| 16th Feb 2012✧17:4318 notes
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GQ UK, January 2012
When Miranda July had writers’ block on the script of her latest film, The Future, she became obsessed with odd listings in a classifieds magazine. Deciding instead to interview the curious sellers, she ended up finishing the film, and writing one of them into it.
You actually cast one of the people you met - 81-year-old Joe, selling Christmas cards - in your film. Did you have something like that in mind when you began?
Miranda July: I always thought it would mean something. There was a moment I realised was going to be in the movie, and it changed the movie. I had an idea of casting them all [the people she met], but it backfired with a girl who just couldn’t act. I made my movie, Joe was in it, and it felt like it was more than a distraction. I realised it wasn’t enough - I needed to write the book. Everyone was so interesting.
Observer - December 2011
The performance artist, 37, on directing sex, ageing and excellence
When I write I wear earplugs. I don’t want to be self-conscious. I don’t want to be thinking about the fact that I’m thinking about it. I just want to be in it. It’s one element of hypnosis.
It matters to me that there’s a connection with an audience. I want to see that they get it, that we are sharing something. And we do, and it’s great but fleeting. When I was younger I hoped it would be a kind of love you could take with you into the darkness, but it isn’t.
December 2011
The Second Film By The Artist Miranda July Explores Dysfunctional Relationships Through The Eyes Of A Talking Cat.
Filmmaker, artist and author Miranda July’s latest film The Future is an affecting follow on from her debut success Me You And Everyone Else We Know. Her knack for pulling at sentimental heartstrings is just as potent; love, loss, loneliness and time are gently squeezed without feeling gushing. A young disenchanted couple decide to adopt a sick cat, whose narration offers a fantastical dose of warm surrealism. Shaken by the realisation that this step will significantly alter their lives, each pursues their own small adventure as they obsess with the notion of time and their relationship. Simon Jablonski chatted with Miranda about fear, time and identity.
NY Times, December 2011
PennySaver is a classified rag that arrives weekly in American mailboxes. It inspired the artist and filmmaker Miranda July’s latest book, IT CHOOSES YOU, a revolving adventure that takes July and the photographer Brigitte Sire into strange Los Angeles homes and the sad, joyous, weird lives of the people who dwell in them — like Michael, a 60-something man in a magenta blouse who’s going through a gender transformation and happens to be selling a large black leather jacket for $10.
At the start of the book we find July, in 2009, trying to complete her next movie script while holed up in her old home, a “little cave” she keeps as an office now that she’s married and lives elsewhere. She writes (or attempts to write) at her kitchen table or in her single-girl bed with the “thrift-store sheets.” Instead of making progress, she bleeds time by surfing the Web and doing Google searches on her own name, “as if the answer to my problem might be secretly encoded in a blog post about how annoying I was.” She finds herself looking forward to the arrival of the PennySaver and drawn to its random objects, used clothes and exotic pets, wondering about the people behind the names and phone numbers populating its pages.
The Daily Beast, November, 2011
Miranda July talks about how her procrastination became material for her newest book, “It Chooses You,” and how she got by during her lean years. By Carolyn Sun.
In 2009, July was recently married and enshrined in her self-described “tiny house in Silver Lake” trying to finish the screenplay The Future, a story about a mid-30s couple who decide to adopt a sickly cat. She wasn’t too far from the end of her screenplay when she began contacting people from the Penny Saver to avoid writing. She decided to interview them without any firm idea of what she would do with the material. Best known for her quirky indie films Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and The Future (2011), July earned her literary chops from her dark and witty collection of short stories No One Belongs Here More Than You, that won her the high-flying Frank O. Connor International Short Story Award in 2007. It was her first collection of short stories.
Huffington Post, November 2011
Miranda July’s new book It Chooses You was published this week by McSweeney’s. Part narrative, part self-conscious ethnography, it tracks July’s exploration through the PennySaver “for sale” classifieds, which she used as a vehicle to meet people in their homes throughout Los Angeles and interview them about their lives. And the book itself, in fact, it began as a vehicle to flee the screenplay for her new feature film, The Future, in her most wicked throes of writer’s block.
In fact, it was one of a slew of ways July used to procrastinate finishing The Future. The first bane of her productivity was a common one — the Internet. Desultory blog-trolling, compulsive information accumulation, self-Googling… And when she managed to wrench herself free of frivolous web surfing, she transferred that energy to the PennySaver, which she’d already had lying around to keep an eye out for estate sales. Gradually, July developed this tangential obsession. She spoke to the audience before reading from It Chooses You at Brooklyn’s BookCourt Tuesday night about the genesis of the project; “I would read through every single ad — through automotive, and just keep going… I think what struck me was that it was all real. Each one of these were real people they were really out there selling these things, and not only that, but [with innocent amazement] here were their phone numbers.”
I often daydream about… Sex. All types of fantasies are the foundation for creativity—it’s about turning your longing and desire into something more productive.
I feel most creative when… I write down my dreams. It’s the best way to start a day of artistic work. Writing sends a message to my mind saying, Creativity is important today.
I’m inspired by… Small things. While living in Berlin, I found a gum-ball machine that dispensed really weird items like a skull-and-crossbones earring and a little rubber baby—never the same thing twice. I imagined a whole story about the person who was filling that machine.
- Miranda July
Montreal Mirror, November 2011
Performance artist Miranda July on real-life inspiration, keeping private life private, getting out of her comfort zone and her new book It Chooses You
While trying to get past a creative block writing the screenplay for her latest film The Future, Miranda July set out to distract herself by interviewing people who posted ads in the Pennysaver. What began as procrastination turned into encounters with an eccentric cast of characters around L.A. These conversations, along with photos by Brigitte Sire, have recently been published as It Chooses You, a meditation on creativity, productivity and meetings with strangers in the digital age. The Mirror interviewed her on the phone from her home in L.A., about her interviews.
Paper Magazine, November 2011
Miranda July is just fine.
“I feel there’s this blurring, where people start to think I’m as sad as a character I play, or as incompetent, and I have fans sort of wanting to take care of me,” July tells me when I meet her for lunch at a coffee shop not far from her Silverlake office. “And I want to say, ‘Actually, I’ve got it pretty together. I made a whole movie!’”
In her work and, particularly, in the unsettled characters she plays onscreen, July projects vulnerability. And in person, she’s exceedingly nice, open and easy to talk to. She has the same strikingly blue eyes that make such an impression on a movie screen, and the distinctive nimbus of brown curls and lean frame. But she’s composed, assured and has none of the lost quality of her heroines.
