Last week, the Criterion Collection released “I’ll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills,” a box set featuring new, director approved, 4K digital masters of Mills’ last three films, “Beginners” (2010), “20th Century Women” (2016), and “C’mon C’mon” (2021), complete with director commentaries and all the extras one would expect of a Criterion release.
Because those three films are so autobiographical — “Beginners” is based on Mills’ father coming out at age 75, “20th Century Women” is about his unconventional upbringing in Santa Barbara with his mother — and accomplished works, they’ve come to define his filmmaking career. But spread over the Criterion discs — each featuring one of the three headliner features — are the director’s lesser-known shorts, music videos, documentaries, and interviews, which paint a fuller picture of his development into that critically acclaimed auteur. In a longer interview with IndieWire, Mills went deep on his pre-“Beginners” career, and how he went from post-art school East Village graphic designer to finding a passion for documentaries to music video director, along with a discussion of how his next film will be a diviation from his prior work, why the box set is called “I’ll Remind You of Everything,” and how doing the box set helped changed how he saw his own career.
IndieWire: Starting with “Beginners” (2011) we know your work for its strong autobiographical roots, but the biggest take away I gained, as a fan of your work, from spending time with the box set is your evolution as filmmaker over the 15 year leading up to that film, and in many ways I found that to be more revealing in understanding and appreciating your work. So, just to start with, can you bring us back to 1996, when you graduated from art school at Cooper Union, and how “Deformer” [a 2000 short documentary about skater turned artist Ed Templeton] came about?
Mills: I graduated earlier, to be honest, like ’89, ’90. So “Deformer,” I’m so glad that’s in this box set, because that’s the second thing I ever made.
I went to art school. I studied with this man named Hans Haacke, who was a big conceptual artist, and really trained everyone to get outside of any concept of art, like painting and sculpture being the only thing that art is. So a lot of attention and energy around entering the public sphere, not just living in the rarefied bubble of museums and galleries and that world. So, we all graduated with a passion for that. That led me into doing graphic design. I did a lot of record covers. I worked for Tibor Kalman at M & Company [a New York-based graphic and product design firm], and I was trying to bring an art level [laughs] of rigor or pretension to that world, and knew I wanted to keep going, or I wasn’t done somehow.
And I had seen a lot of documentary films. I was a huge fan of Charles and Ray Eames’ short films. I taught a class on them at Cooper Union.
Those are kind of educational, right?
Mills: Yeah. But they’re pretty weird. They’re really experiential.
They get categorized as educational, but that doesn’t really give a good sense of what they are.
Mills: Yeah. And in a weird way, like the little essays in “Beginners” or “20th Century Women” are kinda Eames-y. I didn’t go to film school. I wasn’t like a film nerd. I did see a lot of films in art school in the Friday night free class, where you see all your typical — like I saw “8 1/2” and [French director Alain] Resnais and all those things. But then I saw, “The Thin Blue Line” [ Errol Morris’ 1988 groundbreaking documentary], and I was like, “Oh, I could do that,” because it had this essayistic quality, and this observational quality, and this meta quality about the filmmaking itself, and it was still very visual, it was a visual argument, and so with all those things I just remember leaving the theater saying, “I could do that.” Not as good as Errol Morris, but like it was a door.
And then I was living in New York City in the East Village, and in the ‘90s if you lived like around Third and A, you would see freaking Jim Jarmusch all the time, at the coffee shop, just everywhere. And me and my roommate were like, “Oh, we’re in an unmade Jim Jarmusch film,” because we’re largely unemployed walking around trying to figure ourselves out. You know, “Stranger Than Paradise,” “Down by Law,” if you’re not a filmmaker and you look at those, you’re like, “Oh, I could relate to that kind of acting. I could relate to that kind of filmmaking.” That’s doesn’t have all the Hollywood verisimilitude.
So it was those two things that got me going, like, “Oh, maybe I can enter this world.” But it was totally by my own gumption. I just started asking every band that I was doing record covers for if I could do their video. I did one for John Spencer Blues Explosion. I did one for Frank Black, and then I did “Deformer” because I’m an old skater, I know Ed from skate culture from Alleged Gallery in New York City [famed art space founded by Aaron Rose known for bridging the gap between the art world and skateboarding, graffiti, zines, and independent art in the ‘90s], and I come from Santa Barbara, he comes from Huntington Beach, it’s a very similar kind of like cult of happiness that isn’t true [laughs]. And so I knew what Ed was talking about, I knew what his artwork was about, like deforming this false happiness, this false comfort, and I just went for it. But I had zero idea of what I was doing. And it’s weird looking back at it how so many moves in it I still do all the time, like all the portraits, all the objects. The sort of like lyrical essayistic, but it doesn’t have like a Brechtian distancing, it’s trying to get close, but through kind of French New Wave-y methods.
