Rebecca Miller
Rebecca Miller
Rebecca Augusta Milleris an American independent filmmaker, screenwriter, film director, and novelist, known for her films Angela, Personal Velocity: Three Portraits, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, and Maggie's Plan, all of which she wrote and directed. Miller is the daughter of Magnum photographer Inge Morath and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth15 September 1962
CityRoxbury, CT
CountryUnited States of America
I saw Dolce Vita and my mind was blown by it, by the synthesis. I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker and started making films. I was writing screenplays and couldn't get money because my work was so uncommercial.
Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.
I have a great drive to make things and sometimes I forget to slow down a little.
I do think it is a kind of illness in the sense that it sets you apart, it injects you with an endless, unslakable thirst to keep making the thing. The artist has to voluntarily use themselves endlessly.
One of the things that's good for me is that I can go from one art form to another.
Writing is a particular kind of frustration, which is why when I was making the structure for the novel I visualized it for myself with a color-coded board so I could see it.
I think one of the great joys of being a writer is you can transcend everything, even your own sex, what century you live in, and how you think. I found it quite natural to think as a male because I actually think that as a female, one often thinks in the mind of a male in terms of eroticism. You think about what the other person feels. So it's not that hard to imagine being that person.
I had a lot of great lakes of ignorance that I was up against, I would write what I knew in almost like islands that were rising up out of the oceans. Then I would take time off and read, sometimes for months, then I would write more of what I knew, and saw what I could see, as much as the story as I could see. And then at a certain point I had to write out what I thought was the plot because it was so hard to keep it all together in my head. And then I started to write in a more linear way.
As much as there are intellectual choices to be made and all the rest of it, a great actor has the ability really, to disappear and lose themself in a kind of mystical fashion. My appreciation and fascination with true acting is really all over the book, definitely.
As if there's a world that exists that you're semi-privy to yet can't quite penetrate - that's how it feels when you're starting a book.
Writing is acting in the sense that you're imagining and inhabiting another. In the book I was trying to get at the root of what true acting is.
I was interested in the mystical element of humor - was humor part of creation? Is God laughing at us, or with us?
I'm fascinated by what makes up a self, how one becomes a self, how much is it an answer to others and how much is it an essence of self.
Nobody is so weird others can't identify with them.