Prior to her feature directorial debut, “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” Miranda July formed her own movie club/distribution project for women filmmakers, Joanie 4 Jackie. As the award-winning auteur told Women and Hollywood during a recent Girls Club event, hustle and a DIY ethos have defined much of her career — and that of other women making movies.
“Me and You and Everyone We Know” scored four awards at Cannes, including the Golden Camera and the Critics Week Grand Prize, and received Sundance’s Special Jury Prize – Dramatic. July also wrote and directed “The Future,” a fantastical drama about a couple on the brink of major change. Acting, writing, and public art are also on the multi-hyphenate’s extensive résumé. Earlier this year, she published a literary retrospective of her work entitled “Miranda July.”
July joined the Girls Club to discuss her new movie, “Kajillionaire,” the story of a family of hapless scammers, creating a space for herself in the male-dominated film industry, and how her creativity has evolved throughout her career.
A community for women creatives, culture-changers, and storytellers, the Girls Club will be hosting more live events and opportunities such as this in the future. We are offering the first month free for those who are interested and identify as a woman. Please email girlsclubnetwork@gmail.com to receive an invitation and let us know a bit about who you are and what you do.
“Kajillionaire” opens in the U.S. September 25 and in the U.K. October 9.
This interview has been edited and condensed. It was transcribed by Sophie Willard.
W&H: I wanted to talk with you about creativity, because that seems to be the fuel of your life. I was so impressed and intimidated by the number of things that you’re so good at, and so fluent in: short stories, art, novel, film — of course, we’re talking about a film that you have coming out called “Kajillionaire.” Is there a medium that you feel more comfortable with in your creativity?
MJ: The biggest thing I’m doing is alternating between writing fiction, and making movies — that takes most of my time. But those things take a really long time and I also like to perform — I have a performance background — and I like to make things in all different mediums. And that, for me, allows for some things that are a little quicker along the way so I do end up having an idea for an app, or a store, or a sculpture. But I often kind of fit those in. I don’t know — I think writing is the root of a lot of it, but I don’t really play favorites like that. It’s kind of one thing, almost, and it also keeps it from getting boring or dull.
W&H: When I was reading about your different work, it seems like the thing that’s most important to you is to have the freedom to be creative in your own way. The way that I looked at your creativity — in the way that we’ve been brainwashed in our culture, about female and male creativity and stuff like that — you really have pushed a lot of the boundaries of female creativity in a really positive way. I don’t know if any of that’s intentional, but the way that you think about your work and talk about your work is really just freeing for another woman to look at. Can you talk about your approach?
MJ: Right, it’s interesting. Every individual person is different, but I do at this point in my life feel like there’s a fluidity to creativity that makes me really happy, and it means that there are not hard lines between not only the mediums, but between life and work — it’s a more holistic, flowing thing.
These things have been placed in opposition to what’s powerful. Power exists in a really monolithic [way], like, “I’m a specialist, I’m a filmmaker, and I’m at the top of my field” — and I just don’t buy it. I feel like it’s a way that some people think, and if only one kind of person’s story was all we needed, then that would be fine. But there are a lot of us here, and we are powerful in all different ways, and this is the way that I can do the most, I can think the hardest and the widest — if it is integrated into my whole life, and fluid in this way, and almost non-monogamous.
I always feel how it doesn’t fit but I think as much as that can be difficult — I can feel like an outsider in every realm that I’m in — it also gives me so much energy because I’m in my zone. I never feel like I’m having to awkwardly fit into someone else’s thing — I’d be so bad at that.
July on the set of “Kajillionaire”: Matt Kennedy / Focus Features
W&H: There are not many people to talk to where you think, “You are just unique.” And that is what I got from reading all your stuff. But I also read that you knew that you wanted to tell stories and be a film director when you were in high school, you went to college, you went to a film class, and you were like, “This sucks, it doesn’t speak to me.” And you just left and went up north, and joined the Riot grrrl scene. Is that correct?
MJ: Yeah, I mean, I was sort of Riot grrrl-adjacent — today, if there’s any actual Riot grrrls out there, they’ll be like, “You were a little late for that.” But yeah, for sure, and it was really, DIY, women-driven. These things sound more like a brand, when in reality, all women filmmakers are DIY, we are almost always doing it for ourselves — and, frankly, most filmmakers, period. If you’re not willing to do things for yourself, it’s unlikely to happen.
