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
I like embracing kind of normal forms but am always trying to approach them as if no one's ever done that before. As if I'm literally the first person to ever write a book.
I'm always just trying to get the work done so that I can be free - like, with the sense that, like, the real me has no interest in this? I just gotta do it for my boss. But the catch is that I'm never free, I never finish the work, so I don't know who this freewheeling employee with extracurricular interests is.
The life you live in front of an audience is like an altered state - it's not totally real. I'm always, even in the course of one day, trying to find ways to balance both sides.
If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?
Sometimes I lie in bed trying to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them. I thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends.
The worst thing to me is the limited vocabulary of childhood sexuality. Parents, more than anyone, know their kids are sexual.
I have endless sympathy for (them) because I see myself so much in them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.