If you had any doubt that Talking Heads were foundational in the artistry of Mike Mills, look no further than his 2016 feature 20th Century Women. From the ‘Don’t Worry About the Government’ needle drop in the film’s opening to the Talking Heads: 77 shirt that leading character Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), who was based on Mills, wears and is subsequently beaten up for (a shirt Mills actually owns), the director’s appreciation of the band is all over his work. Look a little beneath the surface, and it’s clearly been present since the very beginning. “Talking Heads just hit me at such a pivotal point of my figuring out my life and my creative life,” Mills tells me, and so it feels like destiny that he would eventually be given the task of assembling the first ever music video for one of the band’s most iconic songs, ‘Psycho Killer’.

Releasing for the band’s 50th anniversary, the video stars Saoirse Ronan as a woman going through a cavalcade of varying emotions over the course of two weeks, observed one day at a time. Mills explains that he jumped at the opportunity to lean into the angrier sides of his emotions when putting the video together, while retaining the spirit of fun and creativity that has been present across his whole career. His unique sensibility made him the perfect match for the band’s vision, as he recalls, “I think the other treatments [for the video] really tried to satisfy like, ‘This is the psycho killer, they are a killer and they are violent,’ and the band was like, ‘Please get us away from anything like that.’”

I sat down with Mills to hear more of his reflections on what Talking Heads mean to him, along with the key cinematic touchstones that helped inform his approach to the ‘Psycho Killer’ music video, from landmark 1920s silent pictures to Swedish absurdism to Chantal Akerman and more.

You had four specific titles on the list you gave us of influences, and then the fifth one was just “Chantal Akerman in general”, so let’s start with her.
Mike Mills: This is a little background—not to be problematic, but when I thought of the video, I wasn’t thinking of any other films, to be dead honest. So we’re talking general influences on me, that after having done it, I can look at and go, “Oh, yeah, there’s this and that which I love,” that always come through. So Chantal Akerman, what’s that one called—Letters from Home?

News from Home.
Yeah, just that dry, presentational quality and the nonnarrative patterning kind of filming. It’s more like a basket than a narrative, right? It’s like I’m putting this basket into this basket. If you read that essay about the basket form of narrative, it’s kind of like that to me. What’s that other one? Jeanne Beilman? I’m blanking on my nouns here.

In general, Chantal Akerman kind of relates to Talking Heads to me in that they’re both playing with narrative. They’re both subverting narrative conventions. So they both feel like kinship to me, in of all my influences and the things that I love, and coming from an art school. That’s another reason why I feel like Talking Heads are my godparents, because they came to rock through art school.

To your point on Chantal being kin, she also started off with these really great short films, so there’s something there in that short-form storytelling structure.
I’m revealing how fuzzy my memory’s gotten—what’s her first feature called? Where she’s just in a room?

Je, Tu, Il, Elle.
Great! We’re like a hip-hop team, you’ll come through with a noun at the end. Yeah, I think what I did is a lot like that, right? It’s so self-presentational, which again is very Talking Heads to me. It’s so self-presentational that it gets kind of weird and lyrical and odd. So I think I’m in the shadow of Chantal in that way.

One of the many things that I love about her work is it feels like she captures this innate understanding of depression. There’s this sequence in Je, Tu, Il, Elle where she’s eating spoonfuls of sugar out of a brown paper bag, and she drops some sugar on the ground, and then she just scoops it up and puts it back in the bag. That image has always stuck with me so much.
Right. To me that also feels very European or French or whatever. There’s this bigger, more robust and fluid acceptance of the shadow-self, of the shadows of ourselves. It’s not just like being sad or depressive. It’s just inclusive of that. That’s been hugely helpful to me as a Californian American person who has been fucked by happiness their whole life. Sorry, I feel like we’re doing literary criticism, but in a weird way Talking Heads gave space for my fourteen- and fifteen-year-old self to feel disillusionment and anger and hostility and a fracturedness. Especially if you go from ’77 to Fear of Music, and you’re from California, it’s like, “What the fuck is this mental emotional space that’s more odd and edgy and angular?” I found it much more oxygenated. I found it really helpful, much more than the other punk music I was listening to, which I also love. But Talking Heads felt more mentally healthy for me.

That tracks, as I would personally say there’s a similar sensation when watching your films or listening to Talking Heads’ music of being more connected to what it feels like to feel, if that makes sense?
It’s funny because that’s kind of true, but it’s not like I’m a professional at feeling my own feelings at all. The films are like a compensatory, aspirational thing. Maybe it’s my best emotional self or something like that. But it’s because I have such problems with that, that’s the reason I make movies that are like that, I think.

And then, oh, my gosh, Man with a Movie Camera is so weirdly meta. Like he’s in all these shots and then he’s shooting and there’s such a consciousness of the frame, such a consciousness of film material, of capturing imagery and then playing with the frame in all different ways. That kind of, again, feels very Talking Heads to me, that inherent in the formal experimentation is a kind of self-referentiality that’s not all heady and postmodern. It’s just sort of fun, you know? Talking Heads are both self-referential and like James Brown at the same time, like funky and heady. That’s part of what gives their car so much gas to me. I said oxygen before. They give me so much oxygen, as compared to someone like Gang of Four, another amazing band that I really adore, but is more physical and somatic. To me, Talking Heads, maybe because I’m American, the alcohol just works better on my system.

Talking Heads also has that amazingly sort of quaint appreciation for seemingly simple things—places, buildings, landscapes. That really comes through in your work, and also in Man with a Movie Camera.
Yeah, that whole fascination with the quotidian, and things that seem unimportant, things that seem so banal that they’re not worth talking about. But if you examine them closely, all of a sudden all this stuff happens. Let’s have a double feature with Man with a Movie Camera and then True Stories.

