Rebecca Miller on her film about her father, Arthur.
Miller: filmmaker Early Writer” in her Rebecca documentary (on HBO Miller Monday, (“Maggie’s portrait March “Arthur Plan”) 19), says that when she first started filming conversations with her legendary playwright father more than 25 years ago, she realized that “his public persona was so different from the man I knew. I felt I was the only filmmaker he would let get close enough” to reveal the endearing, philosophical man behind the icon. By the time Rebecca, 55, was born (her mother is Miller’s third wife, Magnum photographer Inge Morath), Miller had already experienced several lives’ worth of achievements and losses: written his masterwork “Death of a Salesman,” confronted McCarthyism (the basis of “The Crucible”); weath-
ered a high-wattage marriage to Marilyn Monroe and late-career dismissal from the critics who formerly championed his every word.
Rebecca Miller, who is married to actor Daniel Day-Lewis, spoke during a visit to San Francisco about finally sharing with the public her decades-inthe-making film, and balancing her perspectives as both a daughter and a fellow artist.
Q: When you first started filming your father, in candid moments and interviews, was he open to the idea of you making a film about him?
A: I was only 21 in the beginning, and there wasn’t much discussion. I just had a feeling that I should do it. The big turning point was in 1995 when my first film, “Angela,” won the Gotham Prize, and the prize itself was a lot of 16mm film. I thought, let’s do some real interviews, so we talked, and Arthur went deeply into the nature of tragedy or about himself as a father. After those I realized, I’m going to finish this film one day. And he was happy for that to happen. We didn’t know it would take more than 20 years.
Q: Was it tricky to balance your personal view of your father with trying to be more objective about Arthur Miller the writer and public intellectual?
A: It feels slightly transgressive when you start to dive into parts of a parent’s life before you were born. It’s like you’re not meant to be in the room, and yet you have enormous power when you make a film about someone. It’s an interesting inversion of the typical child-parent dynamic. I needed to be able to tell the truth as I saw it but, of course, the truth as I saw it includes the fact that I loved my father. So it would be a lie to create some kind of false neutrality.
Q: Your film really humanizes Arthur Miller. Thinking of him as a character in his own life story, what is most compelling to you?
A: What’s so interesting to me is the degree to which his century really lived inside of him and helped to create his work, and his work in its own small way maybe influenced his century.
I was also really interested in how he changed as a character. When he talks earlier in his life, he has so much certainty. Later, he’s much less certain, and you can see the ways being burned, knocked around, affected him — maybe in a good way.
Q: Was it awkward talking to him about dark chapters his life, like the depression he suffered after Marilyn Monroe’s death?
A: In a way it was, but it wasn’t the first time we had had these discussions. I once directed “After the Fall” and had many talks with him then about the play (which is based on Miller’s 1956-61 marriage to Monroe). His inability to save her and his wish, his delusion, that he could give her new life was his great comeuppance.
To me, some of the most poignant moments in the film are when he goes silent and seems to go so far into himself, and you can see emotional states take him over. I’m happy that I realized I should shut up and just capture the moment.
Q: Your father famously refused to “name names” in 1956 when he was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Do you see relevance to today?
A: Yes, some of the things Arthur said then feel strangely prescient and very contemporary. Tony Kushner has this great line in the film when he talks about “The Crucible,” that “all societies reckon one day or another with when the powerful make an alliance with the mad.”
Arthur’s commitment to being a public intellectual is very touching to me, that there could be a place in the national dialogue for the conscience of an artist.
Q: Some of the best interviews take place while your father is working in his Connecticut barn. He clearly enjoyed building things by hand. Did that apply to making art as well?
A: He was always making things or repairing things when they’d break, new legs for our picnic table or soldering a broken coffee percolator back together. It was a sort of spartan attitude, but there was a lot of joy in it. I do think he applied the same sense of construction to art, that it had to stand up, had to have a kind of structural integrity.
His work ethic was striking, which can be a hard thing for artists because no one is asking you to go to work. And yet he always kept writing. He said, “The important thing is that you don’t go silent.”