Miranda July’s Five Favorite Films

Sometimes, I like to mention Somewhere in Time because it’s definitely not a good movie in terms of quality, but it had such an influence on me at such a young age. It’s about time travel, starring Christopher Reeves. I think, you know, as a little kid, the idea of entering other dimensions or time travel, it’s almost like that’s a stand-in for being an artist. Like, you’re not yet old enough to conceive of the life you might have as an artist, but time travel implies the magical thing you might want to do through your work. I didn’t end up becoming a time traveler, but I did end up making worlds.

When I was a little bit older, I saw A Room with a View, and that was the movie that made me fall in love with love –– the idea of romance. I wasn’t yet having romances of my own, but I think I just spent a whole summer kind of walking around in a dreamy trance hoping that I could have hair like Helena Bonham Carter.

More recently, [I’ve enjoyed] Maren Ade’s movie, Toni Erdmann. She’s someone I met in Berlin when I was there, I guess when I was there finishing The Future, because I did my post in Berlin. I knew her and I remember her visiting me actually in L.A. and telling me about this movie and about this father. I always keep in mind how — it’s not that she was insecure; she’s a very competent filmmaker — but when she described the movie, it was years from being done, and it then ended up being such a knockout. I mean really one of the best I’ve ever seen. That’s sort of encouraging me to remember, “Oh yeah, every movie before it’s made seemed kind of unwise or unlikely.”

Another one from my childhood, or like from my teen years, is Sex, Lies and Videotape. It’s funny — teenage girls are not exactly the target audience there, but I think one of the things I really like that drew me in was the movies within the movies, which are women talking about sex directly to the camera. I think even though these are not independent feminist art projects, I saw them in that way. Within the narrative of the movie, they’re tools for this man to get off. It was only a few years later that I would start this underground distribution network for women filmmakers called Joanie for Jackie, and in some ways I think those videos would have been good movies for Joanie for Jackie. Of course, they’re not actually made by women, but I guess it sort of proves that if you’re desperate enough for female filmmaking, you can find it even within that Steven Soderbergh movie.

Agnès Varda’s movie Le Petit Amour, or Kung Fu Master! as it’s called in the U.S., was a movie that I saw before I started writing my first feature Me and You and Everyone We Know. It centers on this really unlikely romance between a 14-year-old boy and a 40-year-old woman, and in a very French way that I don’t think she actually got away with even in France, but I remember taking it on as a challenge: How unlikely a couple could you make? It led me down the path of being interested in what was romance or sexuality from a little child’s point of view. Was there a way, with tenderness, to safely explore that because I’m sort of always interested in the personhood of children and their autonomy. So that led to a storyline in Me and You and Everyone We Know.