“A Radical Democracy of Images”: Mike Mills on His Work Outside of Feature Filmmaking

The following interview was conducted in December 2025, as Criterion Collection executive producer Kim Hendrickson and director Mike Mills were working to prepare the box set I’ll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills.

Hi, Mike—maybe we start with Deformer, since it feels like an origin point for you as a filmmaker.: It’s one of the first things I ever did, in 1996. I was hanging out a lot at the Alleged Gallery in New York City, run by Aaron Rose, which showed a lot of artists from the skateboarding universe. I was reuniting with skate culture after art school at Cooper Union; it was a freeing time, getting out from under art-school anxieties and theory-driven art practice, and reconnecting with the pleasure of making things and the subversive punk excitement of pre-art-school me. That’s where I met Spike Jonze, Lance Acord—both helped me find a way into filmmaking. And that’s where I met Ed Templeton, a legendary pro skater who was becoming a very interesting artist.

Ed had this very Orange County childhood, and he got inspiration by being a contradiction to the sunny emotional, cultural, political flatness of that world —sort of an Egon Schiele of Huntington Beach. The title Deformer is from his work: the skating culture and community; his relationship with his wife, Deanna; and making art opened a more honest and bigger world where he could acknowledge the pain and traumas of his childhood and be decidedly “deformed” inside the falsely “normal” community where he grew up. I could relate to that, coming from Santa Barbara, and feeling outside of the happiness this beautiful place said it provided.

I wanted to make a portrait of Ed and Huntington Beach, and how they cocreated each other. This sort of cultural/environmental portrait became a central way of making films for me. It has so many moves that I keep coming back to: Objects and places are presented as just as important as people, and it’s happily digressive. I would leave the audio equipment with Ed at night, and he and his friends would record stories, jokes, and passages from his journals—this idea reappears in the way I use other people’s texts in my features. Tonally, it’s kind of funny, enjoying the absurdities of this place, but there’s also a more serious meditation on culture. Finally, the film is composed of portraits—people looking into the camera, like evidence or anthropological fragments. In a lot of ways, the influence of Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces is there, and William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest—the idea of a radical democracy of images, elevating the seemingly unimportant. Walker Evans and Wolfgang Tillmans were big influences too. Like Shore’s and Eggleston’s, their books of photos were open-ended stories. I was also very interested in the short films of Charles and Ray Eames—direct, educational films, very simple. Deformer is the weird combination of those influences.

Did you have a desire to be a narrative feature filmmaker?: I didn’t study film in art school. I was basically on my way to being a fine artist. I loved Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Hans-Peter Feldmann, and projects like Group Material, but me and some friends wanted out of the rarefied art world — we wanted something more “public.” For me, that began with graphic design: I worked for a bit at M&Co, learning from amazing designers and artists who worked there, like Marlene McCarty. It wasn’t until I was twenty-seven that I had the idea of directing. Watching The Thin Blue Line — a strange mishmash of documentary and dramatization — was the first film experience that made me think, I could do that.

At the time, I didn’t know what a writer-director was, but I wanted to make work that was mine top to bottom. At first, I thought I might be like the Eameses and make innovative educational films, or be a direct documentarian like the Maysles brothers, or D. A. Pennebaker, continuing the social engagement I had gotten from being a student of Hans Haacke. “Hollywood” filmmaking was a different planet, and American indie cinema also felt pretty foreign to me — the whole world of narrative and emotional verisimilitude was not something I connected with. At the same time, a film like 8½, because it was so adventurous and strange, not traditionally narrative, felt easier to understand. It was more like the art world I was from.

The Architecture of Reassurance screened at Sundance — did that open the door to making your first feature, Thumbsucker (2005)?: [Laughs.] Nothing helped me land Thumbsucker! That was a tough six-year journey. I got to show The Architecture of Reassurance at Sundance, which was a big deal, and I got an agent from it, though it didn’t help me much. In my experience of the film world, each time you want to step up, you have to be willing to start over from the beginning. I moved from being a graphic designer/artist to being a director by begging to do videos for anyone I was doing album covers for. After a few years of making music videos — I did about ten, including the ones I did for Air — then the powers that be think you can do music videos, but that doesn’t mean you can do ads. You have to start from zero again. I did spec jobs — any creatively bad job I could. And I would put all my video fees back into projects of my own because I was treating it as a way to build a reel. Then, after years of building up a “reputation” in those worlds, and building confidence from directing a lot of very different situations, shooting all around the world, with the weird dynamics of filming celebrity athletes, big budgets, big ideas that are not easy to direct — it does help you break into the feature world, but then you have to start from zero again. That’s my experience—an American style of learning filmmaking under capitalism. I basically got that model from watching Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry do it ahead of me.

Music videos, and even ads, and the shorts I paid for, these were all my film school. More than steps on the ladder of this weird career, they are where I figured out not just how to direct but how to communicate with people, and because they are shorter, or driven by the magical force of music, they’re inherently more experimental. I’m very grateful I got to learn in that more permissive and expressive space.

