Writer/director Mike Mills didn't set out to fictionalize his mother in his new film 20th Century Women, which opens Friday. He tried to cram in as much of the real her, in all her contradictions and complications, as he could. She was a draftsperson who dreamed of being an aviator, a Humphrey Bogart-loving, Depression-era baby who ended up the single mother of a punky skateboarder in 1979 Santa Barbara, Calif. "My friends' mothers looked like Farrah Fawcett," Mills says in a phone interview. "Mine looked like Amelia Earhart."
She was equally outspoken and secretive. She bought crumbling old houses and never finished restoring them. She wore bow blouses to punk clubs. She smoked like it was her calling. (It eventually killed her in 1999.) She was an anarchist in sensible slacks. Dorothea (Annette Bening), the heart of 20th Century Women, is all those things. But she's not the only character lifted from Mills's life. His sister, who moved to Manhattan, discovered CBGB and Talking Heads, became a photographer, survived cervical cancer, had two birds named Maximillian and Carlotta and buried them in her backyard when they died, shows up in the film as Abbie (Greta Gerwig), one of Dorothea's boarders.
The surfer dudes drifting around Santa Barbara, who were, Mills says, "kind of sex objects; handsome men who were a little lost, a little less empowered than the women," are distilled into William (Billy Crudup), another boarder. The girls Mills yearned for, "who would sneak into my room after having sex and doing drugs with boys who were more sophisticated and charismatic than me, then tell me everything," are compiled into Julie (Elle Fanning). And Mills himself is represented by Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), who's afraid he'll never figure himself out until he figures out Dorothea.
Billy Crudup’s character William is distilled from the surfer dudes around Santa Barbara where Mills grew up.
"My dad wasn't present, so I was like my mom's little husband," says Mills, 50, who's married to the filmmaker Miranda July. "I was always trying to be more important to her than I could be, trying to save her and make life better for her."
Mills's father (now deceased) was more than not-present: He was gay, and came out late in life. Mills has already made a film about him, Beginners (2010), starring Christopher Plummer. "All my films come from observed things, and real love, and real confusion," Mills says. "Then I cinematize it."
His process is to talk to a lot of people about a lot of things, and then weave their lives into his. "The more I do that, and not just come up with stuff in my head, I really like that," he says.
The stories Julie tells about her first period and first sex are the real stories of two friends of Mills's. The notion that we know our children less and less every day came via his producer, Anne Carey. The idea that a parent can never see her child in the world the way others see him came from the first day Mills dropped off his then-two-year-old son, Hopper, at preschool. He turned back and glimpsed Hopper through a fence, and "the way he was talking, moving, he seemed like a different being," Mills recalls. "I could smell it was the beginning of this impossible gap."
Lucas Jade Zumann, who plays Bening’s son Jamie, represents Mills.
He glories in the ordinary. "Family, relationships, romances, friendships – those are the epic things in life, the Shakespearean dramas, the battles," Mills says. "But often in the film world, they're treated as not consequential enough. Not enough stakes." He gives them stakes.
It took Mills three years to write 20th Century Women, and when his agent sent it to Bening, it took about three pages for her "head to explode," she says in a separate phone interview. She lived in San Diego. She was 21 in 1979. She found herself wondering, "Do I still have that plastic-y wallet I had then, or the macramé handbag with the fur and the fabric that my boyfriend's sister, who was bisexual, gave me?" she says. "I felt like something in my life was being contextualized for me, that I'd never seen anybody do before. And I knew a lot of Williams."
She and Mills met for dinner. "Annette was not easy on me," he recalls. "She had real questions, really tested me about Dorothea. She was interested in Dorothea's love life, where she is on the depression/anxiety spectrum, how unnerved or solid she is. She needed to know, and had opinions. I provoked the mother in her, which was a huge compliment."
For Annette Bening, who lived in San Diego in 1979, the film ‘contextualized’ her life in a way she hadn’t seen before.
Robin Marchant/Getty Images
Mills wants his stories to affect his actors, not just as a job, but in their lives as people. He wants, he says, to "get into their bloodstreams." It's how he gets such personal, lived-in performances. "Annette really fit the bill," he says. "She has emotional intelligence. She's so funny, and can be so dramatic. She looks her age in a gorgeous, natural way, which is really important to me. She is subversive. Her intelligence is not compliant; you can smell that in her performances. She has my mom's bigness of heart. She can reach out through etiquette and propriety and just grab onto you."
Mills shot the film over 35 days, mainly in Los Angeles, with a crucial week in Santa Barbara on the streets where he grew up. "I do that because I believe in magic," he says. "The film gods respond to magic like that."
As well, he employs a trick he stole from Woody Allen: He saves three days of his shooting budget for scenes he doesn't know he needs until he's several months into his edit. "The philosophy is, you don't know your story completely, and that's fine. That's not a failure," he says. "Things are going to happen differently than you conceived. That's part of filmmaking. So why not be open to it?"
Annette Bening, Elle Fanning and Greta Gerwig in 20th Century Women.
It certainly gives his films a lived-in richness. As does the ache that throbs palpably in his work. "I imagine what a really open conversation with my parents would be like," Mills says. "But they didn't happen. They never happened.
"These people were the mountains in my life, and they're still deeply mysterious to me, and I'm still craving to know them better," he continues. "That puts a fire into the movies that I think communicates to the audience."
Now that he's made a film for each parent, he's a bit lost about what to do next – "I don't know how that will ever happen again," he admits.
But not-knowing is not new to Mills. Long before he knew how he'd get there, he knew how he wanted 20th Century Women to end: with Jamie saying, "I thought this was the beginning of a new relationship with my mother, but maybe that was it. Maybe that was as close as I ever got."
"I think life is always doing that to you," Mills says. "You think a human being or a connection is going to stay. But it's often slipping from your hands in ways you don't see coming." It's unpredictable. It's untidy. It's true.