Mills draws from his experiences again in film
Director ‘lucky’ to have Phoenix star in ‘C’mon C’mon’
Writer-director Mike Mills is a deeply sensitive person — “too sensitive,” he’ll tell you. So as thrilling as it was to see his new film “C’mon C’mon” have its world premiere at the recent 2021 Telluride Film Festival, he didn’t have the easiest time getting through it.
Mills, 55, stood in the back of the theater, looking for signs that the audience was on the wavelength of his tender, open-hearted story of a radio journalist named Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) who forges an unexpected emotional bond with his precocious nephew, Jesse (Woody Norman), during a cross-country trip.
“I can talk myself into thinking everything’s broken,” Mills says. “… You really don’t know if it’s going to work at all or if it’s like you’re speaking Russian. But the audience was laughing, which was nice, and then people were really emotional at the end. So I knew something happened, some communication landed.”
“C’mon C’mon,” which A24 is set to release in November, emerged as one of the most admired films in what was widely considered a strong field at Telluride. Already many Oscar prognosticators are predicting that the intimate, black-and-white film — which explores the joys and struggles of parent-child relationships, the deep human need for connection and the difficulty today’s kids face growing up in a world that seems to be spinning out of control — will punch above its weight as awards season rolls on.
“I think people are so grateful to have a story in front of them that is about so much of what life is about,” says Gaby Hoffmann, who plays Viv, Johnny’s sister and Jesse’s mother. “People are just streaming out of the film, sobbing, weeping. We’re all deeply vulnerable all the time but that is stretched in so many directions right now. We’re all in need of connecting and seeing one another and caring for one another, and to me the movie is about confronting that need.”
After his 2005 feature debut, “Thumbsucker,” Mills’ next two films — 2010’s “Beginners” and 2016’s “20th Century Women” — drew from the wellspring of his own complicated upbringing. Following the death of Mills’ mother, his father, after 45 years of marriage, came out as gay. The movies represented Mills’ effort to capture and make sense of both parents in all their complicated, unconventional, messy glory.
“C’mon C’mon” mines similarly autobiographical terrain, drawing on Mills’ relationship with his deeply inquisitive, wise-beyond-their-years child, Hopper (who is gender-nonconforming and uses the pronouns they/them.)
In 2016, Mills was casting around for an idea for his next movie. One day, he was giving Hopper a bath and, while the two were talking, he was suddenly struck with the thought, “I want to make a movie about this.”
“Hopper was saying something kind of profound and making my understanding of the world deepen in a way that was really challenging and strange, and I thought, ‘This is it, this little space. Here’s what I want to do,’ ” Mills says.
Drawing upon his own experience with Hopper, his observations of other parents and kids and a particularly empathetic and emotionally astute teacher at Hopper’s preschool, Mills started working on a script. Wim Wenders’ 1974 road movie “Alice in the Cities” — about a childless German journalist who forms an unlikely bond with a 9-year-old girl left in his care — served as a kind of creative touchstone.
Inspired by “Alice in the Cities” and by Peter Bogdanovich’s 1973 “Paper Moon,” Mills conceived a story in which a childless, middle-aged journalist — while working on a radio documentary project interviewing teenagers about the future — finds himself needing to care for the bright and idiosyncratic young nephew from whom he has been estranged.
Mills had long wanted to work with Phoenix, and after a monthslong process in which the two broke down every aspect of the script and Johnny’s emotional journey, the actor agreed to come on board.
“It was so collaborative and fun,” Mills says. “Joaquin just made it less predictable and less me trying to make sure I come off good. He’s really good at smelling that kind of virtue signaling in different ways.”
The role of Johnny in “C’mon C’mon” couldn’t be more starkly different from Phoenix’s Oscar-winning turn in his previous film, 2019’s dark, disturbing “Joker” — a prospect Mills says the actor relished.
“That was a super conscious (choice),” Mills says. “Joaquin is smart. He knew what a 180 this would be, and that was on my side.”
To play Jesse, Mills cast Norman after being charmed by the tape he submitted during the casting process. “In lots of ways Woody was the most mature person on the set,” says Mills. “He’s a very deep-ruddered person. He really relished digging into the heavier emotions. Most kid actors have been a little bit too trained, but Woody was exceedingly good at just falling into the moment and being there and kind of forgetting all the stuff that was around.”
The film is also, Mills says, “an ode to motherhood.” Taking on the role of Viv — who entrusts Jesse to her brother’s care while she tries to help her mentally ill husband (Scoot McNairy) — Hoffmann was impressed by Mills’ uncanny ability to get inside the maternal mind.
“I myself am a mother, and when I read the script, it was this odd experience of feeling like he was writing scenes that I’d written myself in my head, based on the experience I was having,” Hoffmann says.
For a filmmaker, there are few things more challenging than seamlessly interweaving comedy and drama. But for Mills, that is his comfort zone, and “C’mon C’mon” is filled with scenes in which an emotionally wrenching moment is undercut with a goofy joke, or a light-hearted one turns suddenly melancholy.
“That’s just how I see the world,” Mills says. “There are no borders; funny and sad don’t stay in their lanes. Maybe I have a sort of emotional ADD, but I don’t want to be strictly in just one of those spaces.”
Even as he has enjoyed the reception “C’mon C’mon” has received thus far, Mills is well aware that small-scale black-and-white films exploring the emotional minefield of family relationships are not generally considered box-office gold in today’s entertainment landscape. “I was lucky I had Joaquin,” Mills says. “If not, I don’t know what would have happened.”