Richard Swersey, a shoe salesman, pours lighter fluid on his hand and sets it on fire while his two children look on in bewilderment. It's a ritual he performs to acknowledge his separation from his wife.
It's one of the first scenes in Miranda July's film, Me And You And Everyone We Know, screening at CineVegas June 17 and 18. The film has already won a fistful of awards, including Special Jury Prize at Sundance and Cannes' Critics Week Grand Prize, Golden Camera, Prix Regards Jeune and Young Critics Award.
The plot involves Richard's 6-year-old son, Robby, who develops an online sexual relationship with a woman into risqué sex. John Hawkes (Deadwood) plays Swersey and July also stars as a lonely artist obsessively trying to connect with Richard.
That theme of people trying to connect with each other and how far the deeply sad and lonely will go to find togetherness runs through the film.
While pitching the script to movie studios, July had a hard time describing her film. "Sometimes I say it's just about children and adults trying to figure out how to touch each other in all different ways. Which is inaccurate, but it raises the right questions."
She had a lot of pitch meetings until IFC films showed an interest. "Most people passed or weren't interested unless I was going to cast a star." But she wanted less-famous actors so we could "really believe they were those people."
Miranda had to shoot all of Hawkes' scenes in 10 days because he had to start shooting the first season of Deadwood the same day he finished shooting Me And You.
"We had to keep his hair the same as in Deadwood," July says, "which actually worked in our favor because when we had to do reshoots and add a few scenes, his hair was the same as we left it since he couldn't change it because it was his Deadwood hair."
Brandon Ratcliff, who plays Robby, was chosen from an open casting call. "He was so good, and I just turned to my producer and was like, 'We got it ... he's a star.' We looked at zillions of other people and finally we brought him back and it was no contest."
In the film, Robby and his brother chat in Internet dating groups. Robby innocently meets up with a woman online. She asks him what he would like her to do and he responds by saying he wants to stick his poop in her butt. Surprisingly, it's a tender scene with outrageous, yet innocent dialogue.
"I was very conscious of wanting to create some sort of vocabulary where it would be physical and to some degree sexual, but very grounded in his physical 6-year-old reality .... It seemed like the right territory that it had this kind of intimacy without being really about sexuality in an outright sense," says July.
"When you're a girl, there's a lot of emphasis as to what's allowed to go into what hole as far as cleanliness, you know, and somehow the idea of that in a way maybe influenced it, the idea of your poop going up someone else's butthole. It seemed like the place where my head was at, at that age. I know friends have told me that they thought butts were much more a part of sex, that maybe you rubbed your butts together, maybe that's what sex was. It was very unclear at a young age, so that made sense to me; that maybe if butts were sexual, then somehow poop was too."
All of the dialogue in the film is unique and creative. July's writing is fresher than most Hollywood films, especially where children or teens are concerned.
"I try to feel my way into it, and then the stuff you're actually writing is all in metaphor," July explains. "You're not writing people who are saying, 'I feel scared, I don't know if we should do this.' You're writing things people are saying instead of what they're actually feeling, mixed in with moments of total honesty."
Me And You was shot on high-definition video, the same kind of camera used in the Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx film, Collateral.
"Chuy Chavez, our DP [director of photography], saw no problem using HD, he was confident he could make it look great, which he did. He said, basically, 'Given that there's all these kids, given that you're in it, given that we have only 24 days, anything we can have to make it quicker and allow us to shoot more without stressing, it would be better.' So he kind of finalized that decision and his confidence led the way."
July rehearsed very little with the actors. "I didn't go super- deep into improv or character work or anything like that. Frankly at that point, I was so nervous. In some ways, I wasn't going to be that much help to anyone at that point. Now with a second movie I could use that time with a little more confidence."
She developed the screenplay at the Sundance Institute. "It was wonderful. It was the best possible entrance to the industry. Coming out of the lab gave me so much confidence, both to work my ass off rewriting, and to get to say, 'OK, I know that you have no idea who I am and I want to cast people who you have no idea who they are, but the lab thought I was good, so that's something.'"