“Feelings are my genre.” Mike Mills bursts into laughter. “That’s a good line for you. The perfect pull quote.” We are partway through a conversation over Zoom about his latest film, C’mon C’mon, and he has said this with a knowing smirk—yet at the same time we both realize how true the statement is. It’s rare to find a filmmaker so attuned to the emotional currents of his characters the way that Mills has been over the course of his four-film career, and that emotional intuitiveness has passed along to the viewers who connect so strongly with his work.

Drawing once again from autobiographical elements, the writer-director of Beginners and 20th Century Women found inspiration from the relationship between himself and his kid for C’mon C’mon, in which documentary filmmaker Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) is tasked with looking after his young nephew Jesse (Woody Norman) when Jesse’s mother Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) has to attend to pressing personal issues. In theaters now, the film has been a warmhearted hit with our community, placing high in our Top 50 Films of 2021, and already landing in our all-time Top 250 Narrative Feature Films.

Over the course of our chat, Mills exhibits the same mix of affability and heartrending pathos as his films. He’s gentle and inviting in a way where only forty minutes after meeting him you feel safe opening up and letting him know just how much his films have meant to you—as I would do by the end of our time together.

Along the way, we talked about the films that he loves, ranging from hard-hitting documentaries and journalism dramas to extraordinarily orchestrated silent comedies and all things Wim Wenders.

Absolutely, yeah, it’s a pleasure to be able to let you know how much your film is connecting with viewers, and if it’s cool with you, I’d love to ask you about the films you love. I have taken inspiration for some of the questions from the interviews we see throughout C’mon C’mon that Johnny and his documentary team ask the kids they meet.
Awesome! I love talking about other films.

Perfect. So, Mike Mills, let’s start off with what films scare you? Maybe not even necessarily horror films, but films that can tap into real-world fears or just give you that kind of visceral anxiety.
I’m going to choose only films that I like, if that’s alright?

For sure, please do.
Okay, so what films scare me… well, like [Yorgos Lanthimos’] Dogtooth, right? Just the feralness of those people, and his filmmaking is so… what’s the word?… it's like a street brawl. My films are so nice, and I love how fucking un-nice his films are. They scare me because you know that something bad’s gonna happen, and you don’t know what it is.

Another film that scares me in a way that’s interesting to me is All the President’s Men. I feel like that just relates more and more now. We’re in such a Nixonian time, or such an authoritarian-regime kind of time. That movie gets so spooky. Everyone’s spooked out. Who’s listening? Who’s hearing? They’re all afraid of getting killed. That scares me.

I don’t watch scary movies. Maybe that’s another answer. I’m such a pussy. I’m such a wimp. Like, you know Mad Men? Watching Mad Men, I could barely stand it. It’s so depressing. So dark, so unnerving. I mean all this as compliments to the filmmakers​​—it’s very effective. I’d have to watch Downton Abbey afterwards or something. I’d have to have some tea. I’m so easily scared. I should be braver.

Desensitize is a good word. The meaning of a life really goes out the door.
Yeah, people die. Not just die—people are murdered in insane, chaotic, totally uncaring, brutal and oppressive ways all the time. So why use all your privilege to fake people dying? Why recreate that for entertainment’s sake? That is so cuckoo to me.

Shifting gears in the other direction: what films make you happy?
So many films make me happy for all different kinds of reasons. I love Casablanca to death. I love everything about it. I love the story, the way it looks, the acting out of love, the fact that it’s on the Warner Bros lot, which is near my house. That it’s part of American history. I love that it’s all on stages, and it’s so artificial. I love the craft of it. I really feel like I’m learning about filmmaking when watching it.

I love any old Buster Keaton film. Steamboat Bill Jr., especially the whole second half with the storm and all that. I love Buster Keaton’s entrepreneurial-ness—coming from skating and punk, I feel like I can relate to the way he worked, where they didn’t know exactly what they were going to do every day. There’s so much creativity in that. Like, they knew the situation, but they would kind of physically feel it out as they went. He just had like twenty extras any day sitting there, and the whole crew sitting there, and he’d just show up nine to five and figure out what they were going to do. That sounds so dreamy to me. And the films are amazing.

One that kind of relates to this film: Alice in the Cities was a huge influence on C’mon C’mon. Oh wait, should I separate? Are you going to do influences later or should I talk about it now?

Go for it! We’re just hanging out. I’ll say, I saw Alice in the Cities for the first time last year and it was very much on my mind while watching C’mon C’mon. You can totally feel that influence all over it.
Absolutely. That film is such a gentle, hard-to-describe film. Hard to describe what’s totally magic about it. To me, definitely a sense of place is part of it. I feel like Wim Wenders in general, whether it’s Paris, Texas or Wings of Desire, place is essential to what’s happening with the humans in his films. Place makes certain scenes happen. Place makes emotions and conversations happen, and I think Wim Wenders is really great at that. 

With that idea of being indebted to the history of film in mind, do you remember the first film or films you saw that made you realize you wanted to be a filmmaker?
I’ve got two answers to that. I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’m in New York City right now, and I went to college here. The one answer, that’s kind of more practical, is The Thin Blue Line, the Errol Morris film. I came from graphics and art, you know? I didn’t study film at all. I was really interested in what I guess would be considered more of a documentary space, using art to somehow study life, and I was so drawn in by the diagrammatic quality of that film—the way that he questions any kind of ability to tell the truth. I remember walking out of that theater and thinking, ‘maybe I could do that’.