There’s an element of Ed being a product of Orange County, there’s something almost visual about the conformity, and him being a product of that, almost him and his art being defined as being counter to that — and there’s something about your exploration of how you captured that, that we would see further develop in your latter autobiographical scripted narrative work.
Mills: Absolutely.
There’s something there with a portrait of a person in his space, and how the conflict between the two produced the artist. Am I wrong?
Mills: No, totally. And that’s why I felt like I had access to work on Ed’s portrait, or his story, beause Santa Barbara gave me access to Ed’s Huntington Beach. And if you look at the kid in 20th Century Women, which is based on me, that kid would love Ed Templeton, [Laughs] and would have something in common with Ed Templeton, and trying to get out from the oppression of an emotionless, conflictless lie that both those cities kind of promote.
And mentioned it, there is something that we see there in that film with a focus on objects and places, in a way that is not a digression, but brings us closeer to him. I can see you starting to work that out — you talk about that as move, but how objects and places come to define Ed, we’ll see in a far more polished way later in films like “20th Century Women.”
Mills: Yeah, and I had done that before. I did Sonic Youth’s “Washing Machine” record cover, I did that as a graphic designer, and on the back of that I took pictures of the band members’ inanimate objects, like Thurston [Moore’s] record collection, Lee [Ranaldo’s] sock drawer, Kim [Gordon’s] stuff, kind of in a [photographers] William Eggleston, Stephen Shore way. And “Deformer” is very Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Walker Evans- lineage to me. It’s not a move, or a habit — what do you call it —it’s a way of seeing the world or a way to shoot things that gets me excited. It’s weird how it’s all in “Deformer,” even for me, going back and looking at it, it’s like, “Fuck, I haven’t really changed that much.” [laughs]. My interests were all there.
I wanted to talk about “Architecture of Reassurance,” which I had never seen before this box set. And there’s an image of the young woman protagonist standing on the hill overlooking — what suburban town is it?
Mills: Santa Clarita. It’s where Magic Mountain is.
And she’s standing over there, and there’s all these similar cookie-cutter suburban houses. To me there was something so literal about what I understand about your point of view from “20th Century Woman” of this sense of both feeling outside of that suburban culture — growing up in your mom’s old Colonial house — and there’s something very wonderful about growing up in this very artistic, open household, but of wanting the comfort of conformity.
Mills: “Architecture of Reassurance” comes from a real place, I used to detour my way home from school so I could walk through some of those subdivisions, because I found them to be like an architectural Xanax, I just felt better. I came from a pretty bohemian home, that had a fair amount of darkness that I hadn’t identified, even when I made “Architecture of Reassurance,” and I was just under the misconception that because of the aesthetic unity of those neighborhoods, that there is an emotional unity. a synergy, a connection, and I felt very disconnected from everything. So, that was the seed of that movie, and it sure did come from a real place, I do have the weird kink of growing up Bohemian and thinking that straight culture was going to save me.
Correct me if I’m wrong, these homeowners in the film are playing themselves, right?
Mills: Yeah, yeah.
So talk about the decision in this very stylized narrative thing, to suddenly they start talking to the camera like it’s a documentary.
Mills: Well, so, okay, “Thin Blue Line,” this playing with the medium itself, and playing with the line between documentary and narrative has alwasy been a preoccupation of mine. And then also, the book, not the movie, “Unbearable Lightness of Being” was just a huge influence on me, and it goes back and forth between a narrative and then very real history that these created characters are woven into. So I really like that juxtaposition. It’s again, a very French New Wave kind of move. It’s a very Godardian move to all of a sudden break your movie like that. And it was another thing, that I realized that I’ve always done, is interrupt my authorship with something from the outside. So “Beginners,” it’s real 1955 history, or gay American history, queer history. And “20th Century Women,” it’s like all those different texts that aren’t my voice, or , you know, that, like, aren’t my voice, or “Koyaanisqatsi” is in that movie, or Jimmy Carter’s speech. And then in “C’mon” it’s just all the kids talking, which is all unscripted stuff. And I feel like the planet of your film isn’t done until there’s something from the outside that landed on the planet. Like, something totally outside of my authorship has to be there for me to feel like, “Oh, it’s complete now.”
