Mike Mills found it 'therapeutic' working on movie triptych
Mike Mills wrote Beginners about his dad, 20th Century Women about his mum and C'mon C'mon about his own experience of becoming a father.
Mike Mills has admitted working on movies about his own family life has been “therapeutic”.
The 60-year-old first made a name for himself helming music videos, before making his directorial feature debut with Thumbsucker in 2015.
However, it wasn't until he decided to write a movie about his father - a gay man who hid his sexuality until he came out later in life - and penned Beginners in 2010 that Mike was really established as one of the industry’s top directors.
He went on to write and direct 20th Century Women in 2016, about his mother’s life, and C’mon C’mon in 2021, about his own experience of becoming a father, and working on the movie triptych helped him work through some things in his own head.
He told Rolling Stone: “There is a therapeutic thing happening that I didn’t totally understand at first, but I see now. It’s like I am kind of communing with my dead parents.
“I’m trying to come up with what the f*** they would say in this thing, or it’s like, ‘I know my mom wouldn’t exactly say that, but I’m kind of taking her energy and multiplying it.’
“So that communing with a person who isn’t there feels nice.
“My parents were gone relatively early in my life, and they’re the kind of folks that just didn’t tell you s*** about themselves. So I have a lot of questions and a lot of hunger. There are mysteries with your loved ones.
“But movies are dreams and magic tricks, and I realise I’ve been able to hold on to the mysteries because of those movies. That part has been like nutritive emotionally in a way that I didn’t cop to before.”
Mike added that he feels as though he knows his parents better since he has had to imagine them in the films.
He explained: “I have had to think about these people a lot, and then explain them to other people, and then have them transformed by these other people. That’s another whole magic trick that I don’t even understand.
“Like, you do your best job to try to capture some aspects of your father. You’re only going to get, say, 20 per cent. Then you hand it over to Christopher Plummer, who does his version.
“And you’re like, ‘Well, I kind of learned a couple things about my dad in the way that Christopher was different but also the same.’”
Christopher won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the movie.
