(Miranda July, above.)(This talk with Miranda July originally appeared in Venice Magazine in June of 2005.)
by Terry Keefe
The "ensemble film of people with problems" is a staple of the indie film world these days. The stories often take place in urban or suburban locations and revolve around a group of characters with peripheral connections to each other. Their different paths will cross repeatedly as the story progresses. Then, a tragedy of some sort often brings all the characters together. That might be a suicide, or perhaps a swinger's session that goes badly. There have been so many of these films made that they're a genre of their own. Are you ready to buy a ticket to a different film yet? Don't if the ensemble film of people with problems is filmmaker Miranda July's very unique Me and You and Everyone We Know. At first glance the elements are familiar: a single father with two confused children; a struggling artist and the depressive art gallery curator who she's courting for a showing; and two randy teenage girls who befriend an older male neighbor with a perverted streak. Actually, that last storyline is closer to the darkly comic bent which sets July's film apart. A common theme of the aforementioned genre of films is that, despite our differences, we are all human underneath and just want to be loved. July's characters certainly are desperate to find a connection with their fellow human beings, but it's just how far they're willing to go to find that connection which is striking and truly puts her film in a class of its own, and also in no genre in particular. One of the most memorable examples of this would be the character of 7-year old Robby (Brandon Ratcliff), who is left to his own devices to wander the Internet, and strikes up a conversation with an adult looking for a sex partner. Robby manages to hold his own in the repeated instant messenger exchanges, despite that what he is clearly looking for is less of a sexual exchange than someone to talk to. At the same time, and this will be controversial in some quarters, July doesn't back away from the undeniable fact that children have sexual impulses, something they share with the adults in the film. The film indicates that we are in fact all human underneath despite our differences, but that "human" can just as easily mean impulsive, desperate, and perverse as it can a host of more positive adjectives. Simultaneously, though, this is not something July judges her characters for. There are no good or bad guys in the film, nor any easy lessons learned. Her characters simply are. And even when their actions make you very uncomfortable, you will recognize them as, well, me, you, and everyone we know. Forgive me that segueway - it's accurate.
When July set out to write this first feature, she says, "I just had a territory when I started. I knew it was an ensemble cast, so I could keep adding characters. But I never really plotted it out. It was more of a cumulative process." This looser writing method clearly enabled her to explore some of the tangents the script goes off on, while still managing to ensure that every character belonged in the world of the script and connected to the overall themes of loneliness and of people trying to connect. July says that the themes of the film "were kind of a touchstone in myself. I would be able to hold up things that I'd write and say 'This is of this movie or it isn't.'" As for how she came up with many of the characters and their quirks, July further explains that she "obsessively" writes down things she hears and sees in her daily life and says, "I'm always inspired by things I collect or overhear or people tell me about, and I kind of combine those with whatever my emotional state is when I sit down to write." As a specific example of a moment in Me, You which had its genesis in real life, July recalls, "A friend of mine was eating Doritos and said, 'Yeah, my sister used to drop these in my mouth like I was a little bird.' And at that moment, I flashed to the children in the film lying on the ground.'"
Speaking again of the challenging roles of the children, they've been well cast with Ratcliff's Robby; his 14-year old brother Peter (Miles Thompson); the very wise young girl next door Sylvie (Carlie Westerman); and teenage pals Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend). The latter two become involved with Peter, asking him to be a guinea pig for them to practice oral sex on; a scene which is by no means titillating. July's framing is everything here, as her camera remains largely on Peter's somewhat bewildered face. He doesn't appear to know how to react, a feeling that much of the audience will share. By shooting in a largely non-erotic manner, July manages to make this trickiest of scenes feel very realistic and relatively non-perverse, although it is still not for the squeamish. It goes without saying that the issue of the children's sexuality will cause some controversy upon the film's release. July expounds on the topic, "I don't want to jinx it or anything, but it's been kind of amazing how open people have been to [the scenes]. Obviously, the humor helps. But it's also people really being as open as I was when I wrote it, to that side of themselves that can handle acknowledging that children are sexual. And that that's not inherently inappropriate. That that can be true, and be okay. And the fact that children are sexual and exist in an adult world, is so terrifying, and yet, again, it's not inherently evil. Things do not have to go wrong. There can even be points of connection. I guess I'm trying to expand the conversation and the vocabulary about how one even talks about that. Because it's scary to kind of leave it to people who are pathological. To leave the conversation to pedophiles. That really is perversion!"
Somewhat surprisingly, July says that the roles of the children were the easiest to write. "It makes sense for the children to be really free. And I felt very free when I was writing them. There's definitely a side of me that, as an adult, I'm a little bit of a loose cannon. But if I was a child, I would just be appropriate," she laughs. It's always difficult to find solid child actors, and it must have been doubly difficult casting Me, You because of the subject matter. Says July, "Granted, there were a lot of kids who just didn't audition for this movie. It was a very wonderful and interesting group of parents. They were all kind of people who were hoping that their kids could be in interesting stuff. For example, Brandon's mom said that this was really the first age-appropriate thing she read for him. He was really comfortable, and I think that had a lot to do with her. She's really the first line of defense in helping him learn his lines. I think she didn't have any awkwardness about it, and he didn't feel any, and I didn't add any."
