Miranda July
Miranda July
Miranda Jennifer Julyis an American film director, screenwriter, actor, author and artist. Her body of work includes film, fiction, monologue, digital media presentations, and live performance art. She wrote, directed and starred in the films Me and You and Everyone We Knowand The Future. Her most recent book, debut novel The First Bad Man, was published in January 2015. July was a recipient of a Creative Capital Emerging Fields Award...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth15 February 1974
CityBarre, VT
CountryUnited States of America
character thinking cities
Most great filmmakers are good at place. Like how people say, like, "The city itself is a character in the movie," you know? I'm so interior. I always forget there's such a thing as an exterior wide shot, where you can see where someone is. As opposed to just: how can we show what this person is thinking, in an abstract way that is felt?
sweet character people
I supposed this was one reason why people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end.
character space people
Narrative and characters have always interested me. I never tried to alienate an audience. Of course, gradually, I wanted a bigger and bigger space to draw people in, so it's very organic.
character writing thinking
I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.
jobs writing character
The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul.
childhood kids limited vocabulary worst
The worst thing to me is the limited vocabulary of childhood sexuality. Parents, more than anyone, know their kids are sexual.
endless sympathy
I have endless sympathy for (them) because I see myself so much in them.
almost inherently interact points reality worlds
There are going to be points of contact. That's just a fact. That it's not inherently bad. In reality, the way that the two worlds interact are often very, very subtle, almost inarticulatable.
blame both conversation exciting good leave sad scary shame talk vocabulary
I wanted to talk about that and show that without having to just have a vocabulary of blame or shame -- to say that it can be both really scary and OK, ... It can also be sad and exciting and even kind of fulfilling. It's really not a good conversation to leave to ped-ophiles. It's much better to actually talk about it without pathology.
coming emotional kids last loving physical
As a filmmaker, the last thing you want to do is place kids in emotional or physical jeopardy, ... Especially for me, coming from a place of really loving those kids.
care conversation definitely fill side sort spaces taking talk
I have this audiotape that I made when I was like 6 or 7 that's just one side of a conversation with spaces for me to fill in the rest, ... So, I could play it back and talk to myself. Don't know if that's art, but it was definitely a sort of way of taking care of myself.
writing house comforting
My ideal life is just lounging around the house and every once in a while I'll kind of write something, and then I'll leave and eat something and masturbate or whatever - just this very fluid life of comforting myself.
real clothes creating
You've got the people you know, which are problematic. Always. They're rich but they're also real people living their lives alongside you. Then you've got the people that you make-up completely, who are often missing a dimension if they don't have some reference to real people. So strangers exist in this in-between space, where in not knowing them, you are creating a fiction for them, even in passing, but at the same time, there they are, with their actual bodies and their actual clothes. It's totally enticing.
world kind virtue
I'm interested in what the virtues of all those things are, especially for the kind of person who's made their own world that revolves around them, like writers do. It seems especially precious.