When I ask July what it was like to go back and revisit the film that marked such a dividing line in her life, she admits she never has. “I don’t really go back and watch the movies again, ever, after they premiere,” she says, laughing. “I think for this [the Criterion release], I looked at some pieces on YouTube, maybe?” In retrospect, she says, “I guess I’m kind of amazed now that I got away with it.”
Among the things she got away with: scenes in which a six-year-old boy engages in online sex talk with a middle-aged woman, and others in which a pair of teenage girls carry on a sexually tinged flirtation with their adult neighbor. “Occasionally I’ll see someone accusing me of pedophilia or something, and I’ll be like, ‘Right, right,’” she says. “Because if you’re only hearing about the idea of children and sexuality next to each other in terms of like, something has gone terribly wrong, then of course you would become uncomfortable, and some people were. But the other thing is, I was so young. I had been a child longer than I had been an adult. I was really writing about what I knew best at that point: being a girl, being a little kid. I knew about my own character’s job, but the other jobs were more like loose sketches of what I thought adults might do.”
For years after the film’s release, thanks at least in part to the power of the character she played in it, July became indelibly linked in the minds of fans with the film’s Christine: talented and creative, loopy and unmoored, emotionally fragile. Twee. That happens less now. “I guess it’s sort of a good thing, or I can feel like I’ve done my job well, because it used to be that people would come up to me and ask, ‘Can I give you a hug?’” she says. “I guess there was something about that character that made them feel like doing that, which is so not me. I mean, anyone who knows me is like, Nope! She definitely doesn’t want to give you a hug.”
Desire for hugs or no, much of July’s work involves the search for human connection—how much we need it and how little we ever get of it—so the confusion is perhaps understandable. It’s something that infuses much of the work on display within her chronological monograph. July compares looking through the notes and journal entries and assorted artifacts of projects past to cleaning out a closet, although not in the sort of joy-sparking way that someone like professional tidier Marie Kondo might recommend. The task, she says, was excruciating. “I think it’s part of my process to not be self-conscious, not think about how I’ve made things, or what the journey has been. I think probably for a lot of artists or writers, you’d sort of do anything not to have to needle yourself in that way.”
July’s eyes are closed. She’s in front of the photographer, all in red now, doing cool things with her hands. Prince is playing (“1999”), then Dua Lipa (“Don’t Start Now”). During breaks, she comes out to the monitor to take a peek and see how things are coming along. She’s been on both sides of the camera often enough that one gets the sense she could do any number of jobs on this particular set, if called to.
But she has learned to let others take their turns and have their say. Indeed, early on in planning the new monograph, the idea was for July to write about herself, seeing as how she has been a writer for years and knows the projects in the book better than anyone. In the end, however, she decided to let others do most of the talking; each project covered in the monograph is accompanied by the recollections of friends and collaborators. The stories they tell about July are compelling. Like that time she got caught stealing Neosporin from a grocery store and was so scared she peed on the floor (as told by Lindsay Beamish, now an assistant professor in performing arts at Emerson College), or the accounts of what she did to get by as a young artist in Portland. “There were some more revealing things that I kind of gulped and was like, Well, maybe it’s okay if the world knows that,” she says.
In the meantime, July is excited for people to see Kajillionaire, which she insists is not about her own parents, although she sees the similarities: how every family thinks their way of doing things is the right and only way, and general anxieties about money growing up. “I wrote a whole draft of that movie before it ever occurred to me that it had any relationship to me or my family,” she says. She also concedes that some of the film’s themes about parents and parenting come from her own fears about being a mom, and possibly messing that up herself. In many ways, she says, her films are practice runs, albeit often extreme ones, for everyday life.
“That’s partly what art is for sometimes,” she says. “People are still mad at me for the cat dying at the end of my movie.” The film she’s referring to is The Future, a 2011 feature in which July plays Paw Paw, an injured, talking cat, sort of, as well as the 30-something woman who hopes to adopt him. In the end, Paw Paw dies, but July just told you that herself. “And I always think, Yeah, that was horrible, but my child is still alive, you know?” she says. “I think I’m the kind of person who’d rather fully embody the darkness in my art so I don’t do it in my life.”