Let’s talk about your music videos—we’re including two in this box set. You made several before “All I Need,” but that one feels like a turning point. What opened up for you on this project?: “All I Need” was part of a long, unusual, and productive collaboration with Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, who are the French band Air. From the beginning, the idea was that I would do all the graphics and the videos for their Moon Safari album and its singles, and that was something I had wanted to do for a long time: build a whole world of integrated design and filmmaking. By the time we made “All I Need,” I’d already done two other music videos for them: “Sexy Boy” was a dreamy, puppet-y video, and “Kelly Watch the Stars” a surrealist Ping-Pong experience. At the time, the radical differences in the Fischli and Weiss work were my favorite thing, and I wanted each piece to be very different from the last. Nico and JB supported that. “All I Need” is kind of a sentimental song, even to the band themselves—not schmaltzy, but I remember Nico and JB saying something like, “It’s too pretty, fuck it up.” And that’s a wonderful prompt.

I saw myself as a documentary-based person, and I was coming from a conceptual-art-world habit of appropriating cultural forms for other means, and I had the idea of doing a miniature documentary as a music video. As this was their most romantic, sentimental song, I wanted to engage with that tone by pushing against its dreaminess. I pitched doing a documentary of an actual couple who are in love: I wanted to interview them and have their answers play as VO over the music. The Air guys, being who they are, said, “Great.”

You’ve told me it was where you learned how to be a director, and that you’re not sure what would have happened if you hadn’t made it.: So, what I pitched was a kind of conceptual-art trick, but what I got out of the shoot was something emotional and connective and other than cerebral. I accidentally bumped into the sincerity and emotional availability that those kids had—I didn’t know that was going to happen. But I did grow up in the next town, I was a skater like them, and we hit it off. Perhaps it was the first time I really understood the power of a director who’s emotionally available and connected to his subjects. I am a formerly very shy person—way too self-conscious and afraid to be a good performer—and I feel for anyone who gets in front of the camera for me. Because these kids were very much like me, and not actors, it all came together where the trust between me and them allowed for and created an intimacy that’s in the video.

It had an immediate, not-afraid-to-be-vulnerable, not-interested-in-being-cool energy, communicated very simply. I hadn’t experienced that before, as a director, where people reacted emotionally to something I had made. And it was the beginning of a mysterious practice of creating a space for some kind of emotional realness between me and whoever’s in front of the camera, me and the crew, and, via the camera and editing, a communication/connection between me and the audience.

Godard was another huge influence on me—his shelf at Kim’s Video on Avenue A seemed like the heaviest shelf. So to be emotionally direct and sincere and available was very punk in a weird way—punk to my family of origin, because they were not supposed to be emotional; punk to the toughness of SoCal hardcore punk music, which was my first god; and punk to Godard’s cool, Brechtian suspicion of emotional authenticity. It was a funny coming-of-age individuation story for me [laughs], because it’s saying to Godard, You have some blind spots, you have some rackets that you’re running. Same to you, punk world. This desire to be seen and connect felt subversive. Maybe it’s the beginning of the influence of therapy on my filmmaking too.

Is Eating Sleeping Waiting and Playing (1999) a continuation of that emotional, observational approach?: This was another experience in learning a documentary way of shooting, where you only have half a plan of what you’ll shoot on any given day. You’re hunting for, not completing, a preconceived idea: the film and my direction are reactive and changing all the time. I love how alive that is, and I think that way of being on set has continued to influence everything I do. And maybe more than that, Eating Sleeping Waiting and Playing was one more experiential step in working out a particular voice—a kind of cultural observation, mixed with something like humor, or just absurdism, mixed with an instinct toward and pleasure in connecting with the person in front of the camera. There’s a cinematic mischievousness that wants to be kind of funny and wants to be kind of critical. This project helped me play in that vein and, equally importantly, show that side of myself to an audience, get a response, and develop trust through that.

I want to stay in the documentary world, since you return there often. Between your narrative features Thumbsucker and Beginners, you made a feature-length documentary, Does Your Soul Have a Cold? (2007). It’s not included in this box set, but I’d love to hear what motivated this project.: Thumbsucker wasn’t the experience I was hoping for, and I wanted to go back and engage in a kind of filmmaking which was easier, where you don’t have to write a script, where you’re making decisions on the fly. And I had a real ambition to do stuff that was just more socially engaged, that reflected and carried all the interests and concerns I had in art school. I also wanted to make a documentary that felt like a novel, that had a pattern or focus on a particular situation—in this case, being depressed and taking antidepressants in Japan—but in a ruminating, lyrical, novelistic way. Looking back, the cosmos of inner confusion–pain-depression is an unacknowledged theme in all my work. And that fits, as depression is insidious, and sneaky, convincing you it’s neutral; it hides well.

A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought Alone (2013) has that socially engaged ambition behind it too.: That project was commissioned by SFMOMA. They invited a bunch of artists to come to Los Altos, a town in Silicon Valley, famous for being where Steve Jobs began Apple in his parents’ garage. In researching the history of that town, I became curious about all the famous “futurists” who worked at those companies, and the myths of a much better utopian future that run through that culture. I had the idea of interviewing not the adults who are coming up with these ideas and corporate policies but their children.

