Mike Mills first spoke with The Filmlot after his first feature, Thumbsucker, played at Resfest ‘05. While the success of his first film continues around the globe, his first documentary, Does Your Soul Have A Cold?, premiered recently at SXSW and will debut on IFC in October. Mike sat down to talk with us about his new film that takes a look at the “discovery” of depression in Japan and the pharmaceutical companies that may have influenced a rising demand for antidepressants.

How have things been since Thumbsucker?

Well, Thumbsucker keeps going. It just came out in Japan and France in the fall. I had to go do a press junket in Japan, so it keeps going and going. I’ve written a new narrative script, which I’m about to get going, and then I did this doc. So it’s been good. I stopped doing commercials and I’m really happy. I hope I can keep doing this thing where I can go back and forth between narrative films and documentary things. If I can keep doing that, I’d be really happy.

How did the subject of the film first peak your interest?

Well I go to Japan a lot… So I have a lot of close Japanese friends. I started noticing a few years ago, a couple of them were on anti-depressants and it just struck me as this strange east/west fusion like, “Wow, that’s such a strange thing to see here.” I did some research about it and I found out that before 2000 there wasn’t even really a word for depression, SSRI’s (antidepressants) weren’t available and there’s no real therapy or mental health community there. Then GlaxoSmithKline and other western pharmaceutical companies came in with these large ad campaigns, a big website presence and all these seminars and kind of explained depression to Japan… and also had their cure. That was like, “Wow, that’s a new level of globalization to me.”

On top of that, I feel like I can only make films about things I know about on some level. I’ve been very close to people who’ve had depression, kind of serious depression, and I myself, I’m not a big depressive or a diagnosed depressive, but it’s been suggested more than once that I take antidepressants and I struggled with it at times… so a combination of all those things.

What do you think came first: depression or pharmaceutical companies in Japan?

Well I think that Japan definitely has a lot of depression. Japan has almost the same annual suicide rate that we do, like 30,000+ people a year, but they have less than half the population. So it’s kind of a testament that there’s something pretty real there. I have no question that there’s real suffering going on. I think what the pharmacological companies did is they said, “Here’s what it is in a package and here’s how to take care of it,” leaning mostly towards their product.

In Japan right now, if you Google depression, the first thing that comes up is utsu.net, which is a Glaxo paid for website, but it doesn’t say it’s paid for by Glaxo. It has all these doctors on it and all these clinics you can go to, which lead to clinics that mostly prescribe Paxil (which is their pill). If you get past that, the second one is the official Glaxo website and so they really filled a vacuum. I’ve heard some people say, “Oh that’s so crazy! It’s not like that here.” Well actually here, pharmacological companies inform doctors on how to use their drugs, they have seminars and it’s not that different. It’s a little more intense there (in Japan) but it’s something that’s happening everywhere.

It was interesting that Mika said utsu.net was the first time she had read an objective description of depression.

Ken says it too. They all feel that way. It’s partly because it’s western. There is a Japanese tendency to see these western, especially medical advances, they think of western things as ahead. So if it came from the west it’s advanced, it’s from the future, it’s better and they tend to treat it as the truth. What I think they’re also implying when they say that is: Everybody’s so afraid of depression in Japan. It’s filled with a sort of mystery and darkness and taboo. You don’t want to touch it. You don’t even want to look it straight in the face. So that’s also what they’re saying, it was the first time they looked at it straight in the face.

It was also pretty disturbing when Kayoko says everything from America is good. So antidepressants must be good because they come from America.

Mika (whose grandmother who died in Nagasaki) was saying, people of that generation, people who were actually alive during World War II, basically a lot of them (I got the impression the majority), see America as liberators and they blame the imperial Japanese legacy for the war. So they see America as the modernizers of Japan and that they brought it out of the imperial casts and they brought it into a modern capitalistic thing which Japan has very much enjoyed… So that was really shocking to me.

It shocking to see just how many pills the subjects took on a daily basis.

