Interview: Miranda July Takes Us Into ‘The Future’

Posted by Noah J Nelson on July 26, 2011

Publicity Still from "The Future"

Miranda July has a singular voice that flows from a naturally off-center view of the world, and her intensely intimate stories contain a sense of whimsy that isn’t forced. In films, short stories, and performance pieces July has created a body of work that uncovers strange strands of beauty that lay underneath the surface of day to day life.

Her latest film, The Future , tells the tale of a disintegrating relationship, a theme that she first developed in the performance piece Things We Don’t Understand and Are Definitely Not Going To Talk About. The film takes elements of that production and adapts them into a more traditional narrative format.

“I did always think it would end up as a film,” July says, “but I thought it would be a really be a new kind of film that like the performance involved audience participation and therefore would not be distributed in any of the normal ways. And might even have a web component.

“Because this was me thinking: ‘Well I made a movie. I made a normal movie that happened the normal way. Like, why do that again? I want to make movies but, why repeat that? And I think that the answer why came after doing something wild enough that I kinda got all that desire satisfied. And then I think the thing that compels me to make movies came back and it just felt like suddenly the most interesting way to tell that story.”

July’s work uses the logic of dreams at key points, inviting the audience to take a quarter turn left and leave mundane reality behind. Without giving too much away of the film (a complete review of which was part of Sundance coverage), I’ll note that one of the speaking characters in the film is a cat, and that this is not the only element of heightened reality in the film.

The writer-director found that “the more surreal elements — a lot of which were in the performance — might be more interesting in a kinda more conventional context.” The storytelling challenge became to pull that off.

“Sometimes I write down on a post-it, I’ve rewritten this many times, ‘move in symbols’. Because when I start to get too literal — or heaven forbid autobiographical which is always certain death for me — it starts to get… it just gets bad. Then if I let go and realize that this thing [the symbol] can hold the feeling.”

The key relationship in the film is that of Sophie and Jason, a very “sibling” like couple whose four year romance has calcified into routine and is quietly disintegrating. As depicted in the final film, Sophie and Jason are nearly sexless with each other; their status more that of roommates than lovers. July notes that this was not the original intent.

“Movies by the time they’re edited,” says July “they get a little simpler. You begin to realize there’s a lot of complicated stuff in here without having to get every subtlety. And I had shot a sex scene between Sophie and Jason. We fully prepared for it, did it. It turned out way pornier than I meant to do. Oh, my god. No one will ever see that.

“When I honestly saw the first assembly and the editor had cut it together… I’m like ‘Okay I’m never watching that again.’ I don’t know how you accidentally make an x-rated movie but, we did.

“I mean, not. That’s gonna sound weird. It’s not technically X-rated.”

During the press roundtable for the film July let slip that her next project might not be a film. The idea is so new that it kept her up the night before the junket.

“I’d begun really thinking of it as a novel last night more than a movie. And I realized, ah, that’s better for all these reasons that I suddenly could see and feel and was excited about.”

July has one collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, already under her belt.

“Those short stories, a lot of them, those are like the first things I ever seriously wrote as fiction. When one came I would write it and they’re pretty quick I realize looking back. I’d write the bulk of it in three sittings over three days or something. That changed near the end of that book, once I had a publisher and I needed to have a few more stories.

“The longer stories are the ones I did last and they were after I finished the movie. The good thing was I had a wider scope and I knew I could I could take on more. But the like lightning strike stuff was no longer what it was all about. Having the flash of the idea, it was more of having the discipline of it, and if there was lightning that was fine, which is the writer’s life.”

The Future opens in limited release this weekend.

Related posts:

1. Sundance Review: Miranda July’s The Future
2. Interview: These Guys Make Everything
3. Farmers of the Future: An Interview with Taylor Reid of BeginningFarmers.org
4. Interview: Director John Gray On Directing “White Irish Drinkers”
5. Apocalypse, CA [Indie Filmmaker Interview]