July has been a working artist of a number of stripes for years now, having supported herself through artistic work since the age of 23. She grew to prominence as a multi-media based performance artist, with works such as "Love Diamond," "The Swan Tool," and "How I Learned to Draw," which have presented in a number of venues, including the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and the Kitchen in New York. She has published short stories in The Paris Review, as well as The Harvard Review. And prior to her feature directing debut, she directed a number of short films. Taking on a feature-length project was daunting, of course, but July found that she had really been preparing for it for some time. "It felt really scary at first. But what I started to realize, was that the things that were most important....meaning doing it exactly the way I wanted to do it and seeing my vision through.... I had already been doing that for a decade [with my other projects]. So there was no alternative to doing that in my mind, even under great duress." July's character of Christine in the film acts on impuIse quite a bit and when answering the inevitable question of how similar she is to her role, July says with a laugh, "I am a little bit of a daredevil. That's always given me energy. I'd be like, 'Oh, this isn't possible. So I'll just do it anyway.'"
When July set out to write this first feature, she says, "I just had a territory when I started. I knew it was an ensemble cast, so I could keep adding characters. But I never really plotted it out. It was more of a cumulative process." This looser writing method clearly enabled her to explore some of the tangents the script goes off on, while still managing to ensure that every character belonged in the world of the script and connected to the overall themes of loneliness and of people trying to connect. July says that the themes of the film "were kind of a touchstone in myself. I would be able to hold up things that I'd write and say 'This is of this movie or it isn't.'" As for how she came up with many of the characters and their quirks, July further explains that she "obsessively" writes down things she hears and sees in her daily life and says, "I'm always inspired by things I collect or overhear or people tell me about, and I kind of combine those with whatever my emotional state is when I sit down to write." As a specific example of a moment in Me, You which had its genesis in real life, July recalls, "A friend of mine was eating Doritos and said, 'Yeah, my sister used to drop these in my mouth like I was a little bird.' And at that moment, I flashed to the children in the film lying on the ground.'"
Speaking again of the challenging roles of the children, they've been well cast with Ratcliff's Robby; his 14-year old brother Peter (Miles Thompson); the very wise young girl next door Sylvie (Carlie Westerman); and teenage pals Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend). The latter two become involved with Peter, asking him to be a guinea pig for them to practice oral sex on; a scene which is by no means titillating. July's framing is everything here, as her camera remains largely on Peter's somewhat bewildered face. He doesn't appear to know how to react, a feeling that much of the audience will share. By shooting in a largely non-erotic manner, July manages to make this trickiest of scenes feel very realistic and relatively non-perverse, although it is still not for the squeamish. It goes without saying that the issue of the children's sexuality will cause some controversy upon the film's release. July expounds on the topic, "I don't want to jinx it or anything, but it's been kind of amazing how open people have been to [the scenes]. Obviously, the humor helps. But it's also people really being as open as I was when I wrote it, to that side of themselves that can handle acknowledging that children are sexual. And that that's not inherently inappropriate. That that can be true, and be okay. And the fact that children are sexual and exist in an adult world, is so terrifying, and yet, again, it's not inherently evil. Things do not have to go wrong. There can even be points of connection. I guess I'm trying to expand the conversation and the vocabulary about how one even talks about that. Because it's scary to kind of leave it to people who are pathological. To leave the conversation to pedophiles. That really is perversion!"
Somewhat surprisingly, July says that the roles of the children were the easiest to write. "It makes sense for the children to be really free. And I felt very free when I was writing them. There's definitely a side of me that, as an adult, I'm a little bit of a loose cannon. But if I was a child, I would just be appropriate," she laughs. It's always difficult to find solid child actors, and it must have been doubly difficult casting Me, You because of the subject matter. Says July, "Granted, there were a lot of kids who just didn't audition for this movie. It was a very wonderful and interesting group of parents. They were all kind of people who were hoping that their kids could be in interesting stuff. For example, Brandon's mom said that this was really the first age-appropriate thing she read for him. He was really comfortable, and I think that had a lot to do with her. She's really the first line of defense in helping him learn his lines. I think she didn't have any awkwardness about it, and he didn't feel any, and I didn't add any."
July has been a working artist of a number of stripes for years now, having supported herself through artistic work since the age of 23. She grew to prominence as a multi-media based performance artist, with works such as "Love Diamond," "The Swan Tool," and "How I Learned to Draw," which have presented in a number of venues, including the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and the Kitchen in New York. She has published short stories in The Paris Review, as well as The Harvard Review. And prior to her feature directing debut, she directed a number of short films. Taking on a feature-length project was daunting, of course, but July found that she had really been preparing for it for some time. "It felt really scary at first. But what I started to realize, was that the things that were most important....meaning doing it exactly the way I wanted to do it and seeing my vision through.... I had already been doing that for a decade [with my other projects]. So there was no alternative to doing that in my mind, even under great duress." July's character of Christine in the film acts on impuIse quite a bit and when answering the inevitable question of how similar she is to her role, July says with a laugh, "I am a little bit of a daredevil. That's always given me energy. I'd be like, 'Oh, this isn't possible. So I'll just do it anyway.'"
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