Ed note: The following is an (almost) unedited transcript of Annie Wagnerâs interview with director Mike Mills and actor Lou Pucci, for their movie Thumbsucker, which Mike Mills adapted from Walter Kirnâs novel. Lou Pucci plays Justin Cobb, a high school senior who still sucks his thumb.
I understand this is your first adaptation, as well as your directorial debut. How did you get interested in Walter Kirnâs novel?
Mike Mills: My friend Bob Houston showed it to me and when I first read it I just didnât feel like it was someone bullshitting to me. I didnât feel like there was someone making up things for the sake of making them up. That really got me, and it was about family stuff, which I really liked. And it was showing something that was kind of hard to talk about, or you donât usually talk aboutâlike thumb-sucking, but more than thatâlike the kooky things that family members do to each other. And it did it all with a humor that made it like, not self-pitying and heavy and sappy-sad.
Lou Pucci (to Mills): Was the movie funny?
MM (to Pucci): Our movie?
LP: Yeah.
MM: Um, I donât know. (Laughs.) I mean the movie, like the book, it has both good parts and funny parts. Like youâre funny⌠-looking.
LP: Yeah. (Doesnât laugh.)
MM: In the movie.
LP: Thatâs true.
MM: You have a great sense of humor. Did you hear our negative review in the LA Times?
LP: No, I really want to know what it said!
MM: One of the comments was that your hair is always in your eyes, and how annoying that was.
LP: Sounds pretty funny.
MM: Anyway, the real thing about the book was it had enough overlap with my family in my life that it quickly became a totally personal story and felt like my family and my story. It also gave me a roadmap to talk about things that had happened to me. And the humor made safe and easy to get into. And the key thing to me is that it wasnât making fun of the people. Itâs just that awful world thatâs pretty funny.
Possibly, the orthodontist [played by Keanu Reeves] is being made fun of a little.
MM: I hope not, I hope that no one is. But heâs definitely the funniestâor put it this way, he believes in what heâs saying the most, which makes him the funniest.
It always does. So, in terms of choosing the things that you kept with the novel and excising others, I guess the Mormonism is a big thingâ
MM: Yeah. There are also parts that are equally big that got cut. And I had the Mormonism there forever, in my drafts. And this is my first time writing an adaptation, and itâs not like Iâm some great writer or anything. So I was trying this and trying that, and the main thing I realized is that a movie is actually way shorter than a novel. You have to cut a ton of shit out, and ohâ [Gestures toward the tape recorder.]
Ours is not a family publication.
MM: Good, âcause I cuss all the fucking time. But the Mormon stuffâit was hard to get into and out of it in twenty pages. It wasnât working, and it wasnât saying enough about the character, or at least the way that I was doing it. One thing I love about books is digressionâgoing off the subject and rambling. Thatâs where you find the best stuff. Itâs really hard to do that in a screenplay. It really wants you to go forward and be the same thing.
That leads to a question for you, Lou, because your character has major transformations from one act to the next. How were you able to get a fix on who he was even as his obsessions were changing so drastically?
LP: Right in the beginning, way before I did this movie, I had this idea of having one sentence that I had in my mind all the time, just in case shit happens, and I completely forgot who I was, or I couldnât do it or I was really not what Mike wanted. And it would just like keep me on track, to know who Justin was no matter what or where he was in the movie. And his sentence was just: âI donât know.â For some reason that sentence just jumped out at me from the script. So in the audition I told Mike thatâ
MM: I asked him⌠We had an audition and he did really well, and I was like, âHow do you do that? How do you act?â I ask almost every actor that. âHow do you work? How does this magic happen?â Because Iâm not at all an actorâIâm sort of a reformed super-shy person. And he said that thing and I kind of looked at him and was like, âWhat sentence?â And heâs like, âI donât know.â You told me that for Personal Velocity, your sentence was âI hurt.â
LP: Yeah.
MM: I think that was another moment where I definitely cast you in my head. I was like. wow, thatâs really smart and I totally get it. And as a director youâre hiring people to delve into the black arts, you donât know exactly what they do. Theyâre just these, like, weird phantom magician people, and I was like, I can relate to that, that made sense to me, and it seemed really smart, and that he got that out of just a couple of readings of the script, I was impressed.
