April 25–May 2, 1996

cover story|Film Festival Spotlight

MILLER'S DAUGHTER

Filmmaker Rebecca Miller may still be known as Miller's Daughter...but not for long.

By David Warner

When Arthur Miller first met Inge Morath, the woman who would become his third wife, he was immediately struck (he remembers in his autobiography Timebends) by her "transparently blue eyes."

When you meet Rebecca Miller, the couple's only child, that description resonates.

That's because Rebecca seems to have her mother's eyes — the color of smoky blue glass, they convey at once a sense of candor and cool reserve.

Not bad eyes to have. And not a bad bloodline, either: Morath is a celebrated photographer — one of the first admitted to the prestigious Magnum Photos cooperative in the '50s — and Miller, of course, is one of this century's leading playwrights.

But Rebecca Miller, 32, is much more than the sum of her parents' accomplishments.

She's a painter with a degree from Yale, an actor with several films to her credit (Regarding Henry, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle), and a director, currently making her feature debut with Angela, for which she also wrote the screenplay. Set in a small town in Upstate New York, it's the story of two little girls who flee into a world of religious fantasy in reaction to the increasingly disturbing behavior of their mother, a manic-depressive former rock singer.

The film won two major awards at the 1995 Sundance festival (including the Filmmakers' Trophy, voted on by her peers), and it premieres here in the Phila. Festival of World Cinema on May 3 and 4.

I talked with Miller last week in a sunny cafe near her apartment in New York's Little Italy. As Angela's audiences are finding out, Miller has developed a vision all her own.

I rented Regarding Henry after I saw Angela, and I have to say the sappiness of Henry made me appreciate the seriousness of Angela all the more.

That's something I don't address much in interviews: how I was influenced by the movies I was in, and maybe even in opposition to them — and how difficult really it is to have a film like Angela exist in the world at all.

There's a real prohibition in films — a tacit understanding that there's no place for tragedy. I was told that quite point blank by a very well-known producer.

The audience is expected to be taken on a ride but to be let back down exactly where they came on, as if they went on a rollercoaster. I think when you drop them off at a different place, it can be upsetting, it can be discombobulating, and I mean, to me, that's part of the fun of making movies — to make a movie where nobody knows what's going to happen from one moment to the next.

Your movie does reflect the way a child's imagination works — one thing leads to another with a kind of dream logic, almost like magic realism.

The thing about it is that it is realism, because children do really see that poetically. I was really interested in finding a way of exploring the invisible world through participants who could realistically believe in that world and not be crazy — and those participants had to be children.

That invisible world is something that's fascinated you from the beginning of your work as an artist. Dream imagery figured in your paintings and your early short films. And you created a vivid imaginary world when you were a child. Does Angela go back to that?

I would say definitely. There's a definite strong continuity from my childhood and the dreams that I had when I was a child through into my paintings and then through to my filmmaking. It's very much a line that continues to develop...

In a way I wanted to make Angela [as my first feature] because it's the purest story I had to tell, the most sealedoff, in the sense of being very much self-generated. I mean, Angela's world is generated from herself, inside her own imagination. Ultimately she's completely overtaken by that.

Did you develop your fantasy life as an escape from the pressures of being surrounded by your family's fame?

I think it had more to do with living in the country [a big white 18th-c. farmhouse in northwestern Connecticut], and not really having brothers and sisters around...

And from having older parents, too?

Possibly. But my parents [father now 80; mother, 72] are emotionally and physically very youthful people.

I spent a lot of time by myself... telling myself stories, playing characters in my head. I wasn't a very introverted person when I was around other people, but I had a very strong inner life. It took a long time for the outer world to be as compelling as my inner world — till relationships started to have as much of a pull. It's a bit of a relief as I've become an adult to be able to be more open.

How were you influenced by your parents being creative people? Was it inevitable that you would become an artist yourself?

It wasn't inevitable — it felt like a very natural thing to do. And I was encouraged. Because art and writing and reading a lot were very valued.

Were there always a lot of artists in your home?

Not very many — it was a pretty isolated community of people who lived in the woods. The sculptor Alexander Calder lived down the road, as did choreographer Martha Clarke [The Garden of Earthly Delights]. She was in a way a role model — she's had a lot of influence on me in a very unconscious way. And my dad really loved people who were craftsmen and carpenters.

