Writer-director Mike Mills' new movie Beginners is a tremendously moving and funny relationship picture that draws on Mills' own personal experience.
When he was close to 75, Mills' recently widowed father announced that he was gay and was going to pursue the lifestyle with verve ( which he did ) . However, four short years later, tragedy struck when the father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In the film, Mills has cast Christopher Plummer ( in the kind of performance that wins a lot of acting awards ) as Howard, a variation on his real father and Ewan McGregor as his alter ego, whom he has named Oliver.
The story of father and son is paralleled by a tentative romance between Oliver and a young French actress ( winningly played by Melanie Laurent ) that begins a year after Howard's death. The result is nothing short of magnificent. After an advance screening with Mills followed by a lively Q&A, the affable filmmaker sat down with Windy City Times for this exclusive interview to discuss what has the makings of a breakthrough movie for all involved.
Windy City Times: One of your favorite scenes in the movie is the one where the father, Howard, is surrounded with love and support by all his new gay friends at a party—which is made palpable to the son and the audience. Why is that a favorite?
Mike Mills: Part of the reason I like that is because I have such fond memories of the part of that that is real in my life but also, it's just fun having eight or nine guys around and they really liked each other and had such a great rapport.
After our rehearsal for the scene I invited them all to lunch with Christopher and Ewan and other cast members at the Beverly Hills Hotels—Christopher's haunt—and I made Ewan get all their lunch orders in advance and then go get the lunch and serve it for all of them so they all got to know each other. Then, at the lunch I said, "If you're willing, it would be great to hear what it's been like for you coming out or how that happened" and, as you can imagine, for each person, there's a very different story of that. I was very glad I did that because it made everybody quite close quite fast and the days when we had the prime-timer guys around ( the actors playing the elderly gay men ) were always quite fun and Christopher sort of loved holding court with them.
Windy City Times: Just the stories of working with Julie Andrews on The Sound of Music alone… [ laughs ]
Mike Mills: Yes, yes! So those days were just a lot more fun and filled with life.
Windy City Times: Howard doesn't just come out; he "COMES OUT," in capital letters. Was this the experience you had with your father or did you heighten it for the movie?
Mike Mills: Yeah, yeah—big time! I think he first came out very tentatively. Before he told me and one of my sisters he went and visited one of the Santa Barbara gay pride offices; they very nicely introduced him to an out Episcopalian priest and my dad immediately lucked out—he got into an amazing community that was really supportive and positive, aside from being really socially and politically active. As he got more integrated into the group it became very important to him to be both socially and politically active.
Windy City Times: I started to think about Howard and Oliver and it struck me that he becomes this sort of gay Auntie Mame figure to his son—you know, exhorting, "Live! Live! Live!" Did his experience inspire you in reality, as it does in the movie?
Mike Mills: Oh, yeah. What started happening was this—my straight dad was a really kind, really good guy. He was a really sweet father but he was a little vague or a little distant or a little uninvolved. And like so many men of that generation he just worked, worked, worked. From my childhood on, I didn't really see him very much. Then when he came out we just had such a more engaged, real messy, great relationship.
Just as a father and son we started talking a lot about our relationships and he was very concerned about me; [ he ] very much wanted me to be in love. But also understood that he presented me with very odd models of love in his life and his marriage and we would have these great arguments and discussions and we were way more rough with each other—in a very loving way—that to me really represented a more true and lifelike engagement. That, to me, is really the seed of this whole project. To me, the story is people trying to figure out how to be in a relationship; how to love; what love really is. That's just a continuation of this hot conversation I was having with my dad up until the week before he died.
Windy City Times: One of the reasons why the movie feels so fresh is because the emotional trajectory of the father and son are flipped—the gay dad is open and passionate while the straight son is bottled up. Many gay men—and women—have had great difficulty being close to their straight fathers.
Mike Mills: Yeah, right.
Windy City Times: Am I ascertaining that you weren't really close to your dad until he came out?
Mike Mills: I had trouble with my straight father too! [ laughs ] It's not an entirely incorrect way to look at it for me. I was born in '66 and he was born in '24 and, in some ways, I had more emotionality than he knew how to deal with his son as a man, gay or straight. I wanted to talk about things and I was a little "messier" than he really wanted. But when he came out he was just more open and available in himself so I had a not-dissimilar experience in life. A straight dad wasn't easy to relate to at all times. It was much easier to relate to my gay dad.
Windy City Times: This goes back to that great, reflective line you have Ewan's character say in the movie: "Our good fortune allowed us the time to feel a sadness our parents didn't have time to have and happiness that I never saw." It seems like a major theme of the movie.
Mike Mills: I don't know if it's a theme but one of the big parts of the movie is talking across not just the sexual orientation divide but a big generational divide and a history-perspective divide. I think that's not so much really about my dad's gayness but about the fact that he was born in '24 and I was born in '66. Does that make sense?
Windy City Times: Yes, it does. The film interweaves—beautifully—a mini-history of gay segregation. Did your research awaken that awareness of the gay struggle in you or were you already clued in?
Mike Mills: I was clued in to thing like the Harvey Milk stuff but there are so many crazy connections and I came at the gay history from a very personal place—like really from the key moments in my parents' lives and who knew that '55 was such a key year for gay history? I mean, it's true—my parents were married in a church on April 30 in San Francisco just a few blocks from where [ Allen ] Ginsberg was at that moment writing "Howl."
This is kind of strange and profound—my dad really did do a show at the Santa Barbara Art Museum asking people to collect their used teddy bears. He [ also ] put a quote on the wall about what is real and how do you become real and people who love you no matter what ( it's from the Velveteen Rabbit ) and that happened a week after Harvey Milk was assassinated. So there were these crazy coincidences between his life and gay-history events.
Windy City Times: Did your father have a boyfriend that's based on the character played in the movie by Goran Visnjic?
Mike Mills: My dad had a guy that was central to his life but Goran is not that guy. He gravitated toward guys that were much more wild, much more emotional, not as aesthetically neat, and I found that really beautiful but kind of sad; he really wanted that hotness in himself. I was trying to get that into the character when I was writing.
Windy City Times: As I said last night during the post screening discussion, thank you so much for putting a character like this onscreen. I think this is the first American narrative I've seen that deals with elderly gay men. I think the last thing that I can remember with elderly gay characters would be Vanessa Redgrave as the lesbian kicked out of the house when her lover dies in If These Walls Could Talk 2. So thank you for that.
Mike Mills: You're very welcome. It's nice to hear that.
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