Then there’s also early Jim Jarmusch: Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, those films. The verisimilitude of those films, of the acting, is not so amazing, but in a beautiful way. He loved Ozu, and those films had that kind of Ozu distance—that simplicity where it’s just like one lens, one shot, and all of that. That still really speaks to me. It’s like neurologically pleasing, that kind of filmmaking style. So, weirdly Jarmusch taught me Ozu before I even knew who Ozu was.

Another film that influences me now… so, I went to Cooper Union, which is an art school in the East Village. I walk by the building all the time right now because of where I’m staying. I was looking at that, and thinking about how that is the building where I first saw 8½ on the Friday night free-film club that we had. I was eighteen, and I think it was the first film they showed. So, I was in my first semester at college, having just moved away, and I remember that movie blew me away.

It didn’t make me feel like I could make movies at all as my job because that was so virtuosic, and so insane and so big. But I had never seen a movie like that. That movie still really speaks to me today, as does Fellini in general, in a way that I could talk to you about, but I also don’t really understand. It’s like he was my dad in a past life or something.

The film that really influenced [Beginners] does the same move, and taught me how to do that move, and that’s Lovefilm, István Szabó’s 1970 Hungarian film. I love to promote that film any way I can, cause it’s like no one knows about it. I couldn’t have made Beginners without that film. I don’t know shit about being a Hungarian kid growing up, and all the other history of Budapest—it’s not California—but you could just smell and feel that film as if it was not just something that really happened, but where you’re living vulnerabilities and mysteries that happened to that person. That has a particular charge to it, and an extra intimacy to it.

It’s not that I felt like I was that Hungarian kid, but it just makes you feel more alive and embodied in your own uniqueness and somehow more seen in your own uniqueness. When someone’s really fucking speaking the truth, even if you don’t have the same truth, it just kind of enhances truth and enhances the process of truth, so it just hits a chord in you. It’s like music in a way. Like, why does everyone feel happy about a G-major chord? All these different kinds of people. I feel like it’s a similar situation.

Some others are Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories—complicated thing to talk about, but it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge their influence on me or their impact, and to acknowledge my complicitness with whatever is Woody Allen, you know? I saw those movies in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and I wasn’t as aware of a lot of the issues that are going on in our day. Anyways, in those movies—I’m not at all like that guy, his characters, but sometimes his concerns and his problems and his emotional problems are uncannily like, ‘what? That is so my problem!’ I’m very different than him, but I really feel like he is talking about me and my friends in those moments.

Totally, yeah I have a similar experience where Woody’s movies were really formative for me at a certain point, and you’ve just got to acknowledge that there’s a complicity that comes with that as well as an influence.
Yeah, I would be virtue signaling and lying to say that they didn’t really influence me.

For me, I’m really including the spectrum of family—and by family, I don’t just mean biological family, but the whole spectrum of primary relationships. So, for me it’s always also old people, or actually people who are dying, people on that end of the spectrum as well as kids too. I like the whole swath, and the interconnectedness of all of those ages.

The older I get and the more therapy I do, the more I totally feel like our ages don’t get discarded as we chronologically age out of that year. On emotional psychic terms there is still six-year-old Mike running around right now, talking to me sometimes, and there’s all these different ages of me going around. They don’t lay dormant. They may get brought to the surface at different times, or they’re like a stew at all times, or something like that. I don’t really believe in chronologic age being this neat, linear situation, and I’m interested in how different developmental stages play with each other.

My kid, who’s never seen any of my films but has seen the trailers and heard about them, loves to tease me and always says like, “Mike”… my kid calls me Mike… “Mike, why do you always have your parents dying in a movie? Every movie is a parent dying.” I feel like it’s as important as having streets, and having exterior landscapes. It’s just a part of life. People being kids and people dying are part of life, so of course they should be in every story.

One of the most vital aspects of your filmmaking is this emotional intuitiveness. There’s this line that Woody says early in the film about how his feelings are “inside” him, and then later you have a scene where Joaquin is encouraging him to scream and let out those emotions. What compels you to make films that really encourage that embrace of all levels of the emotional spectrum?
A thing in my life that has probably influenced my movies more than anything—I guess that’s hard to quantify—is my own going to therapy. That space, what you talk about, what that’s all about, that whole history of how you came to feel the way you feel. All the things that led to you interpreting the world in this way, both in a way that you can talk about, and in an unconscious way that you can’t really talk about. That’s my movie terrain, you know? Feelings, your interior life, what people call mental health, or the spectrum of mentality—let’s call it that—that’s my turf. That’s my genre. Feelings are my genre. That’s a good line for you.

Yeah, that’s the headline right there.
[Laughs.] The perfect pull quote. But that’s really true. My kid, largely due to my kid’s mom and just how life has changed from when I was a kid to now, my kid is so much more emotionally intelligent than I am. They’ve just been brought up that way. They can also do everything on a computer I can do. And they’re nine. They’re better than me at Photoshop. And they’re better than me about expressing their own contradictions and expressing my lies. About expressing a need to express. And that was part of the movie, like there’s a slight generational gap between Johnny’s experience and Jesse’s. That’s part of the rub. That’s part of the dramaturgical conflict.