Before I dropped out of college — that was probably ‘93 or something — I was very much in a minority, and it wasn’t cool to me, the way it was being taught. I had already started making performances and plays, so I just had this feeling like I could do it. But, there is something about not having any context at all, suddenly, for yourself, no institution, and I pretty quickly made my own context — this project called Joanie 4 Jackie.
W&H: Yes, let us talk about Joanie 4 Jackie, which was basically the first movie club for female directors in the DIY ’90s. How did you come up with this idea?
MJ: So, picture me: I’m surrounded by girls in bands who are really cool, and my friends — and I’m in a band too, but I know I want to be a filmmaker. I literally don’t know any other women doing that, the technology’s not really totally accessible yet.
And so I made a pamphlet, I typed up this flyer that said, “Lady, if you make a movie and send it to me” — and this would be on a VHS tape — “with $5, I’ll put it on a tape with nine other lady-made movies and send the compilation back to you.” This is before YouTube, so there was no other way for us to see each other’s work.
It started very slowly, and I would give the flyer out everywhere and give it to bands that were going on tour, and really slowly they started coming in. I also was like, “Okay, I’m going to get Joanie 4 Jackie into Seventeen magazine and Sassy.” I had something to advocate for that felt larger than myself, and at that time I hadn’t yet even made a movie. Over the next decade, I did that project and compiled — distributed in the loosest sense of the word — and screened hundreds of movies made by women and girls.
And that was my context. If people wonder how did I make “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” part of the answer to that question is that I was not a minority in my context that I created for myself. I was one of hundreds of women filmmakers that I knew, corresponded with, slept on the couches of.
W&H: It’s a website now, and some of the films are actually on the website that you can watch. One of the things that’s been going on recently is this compilation “Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema” that Mark Cousins has done, and each week he does another section. I feel like you’re the precursor to that — you did “Women Make Film” in the ’90s. It incredibly moved me, it’s like this feminist video team letter, so I just want to thank you for that, and I’m sorry I did not see it in the ’90s — it makes me sad. The films went to the Museum of Modern Art, it became a thing. This is before anybody talked about women directors — they did exist, but there was no context of the lack of women directors in the ’90s. It’s just so impressive. Now, in “Half the Picture,” Amy Adrion’s movie, you said that you were more nervous on your second film than your first, and I’m wondering why, and what were those thoughts?
MJ: I came right from Joanie 4 Jackie to making “Me and You and Everyone We Know” — I stopped that project in order to make that movie. So I was kind of like a punk. I was like, “Yeah, I’ve got me and hundreds of women behind me, I’ve made all these short movies which I’ve distributed on my own thing, and now I’m making a feature.” I was nervous, a lot of stuff was new, but I didn’t yet know until I got to Sundance — which has since really addressed the gender parity issue quite beautifully — at that time, along with every other festival, I was one of two women directors out of 16 in competition that year, so I had the big reality check.
Then suddenly, I was now a part of Hollywood, I was living in L.A., my boyfriend at the time was a director, I [had] filmmaker friends — they were all men at that time — and I think I suddenly was made aware of my otherness. No one was consciously doing anything, but just utterly unconscious of any other way, or what was missing. So I think by the time I was making my second movie, I was actually in sort of less of a good place. I felt I was more frustrated, and in a way slightly less empowered, even though I’d had this success. I can’t quite explain how.
W&H: Because you get into the system, and the system is so fucked up for women.
MJ: Yeah. I had taken better care of myself in my small world, than I was going to be cared for in a larger world, and it would take some time to figure out what I needed to feel good again. “Kajillionaire” was a beautiful experience and quite different, but just to show you: you don’t fix it once; you have to keep [at it].
July in “Me and You and Everyone We Know”
W&H: How were you able to make the leap from Joanie 4 Jackie, into “Me and You and Everyone We Know”? Because that seemed like a jump.
MJ: Right, it was. It was a big leap, and actually, almost at every point, the other things that I have done have helped that leap. I will say a big help was the Sundance Lab, which was really trying to help women directors. I applied three times, finally got into that, and they were very supportive. I did meet people through that — that was probably the biggest single thing.
But in terms of getting financing, I will say that the woman, Holly Becker at IFC, who I met with during a speed-dating, “pitch a movie to financiers and see if they care [thing]” — she had seen my last performance in The Kitchen, a performance space in New York. It was pretty ambitious — it was a two-hour work that I played all the parts in, and it was multimedia, and apparently when she read the script, she liked it, and went to her boss at IFC. This person, Jonathan Sehring, said, “Why do you think she could pull off a first feature?”
