“We’re Faggot Archivists”: Director Joshua Miller, in Conversation With Jeremy O. Harris

Nepo babies are typically only good for one thing: gatekeeping. But actor and filmmaker Joshua Miller, who’s two generations removed from the photographer who shot Marilyn Monroe over the infamous subway grate and spent nine months in the womb of Playboy Mansion regular Susan Bernard, is more than willing to open up about his Hollywood lineage. We’re faggot archivists,” he says. “If you’re a PhD faggot, you know that Gus Van Sant was inspired to make My Own Private Idaho from John Rechy’s City of Night, period.” In all seriousness, though, Miller has a deep curiosity in probing legacy, one shaped by his grandfather’s experience fleeing from Nazi Germany. This idea also informs his latest horror “trauma horror” film The Exorcism, starring Russell Crowe and loosely inspired by his father’s acting role in the horror film classic The Exorcist. Last week, Interview’s resident dramatist and consigliere Jeremy O. Harris called up Miller last week to chat about their favorite tortured actresses, the gentrification of horror, and falling in love with a life partner on the first date.

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JEREMY O. HARRIS: How are you? Where are you right now?

JOSHUA MILLER: At the moment, I am in Los Angeles inside my grandfather’s photographic archives.

HARRIS: Wait, what is that?

MILLER: My grandfather was a glamor photographer in the golden era of Hollywood. I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about that.

HARRIS: Is this the one whose photographs you were finding when we were in Berlin?

MILLER: Yeah, my cousin found the picture that he took of Marilyn Monroe, with the flying skirt on a giant metal grate.

HARRIS: That’s insane. Your grandfather took the iconic Marilyn Monroe photograph?

MILLER: He took the good one. My grandfather knew her from the beginning, because they met when they were neophytes in Hollywood and they both had grown up in orphanages. There were two sittings. She did it on Lexington in front of the actual grate and Joe DiMaggio, her husband, said, “You cannot do this,” and she’s like, “Well, I’m going to.” The one piece of dialogue was, “Isn’t it delicious?” But she, of course, always had a hard time memorizing her lines, so they did 60 takes of that skirt going up. That’s why she and Joe got into a huge fight that night, which ended in her announcing her divorce back in Los Angeles. When they looked at the footage of what they had shot in New York, there was a plane going overhead. At that point, she says, “I will only let two photographers come re-shoot it and I want Bruno [Bernard] to be the one taking the most important pictures of this moment,” because it not only cost her her marriage, it became a whole other disaster for her movie. She literally had just announced her divorce in front of hundreds of screaming reporters and then had to go have her skirt blown up over her face an hour later.

HARRIS: That is psychotic. I love that you’re a part of that lineage.

MILLER: The first picture he ever took of her, she came to his studio and said, “Do you think you could take some sexy pictures of me?” He’s like, “Well, no. You’re the girl next door with a peach complexion. Let’s keep it who you are and not try to be something else.” She kept coming back with all these voice elocution lessons to try to sound sexy and he was like, “No, no.”

HARRIS: Wow. I love that this is supposed to be a sexy photograph and now this is just something that could be on Sydney Sweeney’s Instagram on a Tuesday.

MILLER: This is a two-piece bathing suit. Do you know how risque it was at the time?

HARRIS: Insane.

MILLER: Abrams is publishing all of his unpublished photographs from Palm Springs Racquet Club, which was basically like the Studio 54 of the ’40s and ’50s that was created because Jews weren’t allowed to go to other tennis clubs in Palm Springs. Charlie Farrell and Ralph Bellamy created this club. In your contract at 20th or wherever you were under contract, you had a moral turpitude clause, right? 

HARRIS: Which you couldn’t do within like, 100 miles.

MILLER: Palm Springs is 112.

HARRIS: I love that. This is what makes it so enriching to be one of your friends. I think one of the things that frustrates people about children of famous people, or “nepo babies,” as they’re called, is that they have all this insider knowledge that no one is privy to, but you’re so generous with opening the door. You don’t just casually know your family history. You know it deeply, academically, so when I’m with you, I feel like I’m with someone who’s lived in a museum their whole life. Do you feel like that sometimes?

MILLER: I felt like my mom lived in a museum. I would go to her frozen amber Hollywood mansion in Hancock Park. Even in her 70s, she didn’t cut her hair and it fell below her shoulders and she wore these amazing gowns when she would go to the Playboy Mansion parties I grew up at. I’m making her sound like Norma Desmond or Bette Davis. That’s not the case, but there’s some of that. 

HARRIS: Totally.

MILLER: All of that exuberance and drama, but she was holding onto a period that was fading. Now buckers from tech have just demolished it, as far as I’m concerned.

HARRIS: Now their wives and their girlfriends and even some of the reality TV stars are grabbing up the antiquities, sometimes even wearing them.

MILLER: Wearing them to the Met Ball and tearing them apart.

HARRIS: But in a moment where it feels like history is constantly being ignored, omitted, reshaped, it’s really exciting to know someone who has lived this history. Was it always easy for you to share these stories with people?

MILLER: I think I’m an archivist. Maybe we’ve just realized that.

HARRIS: Sometimes there’s this sense that to know the inside means that you should hide it away, but in your film, you make a direct line to your lineage.

MILLER: I feel like as a queer person growing up—not to put this through the queer lens, but let’s just run it through there real quick. I grew up facing erasure constantly, so fighting against that got built into me. And then I was raised by my grandfather, who was a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany. So I’ve always been about understanding legacy. Do you know Amanda Demme?

HARRIS: No, I don’t think so.