Yeah. Well Japanese culture is kind of pill happy I learned. Like even if they have a cold or the flu, they’ll take several medications. So it’s in that context of, “Lots of pills are good.” Diasuke, the guy I interviewed, he takes like 5 or 6 pills. Mika took two antidepressants and two sleeping pills. They all take sleeping pills… and more than one. They take a sleep inducer and a sleeping pill. There’s another guy I interviewed, who’s not in the film, he took even more than Daisuke. Like over 5 [pills]. So it’s a combination of antidepressants, anxiety pills and tranquilizers. Could you imagine?

Taketoshi had that journal showing the amount of time he slept a day. So if he’s taking sleeping pills, it’s no wonder he seemed to sleep so much!

That was before. What you see in the film, these journals of his, it’s of everything, his sleeping, what he watched [on TV], what he did… he documented everything for years. He has those [journals] for ten years of his life. So not all that was when he was on medication… and Taketoshi doesn’t take as much as everybody else.

Taketoshi definitely seemed to have more of a handle on things then the others.

Yeah, I found him like a Fitzcarraldo style hero. What he’s gone through to get himself to a normal place… When he pulled those books out I was just so blown away [by the] detail and the exactitude of it. I know so few people who’ve had to work that hard just to keep themselves feeling ok. That really broke my heart and won me over to him very deeply.

The city shots are really great; they’re like moving still photographs. At first they seem really neutral but as the film progresses, they start to feel like sad and lonely environments.

I’m really interested in someone’s concrete environment and how that’s part of the story. So their room, their clothes, their belongings. I shot everybody’s objects and to me, I’m trying to make that an equally animated character in the film. So Tokyo is trying to be another character in the film. I was trying to shoot it like William Eggelston, where you don’t know quite why you’re looking at what you’re looking at. It’s not telling you a story, it’s not really part of the plot, it’s just sort of concrete material or facts that you can do what you want with.

I was really excited to try, as a filmmaker to be more open… or the way they film ends, there’s no big statement. There’s no big, this is bad, this is wrong, this is right. That was exciting for me. I got farther over there then I ever have. I like all those shots too… it’s kind of my favorite part. As a filmmaker presenting something where I’m not really telling you what to think about it, feels sort of scary but totally exciting and good. I hope to get to do more of that. It’s so hard to do in a narrative film. I mean people do it and I really admire them. Like I think David Gordon Green did that so well in his first two films like George Washington and All the Real Girls. That’s the problem with narrative films, your audience is walking a tightrope and you have to keep them going or they fall off. With documentaries it’s a little easier to digress.

What was it about those objects that made an impression on you? Why did you choose to shoot them in particular?

I think I’ve always done that. I don’t know if you’ve seen Paper Boys or other documentaries I’ve done. If I’m shooting someone’s room, I’ll shoot the stuff in their room. I’ll often cut away to it for a little longer then you usually would. So it’s always been something I’ve been interested in. In this film I upped it one notch and made them more prominent by putting them on black.

Partly I was thinking… because my film is very much in tradition of a cinema vérité film. But I really don’t believe in cinema vérité. I don’t believe that because you’re hand-held and have no lights, you’re objective. I actually believe it’s completely subjective. It’s the filmmakers dream. There’s no such thing as reality. If you pretend that you’re doing something that’s neutral, that’s the really dangerous thing. So that’s why you hear me ask questions [in the film]. I made sure to keep my voice in it just to remind the viewer that, “Oh this white guy made this film.”

The objects are kind of the same thing, to break the cinema vérité mode and do something that’s very intrusive in a way and take the objects out of their environment and put them on a clean background. So it’s trying to fuck with the documentary format a little bit. With Kayoko I show a ton of objects, like almost every object that is laying around in her apt, and they’re all of one theme. They all have this sort of child-like aesthetic to them. Then Mika, I just picked objects that had to do with… she’s really into nature and organic stuff and getting back to a sort of more organic place. So I just found things that matched that theme in her. And then Taketoshi, I just did all his books on depression because he’s kind of like the in-house depression scholar.

