Village Voice listens to Mike Mills

In the Village Voice, film critic Karina Longworth looks at Mike Mills, the man, the movie maker and memoirist. She looks at the complicated intersection between the real and the dramatic in Mills' Beginners. But she also tries to link his art background to the film's sense of memory. In talking about the period montages that try to imagine what life was like for his parents, Mills highlights how his art background helped:

That's kind of a by-product of me being a graphic designer as much as I am a filmmaker...you're coming from that kind of visual language, you're saying to yourself, 'Well, what is '55? If I show you, like, pets in '55, does that help? Or the president? Or a movie?' How do we understand that time in which those decisions were possible? In which that kind of sex life and love life and emotional life was possible? That was my best way to take a stab at trying to understand.

One can also see his artistic collecting lushly illustrated in Mike Mills' Blog for Beginners.