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| Against the Current: Rebecca Miller on The Ballad of Jack and Rose By Andrea Meyer Rebecca Miller movies get right inside the minds of bold, fascinating people on the verge of transformation. Her haunting first feature, Angela, about a troubled girl coping with her mother’s mental illness, won a 1995 Gotham Award and both the Sundance Filmmakers Trophy and Cinematography Award for Ellen Kuras’ work. Next the writer-director made Personal Velocity, based on her own short fiction, a trio of stories about women struggling to fulfill themselves independent of the men in their lives. This sharply-observed, smartly-written work won the 2002 Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and Cinematography Award (again for Ellen Kuras) at the Festival. Now the seasoned auteur is back, this time in the Premiere section. The Ballad of Jack and Rose stars Miller’s husband Daniel Day-Lewis (Gangs of New York) as an obsessively idealistic environmentalist living with his teenaged daughter (Camilla Belle) in total isolation on a former commune. The titular pair is so wrapped up in each other and the idyll they have created that the world’s intrusion could only bring cataclysmic results. Sundance Film Festival Daily Insider staff writer Andrea Meyer spoke with Miller about her latest film and how it fits into the indie film canon.
Rebecca Miller: I’ve always been interested in commune life. The country looked like a different place. People thought it was going in a different direction, and I guess I have a kind of nostalgia for that time, even though I didn’t live in it. In a sense, the film is about the war against nature, both in an external and internal sense. There is always a war between civilization and things that are inside of us, which aren’t civilized, which aren’t tamed. Meyer: You have really stuck to your personal creative vision. How do you do it? Miller: I can’t say I’ve had great luck because it’s taken me a long time to cultivate my luck, but I was very lucky to meet Lemore Syvan, who’s produced all three of my films. Lemore really understands what I need as a director. I also was lucky in that when I made Personal Velocity, I started working with IFC. They really, truly are about trying to foster unique voices in a world, which is fairly hostile to them. Trying to make films the way that I do is fighting against the current. You need allies and without allies, you can’t do it. I started trying to get this film made in 1995. I knocked on pretty much every door, and it wasn’t until the success of Personal Velocity that I was able to make it. Meyer: You have shown a real commitment to independent film. Is that important to you? Miller: What’s important to me is being able to tell the stories that interest me. If studios gave me the money to do that and gave me final cut, I would be very happy, but that doesn’t happen so much. If that happens for me, I’m not going to say no! I think every filmmaker has dreams of making bigger stories that are more expensive, but at the same time you have to know yourself and what you can tolerate and what kind of working environment you need. Meyer: How would this film be different if you had a $15 million budget and were working with a studio? Miller: I had a great cast. I had Daniel. I think even studios would have been happy with the cast, but I don’t think I would have gotten the movie made. I wouldn’t have gotten the movie made. I happen to know, because I didn’t get the movie made. (laughs) Meyer: You have the reputation for being a filmmaker who accurately reflects women’s inner lives. Do you agree with that? Miller: I’m always trying to get inside of people, but to me this movie is as much about Jack as anybody else. He’s the one in conflict and that’s always very compelling, and Daniel’s performance is so powerful and so human and touching. In the end, a film has its own will and you have to embrace it. Meyer: What was it like directing your husband? Miller: It was wonderful. We talked about things in a very easy, economic way, and he was involved with every aspect, with rewrites, with what the set looked like, with building the set. Then in the cutting room, he was very involved, especially at the end. He was very involved in producing the music with the composer. It was a wonderful collaboration, very close, very intense, but in a nice way. Meyer: Is it harder for a woman to build a body of work? Miller: It must be, because there are so few women making films. But it’s changing gradually and I think it will continue to change. Maybe women are trying to make stories that are harder to get made. I think it’s hard for me to measure, because the kind of films I make are hard for anyone to make. If I were a man trying to tell these stories, I would still have a hard time. |