After the filmmaker Mike Mills lost his mother, his cancer-ridden 75-year-old father made an announcement: All his life, he’d been gay.
“Having this stuff happen was way more intense than making a movie about it,” laughs Mills, 45, writer-director of Beginners, a film-based on (but not an exact replica of) his experiences with rediscovering his father as he reinvented himself. “My worst fear is it’s a self-hating, narcissistic downward spiral, but my hope is that someone can take something from my nooks and crannies and find something that’s real for themselves.”
Inspired by the wry honesty of such artists as Leonard Cohen, Cat Power and Woody Allen, the film — which stars Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer — was written five months after Mills’s father passed away.
“After your second parent dies, you’re like, ‘Who the hell am I?’ You’re on fire with that question, and now it’s just you on the horizon — you’re next,” says Mills, who began his career making documentaries and music videos and directed the film Thumbsucker in 2005. “It really does cause this kind of crisis, but I’ve had enough therapy that I’ve become comfortable talking about myself.”
Mills not only wrote an autobiographical screenplay, but the graphic designer and commercial artist also created many of the film’s props (he made the complicated CD packaging that McGregor’s trying to sell to an uninterested band in the film). During draft after draft of his back-and-forth with Hollywood, his script became more personal as it began looking less likely to be made.
“People liked Thumbsucker, but it didn’t catapult my career and weirdly it made me put everything I love into this,” says Mills. “If this was going to be the last film I made, I wanted everything that felt special to me to be in the story.”
On set, McGregor and Plummer clicked like an actual family and Mills says it was difficult, at times, watching the Canadian icon bring back the charming and complicated character of his dad.
“I never looked at Christopher like my dad, but when the doctor says, ‘You don’t have to come in anymore,’ Ewan started crying and I see this teardrop hit the lens and think it’s me, but it’s the DP,” Mills says. “It wasn’t that it was my dad, it was that something real was happening. Christopher took my dad’s energy and externalized it.”
For Mills, making deeply personal art like his heroes is taxing, but the filmmaker says there’s no other way that he wants to work.
“When I read Ginsberg’s Howl or hear This American Life, I get chills because I know it comes from someone’s unique experience,” says Mills, who was approached by HBO to turn the subject of Beginners into a documentary series. “I told them, ‘What are we going to do, have my dad die every week?’ I’m ready to move on from this story, but this is the terrain I do like.”