That’s what I loved about this box set. In these last three films it’s so elegant and fits so perfectly, and not to say it doesn’t work in these shorts, but you get to see you developing and playing with it.
Mills: Yeah.
Another thing featured in the box set is some of your music video work. Maybe the place to start with is your collaboration with Air on their album “Moon Safari.” My sense was this comprehensive graphic design and video collaboration across the whole project, which was sort of the Ewan McGregor character’s dream in “Beginners,” where he was tasked with just doing an album cover, but pitches this how visual story.
Mills: Yeah, yeah, totally. Ewan in “Beginners” is me without filmmaking, and me doing record covers. Working with the Air guys is really kind is sort of the beginning of my film career in lots of ways, because they just accepted me as a graphic designer and a filmmaker as a whole body. And being French, they treated me as an author and an artist, and especially in capitalism, which all of us American filmmakers are in, you’re only as good as the opportunities you can get, right? And so Air was just this gigantic opportunity where they gave me so much freedom and so much trust, and they wanted to be expansive and form breaking in their work.
My first thing I did was a EPK for Frank Black, and that’s because I was doing record covers for Elektra [Records], and then I met Spike Jonze through skater mafia, through the Alleged Gallery in New York City, I just really quickly said, “Okay, that’s how I’m going do this, I’m going to just jump into doing music videos.” was always in bands. and like music more than filmmaking, I’m just not talented at it. It’s my film school, and the great thing about, that’s sort of un-American filmmaking, is that it’s an idea contest, like, five directors all compete for the same song with just a written treatment. And back in my day, there were no images, you just wrote something. So, it was an idea contest, it was a narrative contest. And I didn’t know that that was making me a writer-director, to the degree that it was. Like, I’m only interested in shooting things that I come up with to shoot, that’s what that led me down the road of…
Included in the box set is “All I Need” from that Air album. I’m assuming there’s a reason that one was included — I have my own theories, but it feels like a very big breakthrough for you.
Mills: Yeah, it was like a quiet breakthrough. So again, another skating thing. Another Southern California skating thing, related to “Deformer.” It’s kids growing up in Ventura.
So to start over, Air was like, “This song is too pretty. Can you please fuck it up with a music video?” That’s literally what they said.
Because there is something syrupy, something—
Mills: —It could be sentimental, and they wanted to cut against it. So I was like, “Okay, what if we made like a documentary that was real about kids saying they’re in love, and what does that mean?” And I had no idea what it was going turn out like. I just had that idea. We found these kids, they happened to be skaters from the the town next to me, Ventura, it’s next to Santa Barbara, so I knew their whole scene, I knew that town. And I think that connection to the subject, and then I just naturally connected with them coming from a really similar place.
Just to clarify, you are talking about this real-life young couple.
Mills: This young couple that’s the subject of the music video documentary. And by accident, it was the first time that I sort of tapped into someone’s emotions, or as a director I created a space, like a safe space for people to be sort of vulnerable and express things. And it’s a very un-French New Wave part, right? It’s very emotional, it’s very connective, it’s very humanistic. And I started showing the cuts of that video to people, and it’s like, “Oh, people are getting kind of emotional watching this, or having feelings watching this.” And it was the first time that feelings happened for me as a director, and in this very kind of naturalistic filmmaking style, which is still my style. I don’t add a lot of sauce on top, and it’s very much in a natural world. It’s not until you do something, and the audience tells you you’ve done it, that you get it. And you can do things in the dark and you don’t really know you’ve done it until you show your thing to your friend and your friend gets a little watery-eyed, and you’re like, “Oh that’s what this is.” And that’s what music videos also provide is an audience, is your relationship to people watching your stuff. If you’re just making shorts on your own, it’s very hard to get people outside of your friend group to watch it.
Everybody’s talking about these new directors coming from YouTube, which, when you start talking to them, what they say is, YouTube is just where they’re putting their shorts, but the thing is there’s an element of instant feedback you get when building an audience on these platforms. And it made me think of your generation and making these music videos, when music video were at the heart of culture, and it’s not, “Okay, I get to go see my short with 200 people at this rarefied festival.” There’s something immediate, right?
Mills: Yes, and outside of just film culture, outside of your captured, rarefied audience. You’re in the big mainstream of pop culture. And that is the weirdest thing about filmmaking, right? It’s an art form, but you’re also part of big, crass, lame popular culture, and how are you going to navigate that, or play with that, or be with that? So music videos are also kinda helpful in that way.