My parents would have people down for the weekend — Russian writers like Yevtushenko, Chinese writers, Robert Lowell — people he'd met through being president of PEN and their travels. It was a writer-heavy crowd, never any filmmakers, almost never any actors.

Did you attend school in the area?

I went to a semi-religious private day school called Rumsey Hall. I almost went to public high school, but the building had no windows — and the idea seemed so depressing to my mother when there was this beautiful, beautiful landscape.

Do you see any parallels in the children you've created for this film and the child that you were?

Definitely. They're kind of me split in two. They're the dark and the light — one who lives in a more nebulous, frightening world, the other who's very positive and ultimately a survivor. Those two people are both me. I think the Ellie in me saved me — if I had been completely Angela I would be a much more troubled person — but I have both of those people in me.

The subject of your first short film, Florence, is a woman so empathetic she catches another woman's amnesia. Do you see that kind of empathy in yourself?

Some people when they're children develop a very acute sense of how everyone around them is feeling, and they feel responsible for it. Every little mood shift, every little tiny anxiety is felt by that child. I was that kind of child. I was very aware, and sometimes that can be difficult — you tend to absorb [other people]. But I think that's the thing that qualifies me most to be a director of actors.

Talk about working with the actors in Angela.

The rehearsals with the children [Miranda Stuart Rhyne, who plays Angela, 10, and Charlotte Blythe, who plays Ellie, 6] were very rigorous. [In auditions] I told Miranda, 'You have to go into my study and when you come out you have to be able to cry.' I didn't want to get out in the woods of Upstate New York and find she couldn't do it.

The thing that was so great with the kids is that they were so open — every aspect of their performance could be unraveled like a map and we could look at it together and chart the territory.

Anna [Thomson, who plays the mother, Mae] had a hard time because she had to really let herself go. There had to be a lot of trust between us. I could set certain limits around her performance, because in an act of great generosity she set no limits herself.

Some who've seen the film remark on the Marilyn connection [Marilyn Monroe was Arthur Miller's second wife, who died before Rebecca was born. Mae, like Marilyn, is a sexy, self-destructive platinum blonde.]

I don't really see [the link] as conscious. I allowed Anna to maintain the look she had — that was her hair, that was her makeup. I looked at it more from a distance and saw that look as being something that still belongs to us: faded ideals of glamour that women are going to be grappling with for a long, long time.

And that Marilyn embodied?

That she embodied, but she herself was already another version of it. Mae is somebody who has put all her identity into an image of herself, so she has no self. She is somebody without a center — she says, "I'll be anything you want me to be." So in that sense I suppose it's more a kind of a social criticism than a [Miller] family thing. I may have a stronger link to it because of the coincidence of my family connection, but that's not so much where I'm coming from. I'm looking at it more as, what does it mean to all women? What does it mean about our culture? This weird combination of glamour and religion that seems to be so much at the heart of our country, and how these two interconnect, and what's deadly about that. This is the question I'm asking in the film. So in a way it's about our country — not my family.

What about directing After the Fall? [Miller's first professional gig as a director was a production of her father's play, widely viewed as a semi-autobiographical version of his life with Marilyn.]

The Ensemble Theater in Cincinnati saw my film Florence in festival and asked me to direct Fall. It was quite clear to me why they were choosing me. At the same time it was a job, an opportunity — I was absolutely right to do it.

That has to be daunting — directing your father's play?

No, that part wasn't daunting. I think any play of that size, of that scope, would have been daunting.

Did your father come to see it?

Yes. He liked it — it was a success for the company.

Your father has said he sees After the Fall as about American amnesia — the culture of denial. Did you have a similar point in Florence?

I tend to start with the personal more than the political.

Your father would go in the other direction.

Yes. Although he puts an enormous part of himself in his work, he tends to think in political terms a lot, and I tend to start with the dream, the emotional core thing. He does, too, but it's just a very different vision, his and mine.

As far as amnesia, Florence is about a woman who forgets she loves her husband. At that moment in my life I was very afraid that love was a completely arbitrary thing... Florence empathizes with other people's pain, which on the one hand is a very warm thing, but on the other hand it's quite anonymous, because it doesn't matter who's in pain — it's not about the individual.

