I recently sat down with director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker) and Ewan McGregor (Trainspotting, Ghost Writer) to discuss their new film, Beginners. Also covered? Melanie Laurent, the acting ability of a Jack Russell terrier, and the influence of Mike’s spouse, Miranda July, on his work. Enjoy!
Laremy Legel: We’ll start with an easy one. What did you shoot Beginners on?
Mike Mills: The RED. The last generation of the RED. And we hardly used any lights. No generator, one Kino Flo, and one Four PAR.
LL: So it’s a decent low light camera?
MM: You don’t really need that much light, it’s kind of a myth that you need all these lights.
Ewan McGregor: For filming?
MM: With the RED, the old RED even.
LL: I’ve heard that you wrote Ewan a letter to get him involved? Do you have good handwriting?
MM: Oh, I typed it. But I write a lot of letters, especially to actors. Because you’re asking them to go on this crazy boat ride for you, and start this pretty intimate relationship. To really put their heart and soul in. So you write a letter, it’s only the polite thing to do. And then also you’re setting the tone. It’s “Look, I’m asking you to reveal yourself, but I’ll go first. I’d never ask you to do something I wouldn’t do myself.”
LL: Ewan, did you open the letter and say, “Well what’s going on here?”
EM: No, it’s not that unusual. It’s surprising it doesn’t happen more often, but it’s not a strange thing to get a letter from a director. It’s nice to sit down and read a story when you’ve been introduced to the story by the person that’s offering it to you.
LL: Mike, had you seen Melanie Laurent prior to Inglourious Basterds?
MM: No, because when we were casting this, Inglourious hadn’t quite come out. Someone gave me her name, and I didn’t even know about Inglourious, but I started looking her up and found out, “Oh, she’s going to be in this [Inglourious Basterds] movie.” Then I saw all these interviews with her on YouTube — I do that a lot with actors, that’s a way you can maybe-sorta get to know someone before you meet them. There’s this one interview I based a lot of Anna on, and I have no idea what she’s saying because I don’t speak French, and she’s going off — and I’m thinking she seems really intelligent, strong, and un-precious. And then I showed it to her, and she’s like, “Oh my God, you were looking at that?? I’m hungover, I’m talking to someone from my college, I’m talking shit …” and I was like, “That’s great!”
EM: That’s what we want.
MM: Yeah!
LL: That’s a bingo. Did you have a rehearsal period prior to shooting?
EM: Yeah, we shot to two halves of the story separately, so we shot the father-son story first. We rehearsed with Christopher Plummer and shot that in its entirety for three weeks. We shot it as much as we could in sequence. I’d never done that before; I’ve always thought it was a bit gimmicky, because part of our job as actors is to be able to shoot things out of sequence, but I was surprised at how useful it was. Then we finished that story, stopped shooting for a week, then we rehearsed Melanie and myself.
MM: And Cosmo! [Cosmo is a Jack Russell terrier who appears throughout the film.]
LL: Cosmo is amazing in this film.
EM: He’s an amazing dog. It feels like he’s giving a performance. He is a character, and I can say that honestly because we had another dog, and once or twice we did scenes with this other dog, a lovely little dog, but when you’re acting with him there was this huge void. He didn’t have nearly the character that Cosmo has.
MM: He’s a very gregarious thousand-year-old soul.
LL: How do you define success with Beginners? Is it just getting it made?
MM: Yeah, that’s huge. In this day and age that’s not something you take for granted.