And then there’s a totally different thing outside of audience in that music: Music and film are both time-based emotional delivery systems, so they share that, but music is a more energetic, somatic, feeling flow [laughs]. It’s not dialogue-driven. It’s just [makes rock noise], you’re on a ride. And I think that taught me a lot about —like when I feel like my films are working their best, they’re getting like music, there’s this little lyrical ride that you’re on. And I think doing a lot of music videos, listening to music, coming up with ideas for music makes you extra sensitive to that, or at least me. There’s nothing better than music and visuals, it’s peanut butter and jelly, so happy together. But it teaches you that even when music isn’t on, how is your film going to perform like music?
Please wave me off if I’m reaching too much here, but there’s something about “All I Need” that felt like a breakthrough. In watching your work, leading up to “Beginners,” that’s featured in the box set, I could see you trying to balance your conceptual art background with the Mike Mills we know, who is so humanistic and not cold. And not to say that conceptual art and Godard-New Wave moves are necessarily cold, but this specific music video felt like where the two organically came together, similar to how they harmoniously operate in your last three narrative features.
Mills: Yeah, it’s interesting. Often the author is the last one to know what they’re doing, or the last one to know when they got themselves in the right spot for what their interests are. So, doing music videos, it’s a reactive form of authorship. You don’have a video until someone says, “Oh, I have a song,” and then you react to it. So what you said is exactly right. It’s a little bit of a magic of having different aspects of your natural way of looking at the world, come together in a project where they so easily could have not come together. It’s a little bit of magic-kismet universe helping you. And that is a weird thing, I’ve done a lot of work that’s prompted by outside people, like that whole National thing [Mills’ 2019 short film “I Am Easy to Find,” starring Alicia Vikander was based on The National’s album of the same name] that’s also on [the Critierion Box Set], and I do ads to make a living. There’s something great about an exterior prompt. It reveals yourself [laughts, because it’s an external obstacle in a funny way. It’s like what happens to characters in narrative, right? An external obstacle comes along and it makes the character discover who they are and how to overcome the obstacle. That’s a little bit what like doing a video or an ad, sometimes it makes you see you more clearly, because you’re out of your fishbowl. You’re thrown up against some weird problem.
It’s really interesting, in talking about this box set, how important documentary is to me.
I found it interesting you had [documentary filmmaker] Kirsten Johnson do the interview for the box set; I don’t know if that was your choice.
Mills: I love her. I did a Q&A with her for “Dick Johnson is Dead,” and we just like each other so much. And [Johnson’s 2016 film] “Cameraperson,” I took a part of that that’s in “C’mon, C’mon.” So we’re in cahoots. And the way that she treats documentary, there’s no assumptions. There’s no rule, or every rule is to be broken, but ultimately, what she’s really trying to get at is some authentic presence with whatever’s in front of the camera. It might be through wild artifice, but like that’s the idea.
And I think, maybe the way I got to filmmaking was through [photographers] Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Wolfgang Tillmans, Walker Evans, or Robert Frank, which are about an authentic relationship with what’s in front of the camera, where you feel like the wind in their hair, you feel a lot of presence, and that’s still the thing that buzzes me more than anything. Like sometimes you shoot a scene that just kinda happens, like you kinda feel the room, you know? And other times it’s not quite there. And that sort of documentary hunt, or documentary vibe, or documentary lust for presence is still a main thing for me.
“Beginners,” “20th Century Women,” “C’mon C’mon,” are the heart of this box set. The scans and color grade look great. I didn’t get to go through the commentaries, but we’ve gotten a chance to talk to you about those three films over the years. And there is an element of those three films — and it could just be how each is different part of your autobiography — they feel a part of one another, that they feel very connected. And I frame it that way, because I got the sense your next film, the thing that you’re working on now, is reaching for something different. Is that true?
Mills: Yeah.I have a lot of the same — I’m just endlessly interested in how we create ourselves in relationship to our primary relationship, so our family, and the intersubjective world between parents and children, or whoever becomes a parent or becomes a child; it doesn’t have to be biological. But I just feel like that’s just the hugest terrain, that’s bigger than “Game of Thrones” to me, bigger than “Odyssey” to me — it is “The Odyssey.” S the new film ends up being in that same domain, that same terrain, but it gets there in a very different way.
