“I don’t usually wake up with a fully-formed movie idea,” Miranda July says. But in the case of Kajillionaire, the newest film she wrote and directed, this is exactly what happened.
“The characters appeared in my mind and I grabbed at them,” she adds. “It was like pulling on a string. I just kept reeling it in as long as it came.”
In July’s polymath career, she’s produced fiction, non-fiction, a sculpture garden, and music, but she’s best known for her films; Criterion recently released an edition of her break-out first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know. Kajillionaire, her third, focuses on a pair of low-level grifters who’ve raised their daughter to assist in their cons with the taut obedience of a trained animal. Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger play the anti-social, neurotic parents determined to scam just enough to get by, while Evan Rachel Wood shapeshifts into Old Dolio (a friend of July’s dreamed up the name), who has extremely long hair, a deep voice, and was raised almost entirely without tenderness or touch. The lives of all three are upended when they encounter a young woman far more at ease in the world than they are, played by Gina Rodriguez. After July’s friend Lena Dunham suggested her for the role, “I became obsessed with Gina,” says July, who lives in L.A. with her husband, filmmaker Mike Mills, and their 8-year-old child, Hopper. “I wanted her backstory as America’s sweetheart. That’s how I see her.”
Before July cast Wood, she was worried the actress was more of a “Disney songbird” (Wood had a role in Frozen 2), but once they met, “She signaled to me, Don’t worry. I’m the kid who most related to Edward Scissorhands.” Wood also showed July her the voice she’d had before she started acting, which is the one she used to play Old Dolio. “She had a vocal coach who trained her voice up,” July says. “She said, ‘People don’t usually want me to sound like this.’”
Kajillionaire’s focus on anxiety, isolation, and connection makes it uniquely well-suited for the current moment. It has at its heart an idea that’s both sobering and hopeful, which is that people have capacities they rarely exceed—“We can only ever be how we are,” Old Dolio says—but that even when someone we love has proven profoundly, traumatically inadequate, healing is possible. Some passages feel akin to a sensory piece of video art, like a wild dance sequence Old Dolio performs, or the pink foam that periodically cascades down the wall of a warehouse where the family lives. But it’s these surreal elements that enable the film to present a version of the world tweaked just enough in the direction of strange that you can see things with fresh eyes.
As someone who explores alienation and loneliness in your work, did you feel like you were better equipped than most to handle quarantine?
How to get at this? Both Mike and I are very independent and it kind of forced us together in a way that must be vaguely terrifying to us or we would have done it before. I just had, for the first time in six months, a few days alone, and I went in this very intense, a little bit ecstatic state. Not like I was being creative every second, but I could stay within myself, whether that meant eating messily or masturbating in a weird part of the house. I kind of tunneled down into an essential loneliness that to me is so core that it’s generative. It’s like touching home base. But I think everyone has some relationship to loneliness and connection. I haven’t talked to one person who hasn’t found [quarantine] to be a really profound metaphor for their deal.
How did your experience of family, whether the one you grew up in or the one you’ve formed now, inform the film?
I’m not sure I would have done the movie if I weren’t also culpable as a parent. I’m trying my best, but I can already see that this is a very weird world that I’m describing to my child every day just by living. I’m almost tricking them. There’s no way the world they live in [once they grow up] will be like this. When Hopper was a baby, people would ask, Are you just so in love with them? And I’d be like, "yeah, but I have only known them for seven months." I’ve known everybody else in my life for longer. I haven’t ever wanted to presume or infringe on their personhood.
What was filming like?
I think any of the actors will find a nice way of saying I have a very exacting vision. I smile when I read interviews with them. I’m like, that’s so sweet of you to put it that way. Me and Sebastian Wintero, the director of photography, also made the decision to shoot one of the climaxes of the movie in one long shot, which I always thought of as a macho move. What are you trying to prove? But suddenly I realized [the actors] needed to just flow through it, that it would literally be a relief, and relief is what that scene is all about. They’re the kind of women who, when you push them to edge, you suddenly realize that’s where they’re happiest.
You recently told New York magazine that no matter what you do, some people still perceive your work as twee. What do you think that’s about?
I do think there’s sexism in there. It makes [my work] harmless. But I really am surprised. For years, I hid that I had done sex work because I didn’t want to be a bad example to young woman. I remember being so nervous when something in the New Yorker was going to allude to it. I thought, Ok this is it, the cat’s out of the bag, I’m dropping a bomb on my reputation. And literally nothing happened. There could be no other motivation at that point other than doing what I wanted to do for myself. It’s somewhere between freeing and hopeless.
How are you experiencing the world these days—do you feel hopeful at all?
At the start of pandemic, I had some basic assumption that things couldn’t get that bad. Which is the kind of thinking that now has been proven wrong, environmentally-speaking and in terms of authoritarianism. Bad things definitely do happen. That kind of magical thinking is much harder to do now.