This project also reflects a shift in my work that came with becoming a parent, and being exposed to wonderful caretakers and educators who are deeply interested in children’s autonomy. So, while I’ve always been interested in younger people, and in taking them very seriously, as in the Air “All I Need” video, this was a piece that was explicitly about respecting and honoring the worldviews of nonadults. I got to practice a way to be in relation to these young people—how to produce a shoot that makes them feel safe and empowered, not judged or made cute. I loved the result, and the simplicity of it. Later, I took this idea, asking young people what they think the future will be like, and made it a part of my C’mon C’mon script.

Since you mentioned C’mon C’mon—a film scored by the Dessner brothers of the band the National—I want to talk about an earlier collaboration you had with them, I Am Easy to Find (2019). How did that project come about, and how did it change your approach to filmmaking?: The process that led to that was a very layered back-and-forth, beautifully hard to describe! I asked my agent to cold-call the band’s manager to see if they wanted to do a video. I was very lost after doing 20th Century Women, and I was looking for anything to move the atoms around. Matt Berninger, the singer, came back and said, “Can you do a film with our music, like a feature film?” I said that sounds like a lot, but he very generously began a very wide-open project where anything could happen.

They began by sharing their Dropbox with me, filled with fragments of songs, some finished songs, a lot of chord progressions done by Aaron and Bryce Dessner that Matt had yet to write lyrics for. So, I was to make some kind of film to songs that weren’t finished. But I knew all their albums very well and related to the kinds of things Matt writes about—he also writes from life, inserting concrete details into stories. After mulling over a bunch of ideas, the idea of a whole life, from birth to death, came to me. It seemed like that would relate to all of Matt’s unknown future lyrics?! Around the same time, I had met Alicia Vikander—also a fan of the band—and we wanted to do something together.

It was a very unique, lucky, and trusting collaboration. I said to them, “Can I treat your songs like a score?” That meant I had the separate stems and I could mess around with them—stretch things out, only play one or two tracks. I loved soloing tracks, hearing just one or two instruments, or just the vocals and the drums, and in the edit I got more adventurous, combining songs, rearranging the instrumentation, breaking a song down and editing its structure.

At first, I was very scared to show them what I did, but they were super generous and curious and liked what was happening, and I think they just enjoyed having this weird intervention in that stage of their career. They said, “Let’s make the album together; you come coproduce, and we’ll finish these songs and do a bunch of new songs that relate to your film but aren’t in the film.” And it became this crazy cross-feeding thing over a year or so. In my film, I was hearing one idea in a song and would play that out in the scenes you see in the movie, and the band would later see that and write a song about the thing they saw in the film. I wrote the children’s book that the dad is reading to young Alicia, just to avoid legal problems, and then later, unbeknownst to me, those words became lyrics in a song. In another song, the subtitles I wrote as the underlying structure of her life were put into an arrangement by Bryce and sung by the whole Brooklyn Youth Chorus. It was a very magical, fluid, multilayered collaboration. And it was wonderfully free with Alicia. It helped me be more brave with directing: put forward a simple but juicy prompt, open-ended; let the actor run with it and coauthor what happens; and my job is to capture that freedom.

When the idea for a video for “Psycho Killer” came about, the Rhino–Warner Brothers people contacted my reps, and I knew it was going to be the typical video thing where I’m competing against five directors for the project. To me, “Psycho Killer,” like the whole 77 album, is one of the best pieces of art from the twentieth century. So, how in the hell do you come up with a video for that? I was walking around feeling grumpy and put-upon [laughs], and then the idea just came, in one stroke, mostly formed—a repetition of days, seen in the exact same twenty moments. And coming from my own therapy work, I have been very interested in emotions and how I so often don’t trust mine, or feel like I’m having the wrong emotion. I think it was from that experience that I had the urge for her to go through extreme emotions, the way they often feel on the inside, and to externalize them wildly. I thought it would be interesting if the world around her didn’t react accordingly. So we had seventeen moments done thirteen times. Each day, Saoirse Ronan played with one emotion across the whole day: “What is normal?,” people-pleasing, anxiety, loneliness, fear, sadness, disgust, anger/hate, curiosity, ridicule/rebellion, love, joy/freedom, calm/presence.

What are you carrying forward from that collaboration?: Saoirse was amazing to work with, so it was another experience in coauthoring with an actor, my job being to give them a sense of safety and a good prompt to jump off from. Saoirse showed me how I’m leaning toward something bigger than just naturalism, and how that can carry real emotions. It was very exciting to film and edit, and I like that energy in the final piece.

Kind of like I Am Easy to Find, it has this kind of impossible overarching structure—it says, “I’m going to show you a whole world,” which is impossible, and there’s something exciting about that failure to me. I like breaking things down to their composite parts, applying a rigid, clarifying form to the chaos of life that reveals it can never be clarified. But I think Saoirse’s bravery, her fire, and the not-giving-a-fuck in her performance are a bit unnerving, in a great way. So, I got to have a direct experience with that, tasted it, and I’m like, Oh, I want more of that, in a way that I didn’t know before because it was the first time I physicalized it.

“A Radical Democracy of Images”: Mike Mills on His Work Outside of Feature Filmmaking

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