Miranda July Talks "Kajillionaire", Childhood Trauma and How to "Re-Parent" Yourself
Nine years after the release of her cat-narrated flick The Future, writer-director Miranda July has returned with her brilliantly quirky new feature film Kajillionaire.
The American crime dramedy follows the dysfunctional Dynes family, which consists of parents Robert (Richard Jenkins), Theresa (Debra Winger) and their adult daughter Old Dolio, portrayed by an astonishing Evan Rachel Wood.
The Dynes are con artists, spending their days undertaking convoluted scams to scrape enough money together to pay their rent. (In peak July fashion, they live in an office space with walls that frequently leak pink soap.)
On a surface level, it may seem like July’s own personal version of Ocean's Eleven. It is a heist flick, after all. However, if you delve a little deeper, you’ll find Kajillionaire is really a story about human connection, self-realisation and becoming an adult.
Although, as July tells Student Edge over the phone, she didn’t quite realise she was writing about such "painful family stuff" until she’d finished the first draft of the script.
"Every day I’d sit and work on my funny heist movie thing and feel a bit bewildered about why I was doing that," she says.
"Then I got to the end of my first draft and read it back, and I had this really heavy heartbroken kind of feeling.
"I was like, oh no, I’ve somehow written about all of this really painful family stuff that I never would have willingly gone towards."
Of course, this isn’t the first time July has explored the complexity of human relationships. Her debut film Me and You and Everyone We Know also dealt with loneliness and isolation. July also starred as Christine in the flick, which was recently released as part of the Criterion Collection.
While July doesn’t appear on-screen in Kajillionaire, she found the perfect cast to bring the film’s weighty themes to life. The director points out how Wood poured her heart and soul into the awkward and tender Old Dolio.
"[Wood] really sort of took my breath away with the slow transformation she was doing over the whole movie," she says.
"We worked really closely prepping her and deciding all of these physical things, but in the end it’s her in front of the camera and she does something so remarkable."
July explains how she’d always wanted Jane the Virgin star Gina Rodriguez to play Melanie, a vivacious sales clerk who quickly becomes attached to Old Dolio.
"[Rodriguez] was the only one who I kind of had my heart set on when I was writing," she says.
"I still remember the day when she finally read the script and wrote me back and said, 'This script is baller', which is like the highest compliment I’ve ever got.
"I forwarded it to about 40 different people. I thought, these other roles are crucial, but she’s going to set the movie on fire when she enters."
July highlights that Melanie represents the various empowering women in her own life that helped her "re-parent" herself as an adult.
"Melanie stands for a lot of different women friends that I had once I left home, who in all different ways kind of re-parented me," she says.
"I think no matter what kind of childhood you had, you’re now through it, and it’s really a miraculous thing that you will find the people who can give you those things that you were missing.
"You can’t go back and have the perfect childhood, but you can sort of re-parent yourself as an adult."
Even though not everyone comes from a family of con artists like Old Dolio, July believes that the majority of viewers will still be able to relate to Wood’s character.
"I guess I was sort of placing my bets on that more people are going to relate to this weird family than not," she says.
"They may seem really far out there, but you don’t have to have grown up in a family of con artists to have felt gaslit or tricked."
Kajillionaire lands in Australian cinemas on 22 October 2020. Rating CTC.
Header Image: Universal Pictures