I was watching True Stories again the other day, and I’m always astounded by that section where David Byrne is talking to the camera, sort of espousing the wonder and magic of the shopping mall as he’s walking through it, and then it cuts to these two guys who are reading stories about kids starving to death in another country and they’re cracking up. It’s this amazing capturing of that romanticizing and decay of consumerism.
It’s interesting, yeah, they’re both—again I’m making it sound so pretentious and literary criticism-y, I’ve had too much coffee—but they’re both talking about capitalism. I could have put Frederick Wiseman on this. It’s all about how humans are divided up by the systems that they enter. They’re atomized by the systems that they enter. I feel like that’s a very David kind of lyric of a thought.

That approach really works, and it honestly feels more true to life than a kind of gradual straight line of being high and going to low. It vacillates so rapidly from day to day.
I think, maybe, to answer the Andersson connection—Saoirse’s character is a deeply Roy Anderssonian soul. It’s based in all his films, really. He’s saying, “This is fucked up.” This is completely fucked up and it’s dark and it’s crazy and it’s not normal and it’s not nice. It’s absurd. I think that’s what Saoirse’s character is cooking inside of her, and it comes out in all different ways. I think she walked out of a Roy Andersson movie, or maybe Roy Andersson himself, his soul walked out of his body and came into my sweet universe and threw some shit around. Which is great, it’s so fun.

This next one on your list I honestly hadn’t heard of until now: Jørgen Leth’s 1968 short film The Perfect Human. Watching it the other day, it immediately feels very Mike Mills. It’s super easy to see how this is an influence on you.
Wow, isn’t it great? Yeah, it really influenced Beginners and just me in general. He’s done a bunch of films that have influenced me. There’s another one called Life in Denmark, and it’s just like… things in Denmark. That’s very kind of Talking Heads, to me. Like, “We’re all very together,” right? It was funny, when I presented the idea to the band—they were on a Zoom, all four of them, which scared the shit out of me. I’ve known David a little bit over the years, and he’s so interesting and so generous and curious and such a lovely gentleman that I felt a bit safer with David. But the whole band together it was like, “Holy fuck.” Like my little fourteen, fifteen-year-old self was shaking. Tina [Weymouth] said, “Your idea reminds us of all the things that we like,” and I was like, “Well, yeah that’s because I studied you for my whole life.” It was a funny moment. Anyway, where were we? What were we talking about?

About The Perfect Human.
Oh, yeah. So yeah, I mean you could play The Perfect Human to a Talking Head song and it would all make sense. Like it could be a music video. They’re both, and me, are very interested in the seemingly didactic being actually quite odd and surreal. Facts not being what they seem at all, and leaning into a “factual” situation, which David does in his lyrics of just listing things that can take you to a really subtly or masked subversion that’s really interesting. No one thinks of Talking Heads as the hardest punk band, but I do think they did the most subversive work. Maybe it’s because even though it’s a straight band, I think it has a queer vibe, right? There’s something queer about the way that they play with power and force, and their energies feel kind of they/them to me. I don’t know, that’s something akin to the way Jørgen Leth plays with filmmaking. That’s also kind of they/them to me.

So, in a way, for me it’s just having that be your North Pole as a filmmaker, that modeling they did for so many people, that’s sort of what I wanted to include and say. And True Stories is a great example of that—more than Stop Making Sense, because that’s like a Jonathan Demme version of the band. To me, True Stories is much more like their music and all of the concerns of their music. There’s a fearlessness to Talking Heads. A dedication to change. A dedication to not doing things in the standard way. A dedication to breaking the rules.

It sounds so stupid, but to me while this video seems very much like something I would do, it’s also like I’m breaking the rules of how to tell a story or how to make a character. I’m breaking the rules of what a video is. And all of those things make me feel warm and fuzzy inside, like I’m doing the right things. So I feel very indebted to Talking Heads for modeling that to me for many years in such a positive, fun, danceable way. What’s fucking better than that? That’s amazing.

That’s wonderful to hear, because I think something that stands out from your movies is it always feels immediately like you’re watching a Mike Mills movie, and so much of that comes from the way you play with form. That sort of collage-like structure, where it can be straightforward one scene, and then jump into another perspective in the next, or a flashback here, or “Oh, here’s like a three minute slide of various still images with narration over top.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you’re saying all of that, it also makes me think of [Jean-Luc] Godard, right? A lot of those ideas are very Godard-y. When I was starting, I went to Kim’s Video and went through the Godard shelf religiously. On some levels, not on a lot of levels, but on some levels, Godard and Talking Heads are very similar. They have a lot of similar concerns, a lot of similar playfulness, and just a curiosity about the structure that they’re in. So those things have a lot of kismet for me.

I’ll say this. I went to art school and I’m a filmmaker and I’ve done a lot of graphic design, right? All those things have weaker magical powers than music does. Music is a more spiritual, higher, more somatic, more powerful medium that I’m not as good at, but I’m always chasing. Like the podcast I did with David, I we talked a lot about how I listen to music constantly when I’m writing as a guide, or as company in this lonely project of writing, or as an emotional com where I’m following this energy. And it could be one song for weeks, just on a loop. And if you’re like me, and you lean on being rational rather than irrational, and you lean on being a good person rather than a full person, music can really help enchant you out of your own squareness.

I’ve also been thinking, I’m 59 now. I’m thinking a lot about everything I saw in college, like 8½ or Chantal Akerman or whatever, and it’s so impactful. You’re so ripe to be seeded, you know? Talking Heads just hit me at such a pivotal point of my figuring out my life and my creative life and what’s what.