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Moving Pictures
Storytelling times three in Rebecca Miller's restless trilogy.
-Cindy Fuchs

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-Sam Adams

Repertory Film

December 5-11, 2002

movies

Miller's Crossing

Rebecca Miller on film, writing and doing both at once.

by Sam Adams

Like the characters in Personal Velocity, the film she adapted from her own short-story collection, Rebecca Miller just can’t stay still. With an art-royalty bloodline (her parents are Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath) and dreamboat husband (that would be Daniel Day-Lewis), she might be excused for the temptation to enjoy the good life. Instead, she’s struck out on her own in a number of fields -- first painting, then filmmaking (1996’s Angela, which got her on City Paper’s cover), and, most lately, writing. In “Paula,” the story which closes both book and film, she puts these words in the title character’s mouth: “I sort of write, I used to paint. I think I’m going to be one of those people with a lot of potential who never really takes off.”

In fact, while the film's three main characters are most obviously linked by the fact that they're all women on the brink of a major change in their lives, you could just as easily argue that what binds them all is ambition: the desire to make their lives something other than what they are. That's most obviously true of Greta (Parker Posey), the up-and-coming book editor who's run from her famous father's success and now finds herself on the verge of duplicating it, to the ruin of her soul. "I sometimes distrust the part of me that knows how to get along in the world," says Miller, allowing that that part often holds sway.

To that end, Personal Velocity is both humble and adventurous: humble in budget, but hardly in style. Shooting on digital was a condition of financing by DV-devoted InDigEnt, but Miller embraced her first foray into the medium. "I wrote it knowing it was going to be a digital film, and we tried to go with all the strengths of DV," she explains. "Digital should only be used when it's appropriate. This is intimate portraits of three people -- there are almost no wide shots in the movie. We're in there, inside these women's worlds."

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Though its subject matter is indie-film bread and butter, Personal Velocity avoids trendy shaky-cam hijinks; the camera is mobile, but not without reason, a byproduct of both the tight production schedule and Miller's plan for the film. "Somebody once told me that Orson Welles said the best thing that could happen to a director was not to have enough time or enough money," she says, "so in that case we were doubly blessed. I thought, if you're going to do something for such a low budget, and for so little time, it really makes you free." (Along with the skimpy budget, Miller got final cut.) "Why not really make the leap, and see how far I can go, and see if people will follow it?"

Not only was Miller in the unusual position of adapting her own work, but the even odder position of working on both film and book simultaneously: The film deal was signed while she was still finishing the stories, and the book was published in between the film's shooting and its premiere at Sundance (where it took the Grand Jury Prize and an award for Ellen Kuras' cinematography). In fact, "Paula" was written with both story and film in mind. "I almost wanted [the story] to be like haiku," Miller says. "Really economical, simple language, where you're kept very much in the present. One reason, I thought it would be good for me to try and do that, because I have a tendency to want to include the past. But also, I knew that in the film, I couldn't afford to shoot so many scenes of the past, and I thought it would be interesting for the sake of tension to keep in the present." Just don't think that in Greta's troubled relationship with her dad you've found an echo of Miller's relationship with her famously cantankerous papa. "When you write, you're in disguise, otherwise you would write self-help books or something," she says. "The place to look for a writer is not where you think."