Mike Mills is a man of many talents: a graphic artist, video/commercial and now feature film director. His debut film Thumbsucker looks at the dramatic effects on a teenager and his family when he gives up sucking his thumb. Thumbsucker premieres in London this week at resfest 2005.

Additional Info
ReadyMade interview
Sundance Channel interview
Thumbsucker info/review
KF#135: Humans images
KF#136: video stills

This interview was conducted via the phone.

Amanda Boyle: Let's start talking about your debut film, Thumbsucker. What I loved so much about the film is its amazing tone. It's really mellow and thoughtful but at the same time very funny. Now I know it's based on a book, did you read the book and decide you had to make it into a film?

Mike Mills: My friend Bob Stephenson sent it to me. He'd read a synopsis of it in a magazine and to him it smelt like me. I read it and indeed felt that this was something very honest and authentic. While the book was very funny it was actually revealing very hard to say things about yourself and your family. It just felt true. It felt like this must have happened, which to me is attractive and important. It had the combination of saying hard things, saying things that go against the way we are comfortable about thinking about families but doing it with a humour that wasn't making fun of the characters, wasn't just satirical. This gave me a sense of relief as a reader, showing that life is pretty funny and don't take it to seriously, as I tend to. That whole tone kinda reminded me of Hal Ashby and Harold and Maude. So I started to adapt it. I hadn't written anything before but luckily Walter [Kirn] wrote really good short dialogue and so there was a good training wheel for me.

AB: Were you always going to adapt it?

MM: No, not at the beginning because I hadn't done it before but quite quickly on I thought, "Wait a second I can't imagine directing something I didn't write. Let me at least try." I made a deal with Bob: "Let me try the first thirty pages." And in that first time of adapting it, it really became clear how much cathartic mileage I was getting out of this and how I related to Justin and how much having him as a character was allowing me to say things that I wanted to say, that I needed to say. It's like you know when you make a part of yourself that's kinda weak into one of the characters, it emboldens you. You can be strong with it or you can fall down with it and still survive. The facts are very different and most of the details are very different but the emotional underpinnings are very similar between him and his mother and me and my mother. Then the estrangement he had with his dad is totally different, my dad is completely different but the estrangement is very familiar to me. So it became very personal, very quick.

AB: Well I was crying at the end, which was a surprise as it's so funny at the beginning! I'd also like to chat about the eclectic mix of actors, which works really well. [The cast includes: Tilda Swinton, Vincent D'Onofrio, Vince Vaughan, Keanu Reeves, Benjamin Bratt and newcomer Lou Taylor Pucci.]

MM: Having all those actors wasn't something I thought I was going to have at the beginning. Once it became clear that all these actors wanted to be in it I actually had a lot of actors to choose from. It became exciting to me to make the mixture really different, different kinds of people, different kinds of acting styles, different sort of profiles. Mixing glue in there with the unknown people.

AB: I particularly think Tilda Swinton's unusual beauty stands out, which really adds to the idea that she is unobtainable to her husband and son.

MM: The funny thing that I'm really feeling now is that for me the film is a little bit over. It's the beginning of it being over. There is this real sadness. All those people, all those actors that were really nice, who took this thing on for very sincere love reasons and had a ton of trust in me and never really noodled me. Never acted suspect round me, even though they had done so many more films than me.

AB: Were they intimidating?

MM: They were only intimidating in my head; with every conversation they became more and more approachable and by the end they were pretty dear friends.

AB: Was it tricky getting Thumbsucker funded?

MM: Yeah, very hard. All the usual film production companies that get involved with projects like this all said no. For a while it did look like it was dead in the water.

AB: So it must be a great joy, things like Sundance and Edinburgh? [The film won awards at both festivals.]

MM: No, it's just surprising! I'm having to realign my thinking... "Oh wow, this actually happening", I still have this trench mentality. It's still an uphill hike for me. It's funny it's been very challenging to try to swallow the idea that it worked out.

AB: That's a good thing to have to swallow! Was it a natural progression to do a feature film?

MM: Way back when I did my very first video, it was always with the intention to do both documentaries and create narrative, to do longer pieces, in a way to write a novel. I always thought of my videos and ads as short stories that I was doing along the way to hopefully, someday making a novel. To me in my world the three most important things are the novel, the record and the feature film. My goal was to grow up and play in that sandbox.

AB: Collecting the tools, trying things out along the way...

MM: ....practising, was how I thought of it.

AB: I loved the work you did with Air. Although different to Thumbsucker, the "All I Need" video similarly looks at relationships and has a sense of realism which...

