The one-time performance artist's debut feature was a hit on the festival circuit during the first half of the year, where it picked up a prize for "originality of vision" at Sundance and a quartet of awards at Cannes, including co-winning the Camera d'Or Award for first feature. Now it's begun its limited domestic release, starting in about 10 cities, with more to follow.
As its title suggests, like such other American independent movies as Thirteen Conversations About One Thing and Lovely & Amazing, July's Me and You and Everyone We Know is about the tenuous links that join people together in sometimes funny, sometimes eerie ways. July's movie features about a dozen main characters, ranging from schoolkids to the elderly, whose criss-crossing relationships form a community.
The relatively big splash this low-budget ensemble drama is making is a bit of a surprise for the petite Vermont native, who's lived on the West Coast since she was four. In addition to performing live and releasing CDs on Seattle's Sub Pop Records over the last decade, her output also included many short films over the last decade, excerpts of which can be seen on her website, www.mirandajuly.com.
But July's feature film crossover was not her goal "in a calculated sense," she says. "It's kind of like when I was in high school and didn't know all the different things one could do to express themselves, the indie film boom was just taking off and I definitely noticed that. But I kind of forgot about it, and went about my business, performing and making films. And each (short film) was bigger and bigger, and I gradually started to think that at some point one was just going to be too long to make in the same way I was doing them."
The independent movies July remembers having the biggest impact on her were sex, lies and videotape and Slacker. "Slacker definitely had a quality about it that made moviemaking seem very easy," she says. "I liked things like that that don't make it seem mysterious."
In contrast to many of July's short films, in which she was the only person onscreen, shortly before Me and You and Everyone We Know one of her last shorts was Nest of Tens, which she calls "very consciously a movie made with other people in it. It's a half-hour, but it has a lot of the same themes, it has kids and adults, some risque stuff. It was a confidence thing, for sure, to have done things that once would have seemed like an impossible feat."
The move from self-contained short films to a commercial feature was helped by July's attendance at the Sundance Screenwriting Lab. She didn't get in the first year she submitted her screenplay, but she did the second. "I began to think that was the only bridge between the world I was then in (and moviemaking)," she said of the decision to resubmit her script. "And it was exactly that. I'd really shown it to no one else, but having all these professionals see it - not so much for advice, because I'd never had advice before - was really good. To see how seriously people took it. I think I needed a certain amount of permission to make the movie."
Ultimately, making Me and You and Everyone We Know wasn't as big a leap forward as July feared it might be. "It felt like, 'OK, the important things are still the same," she explains. "You still have to know why you're doing this scene. It's the same at any scale. But the amount of pressure and distraction is so much greater. And physically, it's a lot harder. I found that the hardest difference. Just endurance. The hours and the energy having to put out all the time. And then on top of it having to look good on the days I was in it. You never really come down."
In the ensemble of Me and You and Everyone We Know, July plays Christine, an aspiring artist who falls for a shoe salesman (John Hawkes of TV's Deadwood) whose marriage has just broken up. While Christine's way of reaching out is direct - she semi-stalks the guy at his department store - other characters try to connect with others online or, in one case, by writing messages taped onto windows.
"Christine has the part of me that's loving and hopeful and verging on obsessive," July said. "But all the characters are so much me. It's just with her there's no metaphor. I'm the guy who puts the signs in the window, too. My script, my movie, is a total sign in the window: 'Look at me! This is kind of perverse, but be my friend.'"
by Paul Sherman
