Miranda July is a performer, a writer, a filmmaker, and an instigator, in various combinations and often all at once. Her unique aesthetic, deeply idiosyncratic yet strangely comforting, will soon reach a wider audience through her first feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know. The film premiered at Sundance, where it received the special jury prize for originality of vision, and went on to win the Camera d’Or at Cannes. Humane but unsentimental, unabashedly artsy but instantly approachable, this is a movie for just about everybody. We spoke on the phone amidst a day of promotional interviews.

—Eli Horowitz


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EH: Do you see an important connection between your childhood games and your art-making?

MJ: Yeah, I work pretty hard to feel totally free. I’ll create all these artificial constructs so that I can feel like it’s just this thing I’m doing.

EH: As opposed to capital “A” Art?

MJ: Yeah. My ideal life is just lounging around the house and every once in a while I’ll kind of write something, and then I’ll leave and eat something and masturbate or whatever—just this very fluid life of comforting myself, you know. And somehow out of that, I end up with a screenplay.

EH: Actually, there are kids’ books that are basically that—ninety-nine activities for a rainy day and things like that.

MJ: That’s true. And I’m always the kind of friend or girlfriend who suggests, when there’s some cataclysmic problem in the relationship, I’m like, “Well, maybe we can come up with a creative activity that will help us out.” I’m like, “Let’s get out the pens! Draw a picture of how much you hate me!”

EH: Does that work?

MJ: Well…

EH: Just not the right guy. “If he really understood me, it would work.”

MJ: Yeah, definitely.