Ed note: The following is an (almost) unedited transcript of Annie Wagner’s interview with director Mike Mills and actor Lou Pucci, for their movie Thumbsucker, which Mike Mills adapted from Walter Kirn’s 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 Kirn’s novel?

Mike Mills: My friend Bob Houston showed it to me and when I first read it I just didn’t feel like it was someone bullshitting to me. I didn’t 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 don’t usually talk about—like thumb-sucking, but more than that—like 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 don’t know. (Laughs.) I mean the movie, like the book, it has both good parts and funny parts. Like you’re funny… -looking.

LP: Yeah. (Doesn’t laugh.)

MM: In the movie.

LP: That’s 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 wasn’t making fun of the people. It’s just that awful world that’s 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 he’s definitely the funniest—or put it this way, he believes in what he’s 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 thing—

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 it’s not like I’m 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 oh— [Gestures toward the tape recorder.]

Ours is not a family publication.

MM: Good, ’cause I cuss all the fucking time. But the Mormon stuff—it was hard to get into and out of it in twenty pages. It wasn’t working, and it wasn’t saying enough about the character, or at least the way that I was doing it. One thing I love about books is digression—going off the subject and rambling. That’s where you find the best stuff. It’s 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 couldn’t 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: “I don’t know.” For some reason that sentence just jumped out at me from the script. So in the audition I told Mike that—

MM: I asked him… We had an audition and he did really well, and I was like, “How do you do that? How do you act?” I ask almost every actor that. “How do you work? How does this magic happen?” Because I’m not at all an actor—I’m sort of a reformed super-shy person. And he said that thing and I kind of looked at him and was like, “What sentence?” And he’s like, “I don’t know.” You told me that for Personal Velocity, your sentence was “I hurt.”

LP: Yeah.

MM: I think that was another moment where I definitely cast you in my head. I was like. wow, that’s really smart and I totally get it. And as a director you’re hiring people to delve into the black arts, you don’t know exactly what they do. They’re 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 didn’t know whether I wanted to or not, you know, because I never did a movie off a book. I didn’t 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 don’t 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 book—the Mormonism, and all the other stuff—then 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 didn’t 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 didn’t have money to deal with snow. And then there’s the accent, and just to be honest, as a Californian, as a West coaster, I didn’t 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. I’ve shot in and around L.A. so much, I didn’t 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: It’s basically Beaverton, Tualatin, Aloha.

There are a lot of coming-of-age films that deal with suburbia, but it feels like you’re not trying to say things about the suburban milieu. It’s more character driven.

MM: Thank you. You’re coming home with me now. [Laughs.] It’s 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 doesn’t exist, you know what I mean? It is set there, but I didn’t 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. They’re a predominant way that people—and not just in America—are living right now. It’s like a silent part of the movie. But it’s 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, ‘Oh, we’ll get married and then I’ll feel better. Oh, we’ll get married and have a kid, and then I’ll feel better, and I’ll have a house and a neighborhood and I’ll fill a hole.” And we catch up to them in their early forties and the hole isn’t filled. That can happen in suburbia, that can happen in Bohemia, it can happen in the East Village. It happens everywhere. I really don’t want to pick on suburbia.

How about you, Lou, what are your experiences with suburbia?

LP: Uh, I’m trying to draw a good picture. [He’s drawing a portrait of Mills on a Hotel Monaco pad.]

MM: That’s pretty good.

We could put that on the internet. [And we have; see right.]

LP: I live in a pretty suburban town. But it’s not one of those towns that’s wealthy, so it’s not like everything is exactly the same. It’s kind of like an older town from the 1960s or so.

MM: Would you call where we shot wealthy?

LP: I don’t know. It’s a bigger house that what I used to live in, but also it’s not Jersey, it’s Oregon, and Oregon is probably cheaper, because it’s not right next to New York.

MM: He’s from there, he can’t even say.

LP: I liked it. It’s 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 boys’ high school.

I went to an all girls’ high school.

LP: Really? (Laughs.) I feel for you.

I feel for you. The all boys’ 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, ’cause the girls liked us more than the guys that were there.

Your high school experience was super-different from Justin’s.

LP: Yeah, way different. But I learned a shit load. By my junior and senior year especially. I don’t 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, it’s Justin’s teachers who initially seize on Ritalin as a solution to his problems. And it’s not forced on him—his 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 it’s 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 Lou’s depiction of you?

MM: The drawing? It’s pretty awesome.

LP: It’s a really good one for me. I don’t really draw so much.

MM: It’s funny that there are so many films that deal with Ritalin now. I started Thumbsucker six years ago, and I don’t feel like any film has done justice to it. But it’s like when cell phones started making appearances in movies. It was ridiculous, but it’s very cultural specific, like, wow, there we are. We’re at that point… Here comes my brain, my coffee…you can buy it anywhere!

I already had mine.

MM: I regret getting Starbucks. It was a nice little company in the beginning. It’s 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 us—basically, that the terrorists had attacked Starbucks. They could taste what America was like. It was like the weirdest Starbucks ad I’ve 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 there’s 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 Harold’s inner voice… so I wanted that. And I’ve 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 of—I don’t know where he was and… I couldn’t 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 wasn’t 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 Stevens’s “Trouble” and then he had a cover of “Thirteen” 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 “Isolation” by John Lennon and then he died. So, that was over. And then a month later—and it got really dark, the whole editing thing, it got really lost. I didn’t know if I’d 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, who’s sort of the ringleader of Polyphonic Spree and he was into it. It really was a score—he had the picture and he made music to that picture. And I think the two work really well together...

Lou’s first concert in his whole life was to see the Spree.

LP: It wasn’t exactly my first concert. I’d been to Janet Jackson.

MM: You lied then!

LP: I didn’t lie. I think you made that one up. You said it in front of [a publicist] and I was like…

MM: But I thought you said that.

LP: First good concert.

MM: That’s hysterical. That’s how myths begin.

LP: Eh. I didn’t like Janet anyway…