Mike Mills Quotes

Grief and memory go together. After someone dies, that's what you're left with. And the memories are so slippery yet so rich.

No one leaves the edit room thinking, 'Yeah, I nailed that one!' Everyone I know goes into their first premiere or their first screening thinking, 'I screwed up so bad. I'm sorry, I messed up.' It's just a real common feeling.

We never did things as we were supposed to do. That was part of our ethic. We did what felt right to us, not what someone told us we should do.

I would hate to think I'm promoting sadness as an aesthetic. But I grew up in not just a family but a town and a culture where sadness is something you're taught to feel shame about. You end up chronically desiring what can be a very sentimental idea of love and connection. A lot of my work has been about trying to make a space for sadness.

I'm not a craftsman of graphics or art or film. I'm more of an idea generator and manufacturer.

Sadness is a super important thing not to be ashamed about but to include in our lives. One of the bigger problems with sadness or depression is there's so much shame around it. If you have it you're a failure. You are felt as being very unattractive.

As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.

The littlest thing can have the strongest connection when you're grieving. Your Proustian, poetic nerve is turned up to ten.

My dad's gay experiences really had a very positive influence on me and my straight relationships - how to better accept all the weirdness and ambiguity and ups and downs and paradoxes. I knew from the beginning I was writing about love.

My graffiti really comes more from a May '68, sort of Situationist vibe than the hip-hop world. I think a real graffiti artist would find me a poser.

Actors are pretending for you, but they're not lying. They are not putting on a guise instead of themselves. They are finding things inside that they have experienced.

Humans are vulnerable, messy little animals and that's normal. And all I want to do is make a space for that in my films.

As someone who grew up in a house where there wasn't a lot of talking, I'm used to just looking at the world. And in general I often feel like I just don't understand what's happening. That everybody else does, but I don't quite get it.

There is a drunkenness to grief, which is good.

I am intrigued by inanimate objects. They're a piece of history, someone's statement and ideas of life.

There's great sadness and life doesn't work out like you would want, on a lot of levels, but there's no need to feel all alone. This happens to everybody, so there's no self-pity. This is the ride that humans are on, and all of it is essential for our natural part of it.

There's some movies I watch, they're kind of like my anti-anxiety pill, my anti-depressant pill. I watch them at least once or twice a month probably. And I never stop learning from them as a filmmaker.

Being a good Hans Haacke student, part of his influence on me is that there's no difference between a gallery show and a film - or even an ad and a T-shirt-in terms of cultural legitimacy. They're just different contexts in which to have some sort of communication.

I was so happy with my bow ties from the last kickstarted project that I'm back for more.

People ask 'How does doing a film compare to doing an ad?' Well, when you're doing a commercial you don't have to sell tickets. You have a captured audience. Which is actually completely rare and great; it gives you a lot of freedom. When you make a film, you have to do advertisements for the film.

OK, so my parents were married in 1955 and my mom knew my dad was gay and my dad knew he was gay and so I was, like, 'Why in the heck did you get married?' Like, what was going on? What was that time? It's like this crazy paradox that my whole life is based on, or my family's based on. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand '55.

If you ask me, the place that a story happens is as equal character. It's almost like an ecological viewpoint: These people are living in this piece of land, and in this piece of land in this time this is possible. For me, I almost think location first. It's time first - what year is it - then where are we, and then who is in it.

My experience, with both my parents, is that grief has a lot of down, sad things, but I was also really emotionally raw, in the first year after each of them passed. Flowers smelled more intensely, my relationships were hotter, and I was more willing to risk. I was going for it a lot more. I was 'unsober' and I wasn't playing by my rules.

L.A. is so isolated and unhip in a way; it gives you room to figure out who you are and explore more personal stuff.

The oldest sibling always knows things that the younger ones don't.

I'm into people's emotional lives and relationships and the complications of living. That's my turf.

I pretty much believe that a film is a film and when an audience watches a film, they finish it.

I guess I watch movies to make myself happier a lot.

I don't really believe that documentary is objective reality and fiction is all illusion.

I definitely believe in the energy of the set and the energy of the actor, way more than your written word.

Over and over again, I'm trying to express or communicate these big and small struggles to the world, and really to myself.

It's funny now how much we look at - whatever you want to call it: art, design, culture stuff, film - online, and how in the online world, you're instantly global.

Life is too short for a half-rack.

To me, sadness and humor aren't disrelated and humor is the best tool I've had against the sadness in my life.

To me it's like, every time I'm a director, like today, you're the captain of the ship, so you better dress like it. You're the host of the party.

Film is endlessly just beyond your reach. I think that's what I love so much about it.