By Jake Coyle, Film Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --Director Mike Mills had some advice for his audience at the New York Film Festival: Make a movie about your mom.
Mills premiered his "20th Century Women," starring Annette Bening, on Friday at Lincoln Center, where his film is playing as the festival's centerpiece. In it, Bening stars as Dorothea Fields, a woman born during the Great Depression who's raising her 14-year-old son (newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann) by herself in 1979 California, albeit with the help of the colorful tenants (Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup) living her old Santa Barbara home.
The film is a lushly lived-in coming-of-age dramedy about a mom and her son, told with a keen eye to how historical currents shape emotional lives. Mills, at a press conference Friday, said the movie could be reduced to "'As Time Goes By' meets the Buzzcocks."
Mills, the writer-director of "Beginners," said he wrote "20th Century Women" primarily as a love letter to his mother.
"You all should make movies about your mom because it's really a trip," said Mills. "And then have an amazing actress do it."
The film, which A24 will release Dec. 25, has been lined up as an awards season contender, with Bening's lead performance particularly trumpeted. Her Dorothea is part a cigarette-smoking traditionalist (she tells her son: "Wondering if you're happy is a great shortcut to being depressed"), and part an open-minded child of the 1960s, willing to try dancing to both the Talking Heads and Black Flag.
Bening was 19 during the film's time period, but grew up in San Diego near the movie's coastal setting.
"My world was a different world than this world that I grew up in, but the time was the same," said Bening. "I loved the script because I thought it contextualized that period for me in a way that I had never seen."
The challenge of playing the part, Bening said, was in finding the character herself while also being faithful to Mills' descriptions of his mother. The balancing act, she said, was "fascinating but not easy."
"To me Dorothea was very much Annette, in body and timing and soul," said Mills. "It was fun to sort of show her my mom, always saying to her to take what's interesting and dump the rest."
Mills said he was inspired not just by his mother, but other women in his life, who he interviewed almost like a journalist. Their stories informed other characters and scenes.
"I'm very much trying to base everything on real women," said Mills. "Ultimately, I'm a straight white cisgender male guy trying to write about women, but I can only go so far. I'm on the outside looking in. I was trying to make those limitations of my perspective part of the story."
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More