[To Pucci:] Had you read Thumbsucker before you auditioned?
LP: No, I read it after. We made that choice, because I didnât know whether I wanted to or not, you know, because I never did a movie off a book. I didnât know if I should get the most information out of it or just read the script. I just ended up thinking the script is better because I donât want to confuse the characters just in case there were any big differences about them. Because I always think that the character is what has happened to him. So if other things had happened to him that I was remembering from the bookâthe Mormonism, and all the other stuffâthen I would have to forget that and it would just be more work to have to forget the things that I read.
One other thing that shifted from the book to the movie is the setting. Did you decide to shoot in Oregon and then decide to set it there, or was that choice part of the original adaptation?
MM: It was pretty early on, I mean, the book is set in Minnesota, and I made it a single school year. And I wanted it to be set where it was filmed. I didnât want to be pretending that it was somewhere else. So, with Minnesota I would have had to deal with snow, a lot of snow, and I didnât have money to deal with snow. And then thereâs the accent, and just to be honest, as a Californian, as a West coaster, I didnât feel like I knew about Minnesota. The Pacific Northwest people will get upset at me about this, but I feel like I knew more about the West coast. My parents were from Seattle, and I feel like this landscape is more recognizable for me and I feel more at home. So as a director I felt like I had more connection to Oregonians⌠It had a lot of the same things I needed in the story: a kind of mountainous setting, woods right near by a suburban area. Iâve shot in and around L.A. so much, I didnât want it to be one of those films shot in or around L.A. but trying to be somewhere else. I flew to Portland, got off the plane and it felt right. Then I looked around and found the neighborhood.
And what was the neighborhood?
MM: Itâs basically Beaverton, Tualatin, Aloha.
There are a lot of coming-of-age films that deal with suburbia, but it feels like youâre not trying to say things about the suburban milieu. Itâs more character driven.
MM: Thank you. Youâre coming home with me now. [Laughs.] Itâs definitely not saying that suburbia is a trap, or suburbia is a place where people make dumb decisions, or suburbia is a place where lesser people live, or suburbia is some myth that doesnât exist, you know what I mean? It is set there, but I didnât try to make it an arch-comment on that place. And I do think that the suburbs are hugely part of our lives, whether we live in them or not. Theyâre a predominant way that peopleâand not just in Americaâare living right now. Itâs like a silent part of the movie. But itâs true that you see the Cobb family coming in at the end of a lot of dreams. Especially the parents, they had the dream of, âOh, weâll get married and then Iâll feel better. Oh, weâll get married and have a kid, and then Iâll feel better, and Iâll have a house and a neighborhood and Iâll fill a hole.â And we catch up to them in their early forties and the hole isnât filled. That can happen in suburbia, that can happen in Bohemia, it can happen in the East Village. It happens everywhere. I really donât want to pick on suburbia.
How about you, Lou, what are your experiences with suburbia?
LP: Uh, Iâm trying to draw a good picture. [Heâs drawing a portrait of Mills on a Hotel Monaco pad.]
MM: Thatâs pretty good.
We could put that on the internet. [And we have; see right.]
LP: I live in a pretty suburban town. But itâs not one of those towns thatâs wealthy, so itâs not like everything is exactly the same. Itâs kind of like an older town from the 1960s or so.
MM: Would you call where we shot wealthy?
LP: I donât know. Itâs a bigger house that what I used to live in, but also itâs not Jersey, itâs Oregon, and Oregon is probably cheaper, because itâs not right next to New York.
MM: Heâs from there, he canât even say.
LP: I liked it. Itâs a community. It always felt that I was in a community, but it was always the weirder part of it because I was always going to the private school. The one private school in the one-square-mile town. I kept going to private school forever. I was at an all boysâ high school.
I went to an all girlsâ high school.
LP: Really? (Laughs.) I feel for you.
I feel for you. The all boysâ school around here was not fun. Did you like it though?
LP: Yeah, I had a pretty awesome time once I got past the fact that there were no boobies in the whole place.
