture, I’m not in it enough to have any real analysis of why it is this way. I’m an amateur in a lot of ways. But since I’ve been around so many creative communities it’s just kind of shocking sometimes how… it is especially the big power part of it I really don’t know it and I’m an amateur of understand it. But it’s just kind of shocking sometimes how…

Out of the loop—

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image via A24

MILLS: Yeah, right out of the loop of contemporary ideas it is.

Since we’re almost done, I just wanted to say I have your artwork on my wall for a piece you did for (the Beastie Boys') Mike D’s MOCA expo in Los Angeles, a few years back.

MILLS: Oh yeah? That piece is actually pieces from publications in 1979 and it was something that I put together while working on this film obviously set in 1979.

I love how you use cultural moments and photographic or stock footage inserts to kind of give some extra cultural foundation to your characters. These asides are always so illuminating. I greatly relate to your time specific anthropological asides...

MILLS: I feel like I could have another career where I am just an artist that only takes historical moments and reframes them and represents them you know as just a grid of shared experience. I would be very happy if I could make pieces like the one you’re referring to, because I love studying time via products, cameras, ads, magazines, etc. When I’m not in school I’m a great student [laughs]. I really love just trying to understand things in how things are presented to us. I really feel like historical consciousness is the key to liberating yourself from all the traps that are out there in our contemporary life.

[Pauses] I’m kind of wondering what the fuck to do now with what the world is right now and I might go more into that type of art.

Yeah, this time period we definitely could use some Mike Mills’ capsules to capture this moment that we’re all in right now; it just feels very fractured. Well, thank you very much; it’s truly been a treat to speak with you about all this.

MILLS: Thank you and you as well.

20th Century Women plays in New York and Los Angeles starting December 28 and will expand cities in January 2017.

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