#C’mon C’mon Director Mike Mills On Joaquin Phoenix’s Hair & His Therapist’s Filmmaking Advice [Interview]

Your movies always bring back memories. 

That’s funny. The films are definitely concerned about memory. They all are, for some weird reason. I have to do more therapy about why memory trips me out so much.

The scope of this movie is probably your biggest yet, right? 

What do you mean by that?

All the cities these characters go to. 

Yeah. I always pitched it as it comes across as intimate, but it’s really epic. It’s the biggest movie I’ve ever done, really. I love place. I love actors, I love cinematography, and I love place. I think that’s my thing I like most about directing. I love walking around alone in a city. I can remember the days I walked around Lower East Side and Chinatown with a camera, like being Robert Frank. You get to try to figure out how you could cinematically interpret this thing. I also love Wim Wenders’ movies, and I feel he’s always telling me, “This scene, this relationship, this emotion, this can only happen in this place, at this time.” Place is that important to him, place and history. I love that.

My idea for this film, the initial impetus before I even knew the shape or what exactly it was, it’s this contrast between in-the-bath level intimacy, two people in a bath together, to America, to as big as I can get. And that’s how I got to this idea of all these kids in the film, all these young people in the interviews and they’re traveling, like a road film in a way.

It was so fun. I eat it up. Like New Orleans, I’d love to do that again. It’s so amazing to get to try to capture it. It’s not unlike filming a person to me, because you’re trying to make a portrait of someone and you can’t show them all, but what are you going to show that reveals something interesting about them? It’s the same way of how you approach a city, to me.

Your portrait of Joaquin Phoenix is beautiful in this movie. Even his hair.

[Laughs] I called his hair ‘El Jefe’ in the film. We had no hair and makeup. And so Joaquin’s hair, we did a lot of haircuts to get to that haircut. It was actually a real key part of our process. Because we didn’t have hair and makeup, especially at the beginning, I would just go in and do his hair before a take. He’d just come and dump his head at me and I would just move it up a little bit. So, the hair really actually is a very important part. If Joaquin was here, he’d completely agree. It’s like, “Oh yeah. That’s how I found it.” That’s the whole beginning of the whole thing. 

There were six or seven haircuts to get to that haircut. It was a lot of discussion, because actors often, and I think Joaquin … You don’t want to talk about the theme. You don’t want to talk about the underlying emotion that you’re going to get to. You don’t want to describe it. You want to talk about something safe and easy, but that helps you get there. Like, hair. That often happens. I’ve had that happen a lot. The haircut, the hair dye, whatever you going to do the hair, it’s the door into the whole situation.