Kayoko’s objects were kind of young and cute feeling. It was kind of hard to believe that some one who’s surrounded with that stuff could be that depressed.

I can totally relate to that though. Because all my design stuff is very much of that style, it’s like seemingly happy or upper cute but actually all about sadness. So I think that those dichotomies often go together. Also someone like her who had something really traumatic happen in her childhood… would spend the rest of her life trying to get that childhood back. So I can totally relate to that.

How was the transition from a narrative to documentary? There seems to be a common thread between this and Thumbsucker.

I sympathize with people who are having interior struggles. I think Justin from Thumbsucker could easily get diagnosed with depression later in life. I’m not really interested in pharmacology… Not all my films are going to be about pills, but I do think it’s a very contemporary thing that’s incredibly important right now. So while I’m not really that focused on it, I do think it’s one of the most distinguishing things of our time. We’re affecting our emotional lives and our perspective of the world with chemicals. It’s like the industrial revolution, [but it’s the] internal pharmacological revolution.

What were some of the challenges you faced with doing a documentary as opposed to a narrative feature?

It’s much easier doing the documentary.

Did you do a lot of the shooting yourself?

Yeah, me and Jim Frohna and DJ. I was shooting all the time and they we shooting too. That was fun! That would seem to be a challenge, but it was actually great. I had a tiny crew and no lights, which was great. Actually, all the things that people would normally consider inhibitions or hardships, I was really excited [about]. I remember one night walking home (they were all sixteen-hour days and five hours of subway rides)… Jim and I were walking home and shooting and I was like, “I’m just totally happy.” This is so much better than a line of trucks… You’re just in a different world. So I found doing a documentary just a whole lot easier.

So your budget was a lot less than Thumbsucker?

Oh yeah, like 10% of it.

Do you feel like your shooting made you feel closer to the subjects?

It just made for less people in the room. And I was really happy. When I was shooting Kayoko and she starts crying, there is like a symbiotic relationship. It kind of created a problem because they tend to look right in the lens and they’re really talking to me. I had to ask them to talk to the translator. But it definitely heightened the intimacy. And for me, because I come from doing Graphics and drawing and being hands-on, involved with the visual part, it felt more like, “Ok now I’m drawing as the film’s being made.” I felt more like, “Now I’m fully here.”

Was this a tough documentary to shoot for you emotionally?

Yeah, the first trip really got me. Because you’re interviewing people who have really lost a lot of years of their life. It’s really scary. I got terrified that I was just going to lose it. Like I was really going to fall off… Then it became really transformative, because it was one of the first times of my life where it really helped me say, “Ok, your depression is your thing and I don’t have to take it on or save you.” Actually, it was really helpful to my own personal psyche. It was hard, but all those people enjoyed it. I think they enjoyed being filmed and they enjoyed the attention and I mean that in the nicest way. They’re living in a place where no one really wants to talk about that, and so they had a voice. I think that we helped them feel normal, sane and important. Which is kind of the opposite of the way you feel when you’re depressed. So I felt pretty good about that. I didn’t feel like I was harming anybody.

What would you like people to take away from the film?

Well… I really didn’t design the film with a specific message. It really is hopefully a concrete portrait that people have different takes on and hopefully enjoy the experience of something that is not trying to even explain something so much. It’s just sort of [to] show these hunks.

I’m very weary of pharmacology and that something as unknown and mysterious as your sadness has anything to do with a multi-national corporation that works for profit. It’s a crazy combination, but I left the thing feeling much more ambiguous. Because here’s all these people who are really dealing with more suffering then I know about and most of them, not all of them, felt positive about it at certain times. I definitely have no feelings like they’re wrong. That’s their experience. So it made my life more complicated on that issue. Before I had an easier, kind of left wing, “Ok it’s all bad,” and now I feel more like, “Huh, that’s not what they think,” and their opinion is more important than mine.