Rebecca Miller on working with Julianne Moore and laughing at fear

I’m taken aback when I walk into a hotel room in Edinburgh to chat with Rebecca Miller, as the director seems to stare me down. When I look quizzically at her, she chirps: “Oh, I was just admiring your sneakers, I need to buy a new pair.” And that’s about as lowbrow as the conversation gets.

It seems wrong to posit Miller in the context of men, given that her films are joyous celebrations of sisterhood. Her latest, Maggie’s Plan, sees Julianne Moore and Greta Gerwig play academic experts in fictocritical anthropology, the academic field that blends personal narratives, fiction and criticism. But the fact of Miller’s personal narrative is that she is the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and married to Daniel Day-Lewis, even if the key influence was probably her mother, the Austrian photographer Inge Morath.

Like her mother, Miller is making bold strokes in what was once considered a man’s world. She’s flipped the screwball comedy dynamic, so that in Maggie’s Plan we have two intelligent women, battling over a man, who despite his exalted position in academia, is a bit of a ditz.

“I started looking into that whole world,” says Miller. “It’s a genuinely interesting field with great writing. But it’s also so absurd. I liked it because it was it’s own world with stars. I wanted to see these movie stars playing these academic stars.”

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Miller wanted the film, developed from stories by Karen Rinaldi, to offer snapshots of our time. It is particular pertinent on the demise of the nuclear family and what that means for relationships. The 53-year-old director asks: “What are men and women to each now? At this time when necessity – and the rule book – have been thrown out of the window. You can have a family in so many ways, we can be friends and procreate, or use science, and we can be parents even if we are gay. It puts a lot of emphasis on choice and freedom.”

The film arrives as America seems to be embracing the cult of personality in Donald Trump. She shudders at the mention of the Republican presumptive nominee, still believing he he will not become president: “I cannot see it happening.”

But she also admits that the film shows the signs of a divided nation – a situation that Brits will know all too well after the European referendum vote. She wanted to make a film that had thoughtful people in it: "it is important to say that this is us [America] too, we are the nation that elected Barack Obama. We are very divided in a lot of ways and the press tends to present things in a block. There is not a whole lot of nuance. We are either presented as one thing, or the other. Right now we are being presented as the nation of Donald Trump.”

It’s perhaps no surprise that the daughter of the man who wrote The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials, as a condemnation of McCarthyism that was sweeping America in 1953, would feel that there is a sense of deja vu about the current climate of blame. One that doesn’t have a habit of ending well. “Fear is a powerful thing and worked for a long time. To combat it is a daily effort – to think: ‘I’m not going to react to the fear, I’m not going to live my life out of fear.’”

The climate of fear and hate-mongering led Miller to believe that comedy was the best way to deal with the dilemmas posed in the film. “I don’t want to talk about big subjects in a ‘weighty way’. This film has a serious heart, in that it wonders 'what is our culture going to look like?’ That’s a serious subject to me. It could be approached in a dramatic way, like [Ingmar Bergman’s] Scenes from a Marriage, but I thought that the way things are now, it is best to take the opposite route; if everything looks dark and dire, maybe comedy is the way to open that door. It creates a levity through lightness.”

It also helped that she found Moore on top form. “I lived for a long time with a Chilean philosopher and he had a lot of European academic friends. I based Julianne Moore on no one specific, but I know that she could be from that world, no problem. Julianne came on early: it was like Moore and I hooked into each other, there was a tone set, and then everything followed that tone.”

Originally, Miller wanted to pursue painting. But that changed when she was 21: “I was living in an artist commune in Germany. I graduated from college and I was going to be a painter. Then I went to the cinema in Munich and saw La Dolce Vita, and it blew my mind. I thought: fuck, I want to make films.”

Cinema married her passion for images, words and music. At the time she imagined that her films would more resemble Tarkovsky than Woody Allen: “I was always painting my dreams. My first films were not narrative films. They were without a beginning and an end. They were gallery pieces. At the time I would really have been stunned to think that I would be making films for people to watch in an audience.”

This dreamlike quality can be seen in her films, Angela (1995) and The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005), whereas the narrative drive of films such as Personal Velocity (2005) and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009) comes from always having written short stories. More recently in between the films, she’s been writing novels.

It’s a career that would satisfy any dreamer, even if – as her new film highlights – things rarely go to plan.