Can be rough, I know. Did you guys have a sister school?
LP: No, not really. We had one school that we took all the girls from, âcause the girls liked us more than the guys that were there.
Your high school experience was super-different from Justinâs.
LP: Yeah, way different. But I learned a shit load. By my junior and senior year especially. I donât know if it was the school or just me, because for some reason I had these really great teachers that were awesome and wanted to teach for their own reasons.
In the movie, itâs Justinâs teachers who initially seize on Ritalin as a solution to his problems. And itâs not forced on himâhis parents are skeptical, but Justin insists.
MM: That was in the book, and I love that. It sort of made it a little more complicated and different. I even like that the mom was a nurse, and itâs her turf. But when it comes to her turf and her family, she loses her power. That scene where she gives him that pill is one of my favorite scenes in the whole movie.
Do you want to comment on Louâs depiction of you?
MM: The drawing? Itâs pretty awesome.
LP: Itâs a really good one for me. I donât really draw so much.
MM: Itâs funny that there are so many films that deal with Ritalin now. I started Thumbsucker six years ago, and I donât feel like any film has done justice to it. But itâs like when cell phones started making appearances in movies. It was ridiculous, but itâs very cultural specific, like, wow, there we are. Weâre at that point⌠Here comes my brain, my coffeeâŚyou can buy it anywhere!
I already had mine.
MM: I regret getting Starbucks. It was a nice little company in the beginning. Itâs funny, I saw one of the very first special reports about Afghanistan. It was when the very first Special Forces guys were there, very undercover, no military at all. They finally got a little base and the thing that made their day was the CIA got Starbucks coffee. And they were talking about it on the show as like what made it all worthwhile and gave them pride and realigned their commitment to what they were fighting for, against those fuckers that attacked usâbasically, that the terrorists had attacked Starbucks. They could taste what America was like. It was like the weirdest Starbucks ad Iâve ever seen.
Your background is in music videos. How did you think about the music for this film?
MM: Harold and Maude was a huge influence, and also The Graduate. I like that thereâs just one musician for the whole thing. And especially with Harold and Maude, the way it was hopeful, and sort of the light at the end of the tunnel. And the way that Cat Stevens was Haroldâs inner voice⌠so I wanted that. And Iâve worked with Elliot Smith before, actually. He was one of my art heroes, and he read the script and liked it and then he went into a long road ofâI donât know where he was and⌠I couldnât get my film financed in forever, and when I finally did shoot, he was coming out of his thing. And we reunited and he liked it still and he was going to do the whole thing. One of the best points of the whole experience was like watching the movie with Elliot and him liking it. That gave me a lot of confidence later on when the film wasnât being liked by different people. And I was like, fuck, Elliot Smith liked it, so back off. Or at least, he liked it enough to want to work on it.
We were going to do all covers with him and we started with Cat Stevensâs âTroubleâ and then he had a cover of âThirteenâ and on the way home he said, you know, I have a song from From a Basement on a Hill that he was working on at the time. And he was working on a cover of âIsolationâ by John Lennon and then he died. So, that was over. And then a month laterâand it got really dark, the whole editing thing, it got really lost. I didnât know if Iâd done it right. A lot of difficult things were happening in my life. And I went to see Polyphonic Spree, just to have a good time. A thirty-five member, robed choir, and their music is really aggressively positive. I can choose depression pretty quickly, and it really made that not an option. It made negativity seem like a real dead end. And I thought, wow, this is exactly what I wanted this to sound like, a real open-heartedness. We contacted Tim DeLaughter, whoâs sort of the ringleader of Polyphonic Spree and he was into it. It really was a scoreâhe had the picture and he made music to that picture. And I think the two work really well together...
Louâs first concert in his whole life was to see the Spree.
LP: It wasnât exactly my first concert. Iâd been to Janet Jackson.
MM: You lied then!
LP: I didnât lie. I think you made that one up. You said it in front of [a publicist] and I was likeâŚ
MM: But I thought you said that.
LP: First good concert.
MM: Thatâs hysterical. Thatâs how myths begin.
LP: Eh. I didnât like Janet anywayâŚ