MM: …that video definitely was a big turning point for me as I discovered something in myself. You know when you do something and the piece is far bigger than you are. Just by luck or unconscious something pops out and you're like "whoa, what was that?". And with that piece it was a willingness to be totally sincere and borderline maudlin but hopefully not. Emotional without being maudlin. I had always been sort of afraid of that and hidden before behind maybe a little irony or a just little distance. But that piece kinda showed me that I can get really emotional, I can get really sincere and actually I really loved the way the audience really reacted to it. I was like I want more of that! I want more people's interior lives and how complicated that is and how sort of endless that is.

AB: I heard that you did a documentary straight after Thumbsucker?

MM: That was at the New Museum in Holland, Not How or When or Why but Yes. That's 40 minutes and I have a deal coming up, I think, with IFC [Independent Film Channel] to do a series of feature documentaries. The first one is about anti depressants and depressants in general in Japan. Similar turf for me. People's emotional lives and especially the parts that aren't working. I think everyone in Thumbsucker is a little depressed. It's trying to give depression not such a bad name! It's a part of life; it's not all bad. Another way to define depression is partly just looking inside and taking notice of how bumpy life is for everybody and not denying that. I guess I need to do that personally, which is why I keep taking projects that force me to do that.

AB: You're moving away from commercials, is that right?

MM: Yes.

AB: How do you structure your work? Every article I've read about you says you are a Renaissance man, you do so many different things. I just wondered how do you divide your time between all these things?

MM: To me, the only way that thing works is that it's not all different to me. It's really the same feelings and ideas, the same problems and issues that I churn around with and I do little doodles in my notebook. The same theme can be done in one way in a shirt and in another way in the script I'm working on right now, you know. It's the same basic issue. I'm working on the same thing but it comes out in different ways. I grew up watching TV so I think a part of me enjoys a little ADD or diversity, they all feed off each other.

AB: I thought the graphic art you did for Humans was really moving. I saw the drawing of the ribbons and really liked it. I then read the text on it [talking about the death of Mike's father] and I really loved it.

MM: You can see how it's all the same. Part of me has a fear that most people aren't going to have the time to get all the connections, but I have resigned myself to that fact that it's better to have a longer conversation with a few people.

AB: We've talked briefly about Hal Ashby but are there other directors that inspire you?

MM: In making this film... definitely Woody Allen, the Woody Allen that makes Annie Hall, Stardust Memories, Manhattan and Sisters and all that. Early Jim Jarmusch got me into making films. Then I started watching Yasujiro Ozu and was like "Man, why is this so familiar and great" and I learned later through a Jim Jarmusch commentary that he had been totally influenced by him. Ratcatcher was also a big influence on me too.

AB: What graphic designers and artists inspire you?

MM: That's a big question. To be honest I didn't look at a lot of contemporary graphic designers but there are people like Experimental Jet Set, every time they do something, I'm like "What they do?". Geoff McFetridge [McFetridge is currently exhibiting in London at the Kemistry Gallery.] I think is really great. People who influenced me as I was coming up are more like: Quentin Fiore: The Medium is the Massage and Charles and Ray Eames because they did a whole bunch of different things, that gave me an OK to be the way I am. Their mission, if you read their stuff, is that they think they are changing the universe but they do it in a playful way. There is an artist called Will Rogan, out of San Francisco, he really had an influence on the new Humans stuff I did. Tom Friedman. Wolfgang Tillmans I've been really into recently, in a weird way that's influenced the Humans stuff. With that new Humans stuff a lot of it I think of as photography. As if I took a picture of something that happens, I draw with the same attentiveness.

AB: What about graffiti artists like Swoon, Banksy, Neckface or people like that?

MM: I don't know those guys. I'm not a graffiti aficionado but I've had friends like Twister who do graffiti; I always like it but I'm not someone who knows about. In a weird way doing posters and graphic design that are on the street and the kind of buzz you get from being part of the public world, I always thought way back when that it was like tagging. I especially like the people who are more tricky, who are taking back spaces that have been commercialised and aren't people spaces any more -- they are really amazing. I remember when I was in college, I don't quite think this any more, I thought that the street was the most prestigious gallery to be in, whichever way you get there, to be part of people's lives. Now I'm a bit more like, I'm wondering what kind of communication I'm really having in that context.

AB: I suppose it goes back to what we were saying before about conversations?

MM: Exactly, I guess I'm looking for ones in a room now...

AB: What are you writing now?

MM: I'm in the middle of it... it's basically about relationships and small, small stakes. Being in love with people and how crazy making it is.

AB: Last question, did anything particularly surprise you about directing a film?

MM: The amount that it impacted on me as a person. What I've taken away from this project is so much more personal and has affected the way I behave and my relationships with my family and friends. I didn't quite expect it to exorcise me so much. I hoped it would. If you had told me that it would before I would have been "great". Working with actors that are willing to go so far and all the conversations you have, you do so much emotional investigation and so much emotional aerobics. So you are in good shape at the end!

Amanda Boyle is an award winning filmmaker, who is currently working on her first feature film as a director.