On Movies: A life full of ideas, and dreaming of flight

When

Miranda July

was in grade school, she'd strut around the yard at recess and say to her friends, "Dare me to do something - just dare me!"

It wasn't that she was a "wild" kid, she explains. "It was more just wanting to be put in some absurd situation that would just be unthinkably shocking. And performative, somehow."

Like going up to the front of a movie theater, standing on the little stage and doing a soft-shoe.

"I promptly got kicked out," she remembers, "and the movie hadn't really started yet. It was just previews."

Another time, she ran onto a basketball court where these "much older and giant guys" were playing.

"The dare was to just go onto the court and start pretending like I was playing with them, and I did, I tried to get the ball. For some reason, this was hilarious and terrifying. And they were just like, What the heh? I was like some sort of weird animal that had skittered through the game."

Speaking of weird animals, July's new movie - The Future, opening Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse - begins with the sad, quavery voice of a cat, Paw Paw, addressing the audience. We see her little feet. We feel her pain.

A meditation about time and relationships, about truth, consequences, and life in the digital age, The Future was written and directed by July. It stars July, too, as a sort of ennui-struck children's dance instructress who lives with a similarly inert tech support guy (Hamish Linklater). They're adopting this cat. And strange stuff happens.

It's almost as if July's fifth-grade pals had dared her to make a movie with a talking cat in it. And, oh, yeah, a talking moon. You have to be a little fearless to do stuff like that.

"But there's a lot of fear in me, too," July says. "It's just that when it comes to making things, I'm so determined, and that overtakes everything, and I have a pretty clear idea of what I want . . . . It's like this itch, I just have to make it right. And all the fear falls away, or works in service of the idea. So I guess I still am a little like the kid being dared - before I really figured out that one could be an artist."

The Future is July's second feature. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Her first, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which also stars July, was released in 2005. Her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Story Award. She makes videos and Web-based projects and still does performance art - that's how she got started, standing on a stage in front of audiences in Portland, Ore., her old hometown. Essentially, she dared herself to deliver the goods, to be "performative," somehow.

Now 37, with an ardent following (and a passionate phalanx of folks who find her work precious and annoying), July shares a house in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer, director and graphic artist Mike Mills. He was writing and then shooting Beginners, with Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, and Melanie Laurent, at the same time July was writing, and then shooting, The Future.

The two met at Sundance six years ago, where his first feature, Thumbsucker, also premiered. "A pretty life-changing year," she says.

"I have a little house that is my office that I go to, a few blocks away. And he works at home," July says, explaining the couple's arrangements. "And after a while we agreed to just not talk about our work. We would go for a walk at the end of the day - we would have a rule - and one of us would start saying, 'I tried this ...' and no, forget that!

"Because the other person's never going to have as great a reaction as you'd expect and hope for. All you want them to say is, 'That idea is so amazing I can't even go on living!'

"And anything short of that, you're just going to be annoyed."

July says that although she and Mills have talked, vaguely, romantically, about collaborating on a project, she doesn't expect that to happen any time soon.

"Maybe when we're older. But I think we both have such a sense of urgency right now. Like, the next movie doesn't seem like a sure thing . . . and it's a very independent quest.

"But in little ways, we make things together all the time. Like we need to whip together a birthday card for a friend, and I realize it's not like two normal, nice people making a card for their friend. It's like two directors who are both very sure that the print should go sideways and, 'Oh, you're going to do that?'

"There's a thing we do - I'm not sure he's fully aware of it - where I'll put something like grapes or whatever the thing is in a bowl, and he'll change the bowl. I'll come back in the kitchen and I'll realize that the grapes are now in a different bowl.. . .

"OK, you pick your battles . . . . It's a very aesthetic household."

July has a novel that she's supposed to be writing (she's feeling guilty about the advance), and journals full of ideas for films, for stories, for performance pieces.

Both Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future wrestle with the (omni-)presence of the Internet, the way it at once connects people and disconnects them. In The Future, July and Linklater's characters decide to forgo the World Wide Web, to see what would happen if they can't flip open their laptops and surf the Net.

"It's such a human thing to not know what to do with yourself, to have moments in the day where you think Who am I? What am I doing?" she says.

"But it's a new thing to have this ready distraction that's pretty acceptable and always there. And I guess, for an artist, as addicted as I am to all that, it's kind of scary, because your work is coming from those spaces where you don't know what to do. And hanging out in those spaces and enduring, not knowing, is where new ideas come from, so - whether or not I'm interested in that, I have to wrestle with it.

"I was almost like, I don't want to put this in the movie, and yet how can I have this couple be real at all and just magically take the Internet out of their life? . . .

"I've always had this idea of someone who panics enough that they flee their life, that they forsake everything they care about. That idea has haunted me for a long time. But I didn't want it to be caused by a big drama, like what could it be that could freak you out that much? I wanted it to be caused by a non-event - because we basically do it on our own. A silent implosion, like disconnecting the Internet."