Ewan McGregor, Cosmo and Melanie Laurent in Beginners (2011).

Director Mike Mills talks Beginners, Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor, his graphic-design background and turning his family history into a film.

By Rachel Langer.

Beginners, Mike Mills’ second feature film, draws on the director’s memories of his father, who came out as gay at age 75 after the death of Mills’ mother. Starring Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer, the film explores love, identity and the search for authentic relationships.

It follows Mills’ 2005 feature debut, Thumbsucker, adapted from Walter Kirn’s novel of the same name. Mills has also directed music videos for artists including Air, Pulp, Everything but the Girl, Moby, Yoko Ono and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, along with commercials, short films and documentaries.

Outside filmmaking, the Berkeley-born Mills is a graphic designer and visual artist. He has designed album artwork for Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, Boss Hog and Buffalo Daughter, worked with brands including X-Girl, Marc Jacobs and Supreme, and exhibited his art internationally.

Rachel Langer spoke with Mills by phone from Toronto about the autobiographical roots of Beginners, working with Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor, the relationship between writing and directing, and how his background in art and design shaped the film.

Mike Mills on the set of Beginners (2011).

Rachel Langer: This film seems like it comes from a place of deep authenticity. Could you talk about that?

Mike Mills: My goal from the get-go was not to make a souvenir memoir, but to try to use this authenticity to make it more contagious or more real for an audience, and that way try to emulate so many people that I look up to, filmmaking-wise, or as far as authors or musicians.

RL: You had a very high-calibre cast on this film. Did you find this caused more pressure or intensity? Did it compare to the level of the cast on Thumbsucker? I mean, Christopher Plummer is Oscar calibre.

MM: Well, Tilda [Swinton, who was in Thumbsucker] won an Oscar, so there were equally intense actors on both films. All those people were just pretty easy. I mean, definitely they’re all different characters, but they like working, they don’t take it for granted, and you’re really just working, you know?

I gotta say, Ewan is just one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people you’re ever going to meet. And then Christopher is just really inspiring, and you can feel that he is not just sitting on his laurels. Even though he is 79, he just wants to continue to do good stuff, or even to get better, and that’s pretty wild to be around.

But it was never intimidating. It was often just very fun. We had a lot of laughs.

Melanie Laurent and Ewan McGregor in Beginners (2011).

RL: Did you find that, as a writer-director, you had trouble wearing both hats, or were there sacrifices you had to make with one vision for another?

MM: No, they go hand in hand. To me it’s like one and the same. The whole process of filmmaking is filled with things you didn’t expect. Like, you wanted it sunny and it’s raining, or you want to shoot for 60 days and only have 30.

You just have to embrace that. If you’re not going to embrace that, you’re just setting yourself up for a world of pain. It’s the way it’s going to be, so you might as well learn how to be flexible and be a part of the filmmaking instead of an enemy of the filmmaking.

I love being a writer-director. It’s the coolest job in the universe.

RL: How did your background as a graphic artist affect your choices for this film?

MM: As an artist, I’ve had a lot of art in galleries, and my graphics have sort of been in both worlds. It’s that kind of “by any means necessary” approach that really influenced this, and that all things are equal. A still photograph is not less important or less emotional or less valid than live-action photography.

And I do think I was going through some sort of crisis-y time in making this, which is very natural after your second parent has died. You know: “Who am I? What’s unique about me as a filmmaker? What do I have that are my particular tools?”

I really un-soberly embraced all the things I know and love and do in this movie.

Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor in Beginners.

RL: The film obviously deals with a generational shift in thinking when it comes to relationships, gay rights and consumerism as a whole. Did you intend to deal with those things, or did the story naturally produce them?

MM: I did cultural studies in graduate school, and that’s always been a really deep interest of mine: how personal and emotional lives—and, in my parents’ case, their sex lives—are really political and a part of their history.

The one flash moment I had that made me think I could make this movie was something my dad said when he was alive. He said, “Your mother would disagree with me, but I think she took off her Jewish badge and I took off my gay badge, and when we married we joined the American Story.”

So he told his own story in this broader historical context, and that’s when I thought, “Oh yeah, this isn’t just the Mills family. This is so many people. This is such a broad thing.”

So I’ve been interested in looking at things through a pop-culture context or a historical context, and I was really happy I found a way to do it.