Kajillionaire writer and director Miranda July tells Ella Kemp about soap suds, pink nails, Evan Rachel Wood’s impressive tuck-and-roll skills, and the playfulness of queer culture.
“What is natural is pretty up for grabs.” —Miranda July
Welcome to the world of Miranda July: marshmallow-pink soap bubbles leak through the walls, love is transactional, Bobby Vinton’s ‘Mr. Lonely’ is our national anthem. The indomitable and elusive auteur—also performance artist, actor, novelist, mother and musician—has gifted the world her third feature as director, Kajillionaire, a heist movie, love story and family portrait all wrapped up in a delicate, if a little lopsided, bow.
July stays firmly behind the camera here, after taking lead roles in her first two feature-length films, Me And You And Everyone We Know and The Future. But the filmmaker’s voice is so sharp that her absence is never felt, as we watch Evan Rachel Wood, Gina Rodriguez, Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins bring her story to life. “There’s lots of parts of my other movies I’m not in, and if anything it’s a hassle when I’m in it,” July tells us over the telephone. “My leading ladies were one hundred percent dedicated here, whereas I would have to shift back and forth, so there’s really no sense of loss.”
Those leading ladies begin with Wood as Old Dolio. She is the daughter of Theresa (Winger) and Robert (Jenkins), who have raised her with the thrill of a heist in her heart. The family dynamic is all business; the unit functions as a mob crew, forever planning the next con. This gives Old Dolio a laser focus on the job, and a painfully obvious lack of tenderness in her life. It’s when the family meets Melanie (Rodriguez) during an ambitious con that Old Dolio’s world cracks open. While her parents see Melanie—all heat and curves—as an asset to their schemes, Old Dolio—lank hair and shapeless clothes—feels something else, something she doesn’t yet recognize.
Those familiar with Wood’s work elsewhere might be taken aback. Old Dolio is immediately and consistently unpredictable, with a chilly lack of emotion that comes from simply not knowing where to find it. She has clearly been raised in an environment that prioritizes hustle over love, and this converges in Wood’s voice: a low, monotone that’s never questioned on screen, and which somehow feels entirely normal for July’s uncanny world, but surely hides something potent to be explored.
“I would have never asked an actor to do that,” July says of Wood’s -change. “It seems a bit too much, and really risky.” That’s surprising: July’s films, with their brazen singularity and offbeat humor, could be the sort that would savor such a vocal transformation as a playful quirk. It’s refreshing and illuminating to hear how, actually, it was a perfect coincidence. “When we were rehearsing, Evan said that her original was that much lower, but she used to get vocal nodules and so trained her voice higher, which is the one people know now,” July explains. “But she said she was just as comfortable being lower, so I asked if she could stay there for the whole film. I noticed right away when she dropped down, she dropped into character.”
Although July will never reveal all her secrets, nothing happens by chance. Old Dolio’s voice exemplifies Kajillionaire’s careful understanding of fluid, curious sexuality that survives and thrives in the spaces where people are just figuring things out. It’s not about seducing, but learning and adapting. “Voices, like hair, are things that we play with at different times in our life,” says July. “Certainly in queer culture, it wouldn’t be unheard of for someone to deepen their voice, consciously or with hormones. I like that it’s a little surprising. What is natural is pretty up for grabs.”
Debra Winger, too, is unrecognizably compelling. As entertaining as Kajillionaire’s characters are, there’s a faint air of menace about Theresa and Robert, as they always and only have one thing on their minds. “The actors took flight,” July explains. “They did so much I couldn’t have expected, and for someone like me who is so used to doing things all alone, that feels like gold.”
Comedy breathes through both July’s whip-smart script and her actors’ precision-engineered physicality. Theresa, Robert and Old Dolio tense up in the same way to process their fear of flying, they limbo along a very specific part of a street to avoid making eye with their landlord. “I don’t know how to do a tuck-and-roll, I can’t do the limbo like Evan can!” July laughs. “There were things I had come up with that were almost abstract, but she could do everything and take it really far.”
The relationship between Old Dolio and Melanie is just as disorienting as the one between Old Dolio and her parents, and between her parents and Melanie. Old Dolio attends parenting classes to better understand the ways her parents behave; Melanie offers to fill that gap for a very specific sum of money; Theresa and Robert search for ways to understand pleasure, to feel that they, as individual people, matter in a world lived on the outskirts of ‘normal’.
It’s why Bobby Vinton’s 1962 heartbreaker ‘Mr. Lonely’ feels like a perfect hymn for these odd souls to explore what they’re missing. The familiar theme returns throughout the film, and there’s now Emile Mosseri (who changed the game with his work on The Last Black Man in San Francisco).
“Not many people can sing like that,” July says. “We were sending each other some of her songs while shooting anyway, just as inspiration. It’s very modern when sung by a woman, and of course in the film Old Dolio is Mr. Lonely—but you don’t get the gender twist of it when it’s sung by Bobby Vinton.”
Mosseri’s own ethereal score—an orchestral, very old-Hollywood waltzing theme—makes so much of the film feel like a projection of make-believe, dotted with images that could only be plucked from our unconscious. But, July says: “None of these images literally come from dreams.” (Although she itted earlier this year that the name Old Dolio came from a friend’s dream about a list of cat names).
Still, detailing the poetry behind a key ethereal image, the filmmaker’s curiosity and sensitivity is undeniable. “There is something very sexy to me about those pink nails coming off,” she says of a scene in which Old Dolio carefully peels off Melanie’s acrylics one by one, as a swirling soundtrack fills the air and the light in a grubby diner turns golden. “I was always trying to find ways that Old Dolio could be in a little over her head and accidentally show her cards, even though she might be fighting against her feelings about Melanie. I guess those nails would seem entirely foreign to her, so she would approach them in this animal way.”
We feel compelled to ask July about another unshakeable image: the glittering suds that Old Dolio and her parents face every day in the rented office space they call home, oozing through the walls from the business next door. Does it make sense? Will it ever be fixed? Can you love something so destructive?
“I was trying to figure out why the rent would be cheap enough for them to afford that place,” July says, matter of fact. “There would have to be something really wrong with it. But then I thought, why not make it beautiful also?” And it’s as simple as that. Something inherently wrong, inexplicable, still so luxurious it stays lodged in your brain. Such is the slippery, effervescent brilliance of Miranda July and Kajillionaire.
‘Kajillionaire’ is in US theaters where possible now, in UK theaters on October 9, and will be on video on demand on October 16.
