Mike Mills famous quotes

03-30-2025

Grief and memory go together. After someone dies, that's what you're left with. And the memories are so slippery yet so rich.
-- Mike Mills

#Memories #Grief #Together
Actors are pretending for you, but they're not lying. They are not putting on a guise instead of themselves. They are finding things inside that they have experienced.
-- Mike Mills

#Lying #Actors #Pretending
I'm into people's emotional lives and relationships and the complications of living. That's my turf.
-- Mike Mills

#Emotional #People #Complication
I'm not a craftsman of graphics or art or film. I'm more of an idea generator and manufacturer.
-- Mike Mills

#Art #Ideas #Film
L.A. is so isolated and unhip in a way; it gives you room to figure out who you are and explore more personal stuff.
-- Mike Mills

#Giving #Stuff #Way
My graffiti really comes more from a May '68, sort of Situationist vibe than the hip-hop world. I think a real graffiti artist would find me a poser.
-- Mike Mills

#Real #Thinking #Artist
Over and over again, I'm trying to express or communicate these big and small struggles to the world, and really to myself.
-- Mike Mills

#Struggle #Trying #World
The littlest thing can have the strongest connection when you're grieving. Your Proustian, poetic nerve is turned up to ten.
-- Mike Mills

#Grieving #Nerves #Connections
There is a drunkenness to grief, which is good.
-- Mike Mills

#Grief #Drunkenness
To me it's like, every time I'm a director, like today, you're the captain of the ship, so you better dress like it. You're the host of the party.
-- Mike Mills

#Party #Dresses #Today
As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.
-- Mike Mills

#Real #Son #Men
I pretty much believe that a film is a film and when an audience watches a film, they finish it.
-- Mike Mills

#Believe #Watches #Film
I guess I watch movies to make myself happier a lot.
-- Mike Mills

#Watches #Watch Movie
I don't really believe that documentary is objective reality and fiction is all illusion.
-- Mike Mills

#Believe #Reality #Documentaries
The oldest sibling always knows things that the younger ones don't.
-- Mike Mills

#Sibling
There's great sadness and life doesn't work out like you would want, on a lot of levels, but there's no need to feel all alone. This happens to everybody, so there's no self-pity. This is the ride that humans are on, and all of it is essential for our natural part of it.
-- Mike Mills

#Sadness #Self #Work Out
I would hate to think I'm promoting sadness as an aesthetic. But I grew up in not just a family but a town and a culture where sadness is something you're taught to feel shame about. You end up chronically desiring what can be a very sentimental idea of love and connection. A lot of my work has been about trying to make a space for sadness.
-- Mike Mills

#Hate #Sadness #Thinking
Sadness is a super important thing not to be ashamed about but to include in our lives. One of the bigger problems with sadness or depression is there's so much shame around it. If you have it you're a failure. You are felt as being very unattractive.
-- Mike Mills

#Sadness #Important #Unattractive
To me, sadness and humor aren't disrelated and humor is the best tool I've had against the sadness in my life.
-- Mike Mills

#Sadness #Tools
No one leaves the edit room thinking, 'Yeah, I nailed that one!' Everyone I know goes into their first premiere or their first screening thinking, 'I screwed up so bad. I'm sorry, I messed up.' It's just a real common feeling.
-- Mike Mills

#Sorry #Real #Thinking
Film is endlessly just beyond your reach. I think that's what I love so much about it.
-- Mike Mills

#Thinking #Film
Humans are vulnerable, messy little animals and that's normal. And all I want to do is make a space for that in my films.
-- Mike Mills

#Animal #Space #Want
I am intrigued by inanimate objects. They're a piece of history, someone's statement and ideas of life.
-- Mike Mills

#Ideas #Inanimate Objects #Pieces
I definitely believe in the energy of the set and the energy of the actor, way more than your written word.
-- Mike Mills

#Believe #Actors #Way
As someone who grew up in a house where there wasn't a lot of talking, I'm used to just looking at the world. And in general I often feel like I just don't understand what's happening. That everybody else does, but I don't quite get it.
-- Mike Mills

#Talking #House #Doe

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