And she said, “I saw this performance; she can do it.” And it’s true — more than a short movie in a way, this performance was fearless, I was in my element — fearless in the sense that I just literally was not afraid of so many things that I should have been terrified of in front of an audience. And that’s what you need on set — like, “We’re going to keep going, that didn’t work, we’re going to keep going.”
W&H: So “Kajillionaire” is your third movie, it opens at the end of this month, and it’s the first movie that you haven’t acted in also. Talk about that decision.
MJ: Right, it wasn’t actually much of a decision. When you think about it, all my fiction, my short stories and my writing — I’m not in that. I had just come off a novel, and then I had an idea for a movie, and I was quite excited about it, and a couple of days into writing that, I realized, “Oh, wait, there’s no part for me.” [Laughs] There’s literally not a woman my age in this movie. I was just like, “Okay, that makes sense, that’s sort of exciting.” Because it means I can use all my energy for directing, and that’s a new thing. That was it, and I just didn’t even think about it again.
W&H: And I read that the idea came to you in bed. Can you talk about the development of the script for “Kajillionaire,” because it seems a little bit more linear than your other movies but it’s ambitious.
MJ: Right, I think the novel I wrote before — “The First Bad Man” — was pretty ambitious as well, as far as twists and turns and reveals, and I remember thinking, “Hmm, too bad I’m not doing this in a movie because that’s all really good stuff for a film.” So by the time I finally got done with that, I kind of had the vibe in me, like, “Okay, if this was a little bigger, maybe I even work with stars this time.” And it’s just a bigger narrative, didn’t have the idea, wrote a script — it wasn’t it. Wrote another script — it wasn’t it, I just knew.
And then, one morning, I woke up with these characters, this family walking towards me. I was awake, but sort of half awake. And I began taking dictation, what felt like taking dictation, and really fleshed that out over about a year and a half. Then I was very lucky with this one: a fan of my novel, Dede Gardner of Plan B, had emailed me about that novel, and I sent her the script, and for the very first time I just got financing — there was no search. Annapurna and Plan B were already in a relationship, and so they supported the movie.
W&H: I mean, stars: Debra Winger, Richard Jenkins, Evan Rachel Wood, and Gina Rodriguez. Unless anyone was in Sundance this year, they haven’t seen it because it’s not out yet, so can you give people the logline?
MJ: Yeah, so there’s a family — Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger are the parents. Evan Rachel Wood is their kind of — if I saw her on the street, I’d [think] that’s probably a long-haired, butch lesbian. She’s just so disconnected from the world because they have a cult-like, very odd family configuration, and they get by doing ridiculously small-stakes crimes. In one of these ill-conceived scams they meet a woman on an airplane — Gina Rodriguez — and she’s very seemingly conventional and chipper, and she kind of turns their lives upside-down.
W&H: Evan Rachel Wood, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her do anything like this, and you worked really hard with her on getting the character. I don’t want to give it away but the moment you see Evan Rachel Wood, you’re like, “What is happening here?!” It took a while to adjust to it, but in a really amazing way. You’re telling a story of a family, a lot of your work is about connections between people, and I think that this film really elaborates on that in a really profound way. Richard Jenkins has said to you that it was one of the most human films he has done. So I wanted to get your thoughts on humanity and all that kind of stuff that you strive for in your work.
MJ: Yeah, I guess connection is a theme, I think in part because I often devote a lot of time showing how hard it is for people to connect, and how they stand in their own way. Even in this movie, I really took care to show how even when someone is set free and given another option, they may want to go back to the more dysfunctional, familiar world that they know. And I think that I do that all the time. [Laughs] Like, “I can go out, I can leave,” and sometimes all of a sudden I’m not sure if I want to.
These ways that we stand in our own way are so moving to me, and then how we ultimately transform, and there’s oddly enough, “the big one” — which I feel like we’re in right now — is a theme in the movie, and surviving and being transformed by “the big one.”
“Kajillionaire”: Focus Features
W&H: You’re a success, in our definition within our culture, but you also talk about having to hustle, and the devaluing of women’s art. I wanted to talk about how do we get to a place — because I feel like you’re a person I could ask this of — where we value women’s art, women’s opinion, and women’s vision in a way that we value men’s?
MJ: I do think that things like Me Too, or the current racial and social justice revolution that I feel like we’re in — they can seem superficial at times, like people are just desperately trying to keep up appearances and prove that they’re “down” but they also make a conversation possible.
I actually really recently was in a blatantly sexist situation where I realized that I was getting paid way less than two male filmmakers — and this rarely happens in a way where you’re aware and you figure it out. And I actually just called it out in the moment. I said, “How much are these two people getting paid? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not the low, low price I accepted.”