Ok, I’ll maybe surprise you, maybe not. My favorite filmmaker lately is [Swedish director] Roy Andersson.
[Editor’s Note: Andersson is the Swedish director of “Songs from the Second Floor” and “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence,” which are stylistically notable for long take, wide, meticulously designed and orchestrated tableaus, in which events play out with a deadpan, surrealist humor, that is often heralded for its social criticism and insights.]
To me, no one’s doing anything as wild as he’s doing, and he’s actually a crazy humanist, right? He’s actually such a softie.
You feel that after a while. Initially, if you just watch one of those frames, it feels a little bit cold, and feels a little bit judgmental.
Mills: Sure.
You have to watch a lot of it to feel the humanity.
Mills: No, you’re right. Absolutely, you have to be dedicated. And who cares if he’s a humanist and a softie or not? I just find there’s an absurdism to life, especially as I get older, and irrationality, that he really is the godfather of to me. So there’s elements [of Mills’ next film] that are a little bit more feral. And I’m a little tired of being sensitive Mike Mills. There’s other things to be done, and still with the same ultimate goal of exploring how “you help make me, and I help make you,” by the way we relate to each other. That’s my Frederick Wiseman box that I’m in.
Just being a graphic designer, and just the way you present people’s lives in context of history and objects, and your work with album covers, was putting this box set together a big deal to you? Almost an act of creation?
Mills: Oh, yeah, having a Criterion box set, there’s nothing else. That to me is the top of the game.
But you can’t retire yet.
Mills: I’m going to shoot for the second box set. That’s my goal. But to be honest, I’ve got enough self-loathing that I don’t like thinking about myself that much. [Laughs]. [Criterion executive producer] Kim Hendrickson is the producer-editor of it. And it was really fun to see my work through her eyes, and her come at it from a different perspective: “Oh, ‘All I Need’ should really be in there.” “Oh, I really want ‘Architecture of Reassurance’” – I didn’t really want that in; I find it a little cringey, but she’s like, “No, it’s important. You lose control of your films as soon as you’ve made them. So, it’s just another adventure in losing control of your films.
The actual visual presentation of it, yeah, I was quite involved, and it was easy to draw on some of the things I love to do, and the graphic design of it. I wrap all my Christmas presents with a lot of graphic design zhuzh. It was similar to that. It’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to wrap it nicely.” It just comes with the package. And Kim encouraged me to do it. I did it with my friend John Rey, who helped me with the “C’mon, C’mon” and “20th Century Women” posters. And it’s all of a piece to me. I studied Bauhaus, Wiener Werkstätte, and if you’re a true believer in that, the record cover is as important as the music. The DVD cover is as important as the film. So, that is how I do things.
And what about the title, “I’ll Remind You of Everything”?
Mills: That was weird. So Kim and I were talking about what to title it, and she was going through my work as if I was a stranger to it, which is a great thing to have to do, and she was like, “Okay, it’s about people, places, and memory.” And I was like, that’s true,that’s accurate, and that sounds like a very kind of Talking Heads title to me. I was kinda into that. Great, “People, Places, Memory,” maybe “Parents and Children,” we had this list going, and we were thinking about that, and then I was like, Joaquin [Phoenix’s] last line of “C’mon, C’mon” is, “I’ll remind you of everything,” that feels like a good title, and she was like, “Oh, that’s great.” And I like how impossible that is. You can’t remind someone of everything, and that to me speaks to the failure of the human emotional project in a funny, interesting way. And all my movies are about memory. They really are. They’re all elegaic in weird ways, and it just fit really easily. And I kind of love that Joaquin said it. It’s just nice, I hear him saying it when I see it.
Well, I can’t recommend the box enough; I’m really enjoying it.
Mills: Thank you.
And you got a lovely essay from Joachim Trier, what he wrote is beautiful. It’s funny, I never thought of it, but I can totally see the “Sentimental Value” guy loving Mike Mills’ films.
Mills: Yeah. We’ve been friends for a while, and we share crew.
Oh, that’s right. And he’s from skater culture, too, I forgot about that.
Mills: He’s a skater kid. He came to my Oslo premiere of “Thumbsucker,” and we met then. But we share a DP (Kasper Tuxen), we share an editor (Olivier Bugge Coutté), and he’s the funnest person to talk about filmmaking with. I’m sure you’ve interviewed him. He’s just such an intelligent gentleman, director, person.
Criterion’s “I’ll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills” is available for purchase now.