I think there's an aspect of love that can be like that. Having one boy friend after another was sort of frightening to me. Why should this be the case? How could I fall in love with more than one person? I still think these are questions that should be asked, but I'm in a different place now.

You're in a relationship?

Yes — something I see as remaining intact.

How long?

Only a year and a half, but we live together — we're solid. He's a philosopher finishing up his Ph. D.

And his name?

I can't tell you — he doesn't want to... in fact, I prefer to not even mention it. It's not his problem I have to do these interviews.

How did you get into film acting?

It was kind of almost like a dare — [superagent] Sam Cohn thought I should really be an actress. Because of that I got a tremendous leg up — the reason I got an opportunity to audition is because Sam got interested in me and I thought well, why not, what the hell. So I went, and I got the first part I auditioned for [as the wife of a condemned man in the Emmy-winning TV movie The Murder of Mary Phagan in 1988].

How did it feel?

I had the confidence of innocence — confidence that only truly innocent people can have. I liked it.

You say you've learned what to do and what not to do from working with other directors. Examples?

[A European director I worked with] was of the school of using cruelty on actors a lot — humiliating actors in front of other people in order to get some kind of performances. What I found is that it shut me down, made me distance myself. In my experience, it's not a good way of working. I want to create a sense of trust and respect — maintain authority, but intelligent and benign authority, not tyrannical and dangerous. The best directors, a lot of what they do is a kind of passive reassurance — the actors feel totally safe to be natural, to be naked.

And who did that well?

Peter Brook. [Shortly after Mary Phagan, Miller won the role of Anya in Brook's much-discussed production of Chekhov's Cherry Orchard at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.] He has a quality — some magical process of his own. You get the feeling when you're on stage that he really loves you, that he's really focused on your work. Off stage, there's no sense of anything, but the minute you're back on stage, you're bathed in light. It's a very special thing — I've never felt it in quite that same way.

He doesn't trick actors. Great directors have made careers out of tricking actors, but I tend to not like to do that, having been an actor.

Have you been tricked, too?

Yes... I think so. Well, they've tried to [trick me].

I wouldn't think you'd be too trickable.

Well, that's the other thing — that's what makes my character less appropriate for a life of acting. I don't like that so much — I like to be part of the process, an active element. Which is why I'm doing more writing and directing than acting. I don't know when I'll do that again.

Have you continued painting?

I'd like to really start doing that again — it was really my whole life. But you can't do it halfway.

Are you putting on screen what you put in your paintings?

I try to tell the story as much in images [as words] that give the audience emotional information that they wouldn't get otherwise.

What image is important in Angela?

Angela painting Ellie in mud. She turns her into an object, her object. It's about how Ellie is martyred by this situation in a way, and also it prefigures the end of the film, [and shows] the way they're torturing themselves, the kind of masochistic element [in their fantasies]. It's crucial to the audience to see that these children are cold and are standing here naked.

That scene must have been tough to direct. Were the girls' parents concerned?

Luckily they were artists — they tend to be less prudish.

Somebody said something about [photographer] Sally Mann in connection to those images...

Yes. I'll be arrested. No, of course Sally Mann was in a different situation, but she too was looking at the natural sexuality and private lives of each of her children. It's a very sensitive subject right now — one understands why — but at the same time I think there's a Puritanism in this country that's not pretty.

Has your father seen Angela?

Yes.

What'd he think?

Oh, he liked it.

Do you see any links with him in your language or anything else in the way you write?

Not in the language. I think that we both have an appreciation of human discourse and how it sounds — you know, a good ear.

You strike me as a very centered, serene sort of person. What makes you go nuts?

In a funny way I think the more pressure I'm under, like on a movie set, the more serene I am. I become less serene when I'm around friends — I get playful, I have a love of illogical living and playing...

Who are your favorite directors?

I like Hal Ashby's movies — his lightness of touch. Being There is one of the great movies of all time. And I love Truffaut, Woody Allen, Fellini, Gus Van Sant, Kusturica, Zhang Yimou.

I think I like a very earthy movie, but... My feet are very much on the ground, but my head is in the clouds.

Miller is working on two scripts at the moment, one she can't talk about just yet and another, called Rose and the Snake, that's in final rewrites. Ed Harris is attached to Rose, which Miller describes as another family story, but one with more comedic elements than Angela.

It's about a father-daughter relationship.