“It’s always varying degrees of terror”: Miranda July on an unflinchingly honest career

It’s Nice That: I’d like to start off by saying preparing for this interview was unique, if not somewhat intimidating, because I knew I’d be interviewing someone who is a master of conducting interviews. A lot of your art is focused around interviews and you always manage to foster a sense of vulnerability between you and your subject. Why are vulnerable conversations so important to your work and how do you manage to tease out that openness with the person you’re speaking to?

Miranda July: It’s not just important in my work. In my life, if there’s not a fairly high mutual risk level then, it’s not that I get bored, but I sort of feel somewhat useless; I almost don’t know what to do with myself. Whereas if both people are sort of stepping over an invisible line of what was expected of the interaction, then I feel like I’m so present that I’m always startled when it ends – and all these interactions do end or else we wouldn’t be here. It’s always an indication to me of how completely consumed I was by them and our shared moment by the fact that I’m never not offended when it ends. If it’s me [that ends it], then I just want to die on my own knife. And if it’s them, I’m mad at them even if it’s been eight hours. I don’t think I’m all that skilled [as an interviewer], I think my thing is less skill and more just willingness to be a fool.

INT: You touched upon it briefly there, the way you move and work with a lot of different mediums at once. Does the idea for the medium you want to work in next come first or does it take shape around the project? What possibilities does writing offer in comparison to film?

MJ: These days, it’s often a reaction to the one that I’m in. And now I’ve been doing this long enough, I can kind of see [it coming]. Every time I’m writing a book, I always think performance seems like the greatest. Honestly, it’s probably for the dumb reason that I’m just really lonely and, when making a movie, you’re not actually there with the audience; I just want to be like a body among other bodies.

Right now, I’m finishing a novel and, for the last year of this novel, I’ve started to put notes into a folder for performance. Sometimes I also get up and just do stuff, and that’s always a nice thing because, once a project is done, for me, it can be a real crisis between projects. I’ve even done a project about that kind of crisis. But I do like to overlap. Filmmaking and writing are also very intimate and creative, but the thing about art – whether it’s performance or an app or a sculpture – is that I’ve done it differently to other artists. I don’t have my gallery. So it has an ability to fit into odd spaces in my life and be a little more built on the relationships that happen in the moment. I really love the immediacy of that. Obviously, a performance works a little differently, but they each have their weight – they’re completely different, not just in currency, but energy.

INT: You have a new book coming out this month, Services, which is based on a phone call you received by chance and the continuing conversations you had with the caller over the next six months. Can you walk us through the amazing premise that sparked the work and how it all came together?

MJ: So this call that I got, it’s very important when I got it: it was 13 March 2020. That’s not just the start of the pandemic, it was the exact day in my world that it began. In fact, it’s when I, and a lot of people I knew, got messages from the school saying we’re shutting down indefinitely which, if you’re a parent, you can no longer pretend that this doesn’t affect you. Your whole life just got shot to hell basically. I got a phone call, and I think in that dumb way where you think everything’s related, I just answered it as if it was gonna be God explaining why this was happening. It wasn’t – or you know, maybe it was.

It was a telephone solicitor, but instead of doing the normal thing – I’m not a saint, I just hang up frankly on solicitors or just usually don’t answer – I answered every one of this person’s questions. I was clearly on some list for like self-published authors, which I’m not. But I was kind of funny about it. This person would say: ‘Would you like more readers?’ and I’d say: ‘Well, my books are like New York Times bestsellers but sure who wouldn’t?’. I wasn’t a dick, but it was like I wanted to impress this random person. I don’t think that’s normal for me.

When they finally said it doesn’t seem like you need our services, I said: ‘Can I ask you some questions?’ and they laughed and then I said: ‘Where are you?’ and they were in the Philippines. I asked, ‘What’s your name?’ and I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, and she said: ‘I’m a trans woman’. I have a trans child and there was, I think, a moment of further intimacy just in realising that. I just said DM me if you’re on Instagram, and we exchanged messages. I asked if she wanted to collaborate; I proposed that I give her assignments and that she fulfil them, and that we have an ongoing conversation about our lives.

Then it was just this surreal thing where, no matter what assignment I sent her way, she came back with something so raw and interesting and often quite laboriously done. I remember asking her to act out a dream in a photograph, and she was dead in the image. She had foaming at the mouth that happens, I guess, when you die, and she had done that with shampoo. The rigour of that really impressed me – and it’s a beautiful, upsetting image too. Then I began intervening with the images and adding things – always things from her – I would find on her Facebook. To me, they seemed like they were little clues about her, like her interest in dominance and submission. In the end, I gave her – almost like a gift, although quite nerve-wracking for me – all the images back with what I had done to them. That was sort of the moment of truth: did this work as a collaboration? Does she like this? I think for both of us it shifted then, becoming something quite emotionally deep. We continued and can continue to this day collaborating like that.