And then my agent took it to the head of this company — a very big company — and what a nightmare for them, right? They can’t do that, not right now, not in this day and age. That could be very, very bad for them, and my fee got a zero added on to the end of it — which it should have had in the first place. It made me realize the idea that you might be shamed or called out — that’s where you begin. And then it becomes more second nature from there, and you’re not operating from fear forever, but maybe initially you are just worried about what people think. That’s the most basic–
W&H: The shaming.
MJ: Yeah, I often think women are the ones who suffer most from “cancel culture” so I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about a certain accountability of mostly companies. It [requires] many, many instances of that.
W&H: Yes, it’s an ongoing conversation. I’m going through the comments here, and there are people for whom you have been a touchstone. I’m going to read this from Adrian — he said, “It’s a fanboy moment, you’re the sole reason I decided to keep trying to become an artist when most of my life was fucked up. Thanks for your books and movies and performances for saving my life. That being said, I would like to know with all this ‘new normality’ situation and the reshaping of our social interactions, and this whole wave of new artists focusing their work in human connection, how do you think that the new rules and realities will be written?” Thank you, Adrian.
MJ: Yeah, I mean we are so in the middle of it, that I don’t really know, other than, we can be absolutely sure that we are being changed right now — our brains and our souls — and we will not be the same. I think for myself, after getting over massive disappointments and that kind of thing, and adjusting, I don’t feel like I’m a worse person. I feel like your empathy goes way up when the inequity is just not hidden anymore — when you don’t have a choice. And I think that’s going to have an impact on creativity and how things are made. But this isolation is wild, and definitely social media and technology is coming into its purpose in a way that I’m both sick of and grateful for.
W&H: Are you creating differently now in this kind of moment?
MJ: Yes and no. I made the first third of a movie that was entirely made by my followers on Instagram, called “Jopie,” where I gave directions and they acted them out. That was the kind of thing I’d always wanted to do, but I could never really get everyone’s attention enough — but [now] everyone literally had nothing else to do.
It’s very unusual, the participants in that were from all over the world and it’s unusual that you have that much in common emotionally in a given moment, so that was powerful to me.
But I am, like all of you, unfolding it each day, just living with the unknown for so long. I mean, that’s like a fundamental Buddhist kind of thing people meditate to figure out, and we’re having it thrust upon us. It’s a formidable transformation.
W&H: We have time for one more submitted question: “I’ve been reading your book retrospective [‘Miranda July’] and wondering if the process of putting together this book changed your relationship to your archive. And do you keep a personal archive, aside from your creative archive?” Or are they one and the same?
MJ: They’re kind of one and the same, although sometimes there are some folders and things that are more just about friends. I have a file folder [that contains] every card Mike, my husband, has ever made for me that’s somehow separate from my art archive.
You know, it’s so funny — I am really organized but, for example, I have not yet put everything back. I took all this stuff out — me and Elizabeth, my assistant — for the book, trying to find the right things. It’s been so hectic, [with] the book, and then Sundance, and now we’re in quarantine — I never have any time. I had to put everything back in the archives, so when I walk into that room, I’m like, “Oh, shit, I’m not really done with that project until I refile it.”
I feel like I’ll just keep going, keeping it out of sight and mind as I did for 20 years, and maybe in 20 more years, there can be another book, and I will force myself to look at it again.
W&H: In closing, I loved the Vulture piece about you recently, where you talked about having a room of your own to be creative. I just respect that so much, and wanted to ask you to offer any advice to people here on being creative. Any advice you want for people who are struggling — filmmakers, writers, all the different creative areas.
MJ: Yeah, it’s so hard right now. I’m lucky to have this space, my office — I know a lot of people don’t have so much space. I have always, everywhere I’ve lived — and often I’ve been living with other people — been like, “Okay, dibs on that closet and I’m not going to use it for my clothes.” I would build a desk in it, and light it. The “A Room of One’s Own” thing, to me it’s not just that you’re going to work in there, it’s that you’re saying this space exists inside of me, too. It’s almost like a monument to that space. When you go in there, nothing else matters, and you’re set free, and you should probably turn the internet off, and leave your phone outside of it, and then see what happens.
I should have photographed each space because some of them were quite small. I often had a board for a desk, because a normal desk wouldn’t fit, but they still functioned. I wrote “Me and You and Everyone We Know” in a space like that. So that would be one hot tip — as if no one’s ever thought of that!
