Miranda July The need
Miranda July leaves pieces of herself everywhere she goes. Through films, books, online projects and one-woman live shows, she’s found a way to quell the urge to reach out and connect. Her new film, The Future, seems propelled by that same need - the outpouring of a riot grrrl with a message for the world.
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When I pull my car up to her office on a quiet block in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Miranda July is standing on her porch wrapping up a phone call. The sun is shining, birds are chirping. She smiles, she waves and time slows. It’s hard to resist the notion that I’m suddenly in a scene from one of her films – all that’s missing is the haunting, quirky musical score.
We sit down in the small house she’s converted into an office, the walls adorned with photographs and artwork. Wearing a mismatched ensemble of cobalt leggings, black miniskirt, red and white floral top and a heavy knit cardigan, July perches at the end of the sofa, feet tucked underneath her.
It’s been six years now since July showed up at the Sundance Film Festival with Me and You and Everyone We Know. The oddball ensemble film – best remembered by some for a scene where an adorable seven-year-old proposes passing poop back and forth forever, butt-to-butt, with a stranger in a chat room – raked in numerous awards on the festival circuit, including a Caméra d'Or for Best Feature at Cannes. Her follow-up wasn’t a film, but a collection of short stories called No One Belongs Here More Than You, which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story award and was published in twenty countries.
The Future, her richly inventive and devastating new film, centres on a couple who, realising their lives will be forever altered by their decision to adopt an injured cat, decide to quit their day jobs and carpe diem for their final month of youth and independence. On paper, the premise could easily elicit eye-rolls – but thanks to her deft writing and interweaving of elements from her performance art, July makes it work brilliantly.
I first met July back in 2005 when she was in the midst of post-production on Me and You. I happened to be working as an assistant to the movie’s music composer, Mike Andrews, and he and July had just become romantically involved. We talk a bit about that period and I reveal that at that time, I found her a little shy and elusive, but that today (and in other recent press I’ve watched and read) she seems confident, warm and generous.
“I’m really gratified to hear that,” she says. “I kept thinking during making this movie, ‘Oh no, I’ve lost it – I was really confident back then!’” she laughs. “It’s one of the many tricks you play on yourself. I often put myself in a fairly desperate feeling situation just to propel boldness.”
This notion of desperation as personal provocateur is a theme that weaves itself into much of July’s work, and is, as I discover, deeply rooted in her personal history.
The Past
When she was five, Miranda July (known by her real last name of Grossinger back then) relocated with her family to Berkeley, CA, from Vermont. She remembers little about Vermont, but this new world in Berkeley, she quickly realised, was not quite normal. “When you grow up in Berkeley, you have a lot of thoughts about what the rest of the world will be like,” she says about the famously left-leaning, activist-centric Northern California city. (In The Future July’s character subtly demonstrates this difference by straightening her hair when she relocates to the suburbs: “You can’t even be as weird as having curly hair there,” she notes.) “And you live in one of the weird places, and the people seem weird. There’s a lot of invention about what a normal place might be like.” Coincidentally – or not – her husband, graphic designer, filmmaker and music video director Mike Mills, also grew up in Berkeley.
There’s a strange cadence to July’s voice that makes many of her sentences sound like questions, and her eyes are always intensely fixed on me as we talk. Basically, she’s pretty much exactly like she is in her films.
As a young girl, July was already planting the seeds of her later work. Using her dad’s tape deck, she would record one half of a conversation and leave gaps in the recording for responses. Then she’d play the tape back and answer her own questions. “It just seemed so magical that you could record yourself and play it back and… there you were!” she says.
She spent her high school years doing performance art pieces at legendary Berkeley punk rock club Gilman Street (where Green Day got their start) and then dropped out of college after a year and moved to Portland.
Though they generally supported her artistic endeavors, it wasn’t exactly what her parents – hard working, Ivy League-educated writers – had intended for her. “I seemed pretty delinquent to them, you know. Or just scary,” she laughs. “Luckily it all worked out or I would still be having difficult phone calls with them.”
In Portland, she became a “real sincere thief” – stealing food, mostly, or just whatever else she needed to get by in order to make the leap from working to becoming a full-time artist. “I was talking to Carrie Brownstein [of the band Sleater-Kinney, and the current TV show Portlandia] and I was comforted because I think of her as classy in a certain way, and we were comparing scams we all used to do and I was like, ‘I’m so glad you used to do that too,’ and she said, ‘Oh, that was just normal at that time.’ I don’t think we were all just fucked in the head. I just think that at that time in Portland, in that sort of riot grrrl-esque era, it was somehow a political or righteous thing to do, but then getting hooked on that [became] a way of living. I stopped cold turkey when I started going out with [K Records founder] Calvin Johnson. He’s the most upstanding citizen. He’s like the mayor of Olympia.”
As well as moving into a house “full of punky girls”, she also joined a band – another perennially hip thing to do in Portland. Just after she booked their first tour, her girlfriend (in the band) dumped her for her best friend (also in the band). She decided it was time for revenge. “I was like, ‘Guess what? I’m coming too! I booked this tour, but I’m not in The Need anymore. I’m Miranda July and every city you’re in, I’m going to be there too. We won’t look at each other but I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up this slot that I booked.’ So I had to call each place and tell them there’s been a change and there’s now two acts.”
It was the first time she used the name ‘Miranda July’.
“I think for a number of years I was still running on that energy that I had to prove myself,” she says. “It wasn’t until long afterwards that I realised, I guess I’m doing my work for other reasons now because I couldn’t possibly still be doing that!”
Check out the full feature in HUCK #026, out now.
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Miranda July (text) by Dan Crane is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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