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Discovery:Mike Mills
Film Comment, May, 2000 by Mark Olsen
As our CULTURE -- through the dominance of advertising, the Internet, and other techno-ephemera -- becomes more visually driven, a new type of artist is emerging, existing on a sliding scale between art and commerce, and whose very canvas is the culture itself. The catch, one supposes, lies in discerning who is simply adding to the noise and who is saying something worth hearing. For every David Fincher, Hype Williams or Spike Jonze who rises from the relative anonymity of commercial and music video directing with a voice and vision so astonishing as to overwhelm the cultural products they are meant to pimp, there are nameless swarms creating the very clutter and sameness from which others must struggle to emerge. With his 23-minute film The Architecture of Reassurance, 34-year-old Mike Mills (director of, among many other recognizable spots, the West Side Story--inspired Gap ads recently unavoidable on the airwaves) has firmly established himself as someone with a lot more on his mind than simply selling pants.
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Mills has been on the radar for a number of years now. As a graphic designer, he helped define the late-Nineties visual aesthetic for a virtual hipster mafia, creating album sleeves and artwork for artists such as The Beastie Boys, Beck, Pulp and Sonic Youth. His working method included writing a treatment of his ideas before he began designing, and so it was a smooth transition to directing music videos and commercials. His ideal assignment was not simply one sleeve or video or T-shirt, but all the art for a given group, achieving a unity of feeling and idea across the spectrum of the band's visual output. His work with the French group Air is perhaps the finest example of this approach -- Mills had a hand in the group's sleeve art, videos, merchandising, and even stage design, as well as directing a tour documentary, Eating, Sleeping, Waiting & Playing.
Since forming a company, The Directors Bureau, with friend and colleague Roman Coppola, to oversee his commercial work, Mills has been able to pursue (and finance) more personal projects. Having made a few short documentaries, including Deformer, on legendary skateboarder Ed Templeton, and another to accompany his mixed-media gallery exhibition Honesty, Shoes, Love and Hair, Mills' interest in exploring combined forms --a cross between conventional fictive narrative and documentary inquiry -- finds stunning realization in The Architecture of Reassurance. The film is a whimsically serious meditation on the influence of our physical surroundings on our psychic well-being. As junior high--age Alice (engagingly opaque newcomer Elise Lappin) explores the areas away from her coolly modernist hillside California home, she comes across a pre-planned housing development where everything looks alike.
"I used to go through developments like that and feel that was the embodiment of happy people," explained Mills during a conversation while in New York for a screening of the film at the New Directors/New Films series. "I really had this confusion where I thought because everything was so integrated design-wise, everybody who lives there must be integrated, they must all have the same kinds of feelings." As Alice explores what she believes to be the wonders of this land, she is in many ways trapped by her own perceptions, seeing the world in the way she wants to without the filter of objectivity.
The film, shot with Mills' long-time cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay, has a brightly detached, geometrically locked-off look that renders its world with an off-kilter precision. Mills had previously shot a short spot for the designer Kate Spade in the same neighborhood, even using the very same houses. Interspersed throughout Alice's adventures are shots of people answering questions from Mills (who is occasionally heard from offscreen), regarding such topics as what makes a dream home. The interview subjects are in fact the actual owners of the houses used for the film, along with their teenage daughters. "I wanted to get the architect," admits Mills, "but no one knew who he was. And that's my favorite part of the film, the documentary/narrative hybrid, that blur between reality and fiction. I like to see the interface between the stuff I created with the stuff that exists, and if there's some correlation between them I find that really exciting. I asked the girls about the same things that are happening to my character, and I think there's a nice weaving between what's really happening in their lives and what's happening in my fictitious character's life. It kind of validates the fictional parts."
In many ways The Architecture of Reassurance is the culmination of a process that Mills has been pursuing for a number of years, across the semi-disparate forms he's worked in, exploring a set of ideas about how popular culture shapes us and our lives. It's fairly heady stuff, and the seriousness of Mills' inquiry is underscored by the fact that, at one point, having received an art degree from the Cooper Union in New York City, he took a job at the prestigious design firm M&Co., only to temporarily quit designing to pursue graduate work in Cultural Studies. Mills explained how this odd career move "confirmed my belief in a playfulness with visual images, that no meaning is essential, it's all culturally constructed. That for me is ground zero, that's sea level, and everything starts from there."