MILLER: She’s this iconic L.A. ’90s figure. She started all the nightclubs. She claims to have brought hip-hop to the West Coast. She was Ted Demme’s wife. She talks a lot about how legacy is so important right now, and it’s exactly what you’re saying about tech taking over and our history being put somewhere else. We have to fight to keep a narrative of what was. In certain ways, it’s daunting to do that. For example, in this room in front of me, there are 70 boxes of just the Palm Springs collection of my grandfather’s work.

HARRIS: Wow. 

MILLER: He had studios on the top of the Riviera Hotel in Vegas, so that’ll be the next book. Then there’s Mallorca, there’s Sunset Boulevard. They’re all different chapters. Sometimes I come in here and I just want to fall on the ground and cry. I’m like, “How do I possibly tell all these stories?” Thank god for Mark because Mark’s been obsessed with it now.

HARRIS: Mark [M.A. Fortin] is your partner?

MILLER: Mark’s my partner.

HARRIS: How did he become obsessed with it? 

MILLER: Well, when we first met, he was writing a play about Monty Clift and Elizabeth Taylor and he was playing both characters.

HARRIS: It feels so perfect that this is for Interview Magazine because Andy Warhol was just someone who loved being a faggot. He’s a true old-school faggot who just could sit and chat and talk about the history. Because a lot of being a faggot in general is being an archivist, right? What I like about this conversation right now is that it feels like an old-school interview. We’re talking about a movie, but we’re actually just talking about Elizabeth Taylor and Monty Clift. This is the world I want to live in. I want to live in the archive of you and your partner because it feels so rich with all these histories that titillate me to no end.

MILLER: When he told me on our first date that he had been writing a play about Monty and Elizabeth and was going to play both characters, I told my good friend Karen Black, “Can you come over? I just met this guy. I’m in love.” That was it, I was in. 

HARRIS: That’s amazing.

MILLER: I love what you said about queers being archivists. Is that what you said?

HARRIS: I said faggots are, not all queers. Not every gay man is a faggot. Like, a faggot is a high compliment, in my opinion.

MILLER: I know.

HARRIS: It’s something that’s earned. I said this in my Criterion Closet Picks, but there is a reading list to be a gay man, in my opinion. Really, to be a faggot. There’s a barrier of entry. Gay 101 is knowing the latest pop hits. 404 PhD level faggotry is getting in the weeds. If you’re an opera queen, you better know who’s at the Metropolitan doing the Aria in 1967. You know what I mean?

MILLER: If you’re a PhD faggot, you know that Gus Van Sant was inspired to make My Own Private Idaho from John Rechy’s City of Night, period.

HARRIS: Exactly. 

MILLER: You know where the homos got their homo inspiration from. Look, I’m an L.A. faggot, so you have to know that Bret Easton Ellis wrote, “People are afraid to merge on the freeways in L.A.,” and the antecedent to that is Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays, and then you got to go a step further to the opening paragraph in A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood who talks about driving on the fucking freeway.

HARRIS: I love it. And Play It As It Lays is a Bruce LaBruce reference for his first feature film.

MILLER: He’s a PhD faggot.

HARRIS: He’s deeply a PhD faggot. Okay, I don’t want us to go through this whole interview never talking about your movie—

MILLER: We don’t have to talk about it. We’re archiving. We’re faggot archivists.

HARRIS: We’re archivist faggots. Archiggots. I need to figure out the portmanteau, but we will. What are the roots of your film?

MILLER: Trauma, but apparently trauma horror is now cringe. To me, horror was always in that borderline between mainstream art and dirty. It’s the queer space. It’s outsider art. But ever since the Jason Blum movies of the world, it’s been gentrified. It no longer has that blue movie feel. There’s not enough weird, sad, solemn horror movies anymore. 

HARRIS: Which ones do you think have done it? I heard Bonello’s The Beast is a really exciting, sort of Cronenbergian horror spectacle.

MILLER: The one that Demi Moore’s in that’s supposed to be really cool.

HARRIS: The Substance, yes. If you were to ask me what my preferred genre is, it’s like, tortured actress. I like to see an actress giving me the possibility of death in their eyes, which doesn’t mean they’re actually being tortured. Sometimes they are, but sometimes they’re just women, specifically women, who know how to get to the brink of death in performance, because they know that that’s the true reality of living. You’re always on the brink of death. That’s what I seek in horror movies. And the only person who’s brought me there recently has been Jordan Peele. I saw that thing in the eye of Lupita Nyong’o in Us or even the relationship between Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya in Nope. I want more of that.

MILLER: Your favorite genre is the genre I grew up obsessed with. It’s the drama that existed in every woman who brought me up and every girl I was in love with as a young boy. I never said this in an actual meeting because they would have ushered me out of the room, but I once said, “This movie [The Exorcism] that we’re making is [John] Cassavetes’ Opening Night, but horror elements.

HARRIS: I love that.

MILLER: I literally pitched this to Russell like, “You need to watch this movie.”

HARRIS: Wait, Russell Crowe had never seen Opening Night? Is he straight confirmed now because he has never seen Opening Night?

MILLER: I think that is the litmus test, don’t you?

HARRIS: I think it might be. I could tell every straight woman that if he’s already seen Opening Night, you should be suspect. It’s not whether he has Grindr on his phone.

MILLER: No. I just wanted to watch Russell Crowe fall apart like Gena Rowlands in Opening Night.

HARRIS: I love that. 

MILLER: That genre was my north star through the whole entire movie. Have you seen The Goddess?

HARRIS: No.

MILLER: Kim Stanley plays a sort of Marilyn Monroe. This is in her heyday. 

HARRIS: Wow. I’m putting it on my queue now.

MILLER: That’s a subgenre we need back, and I think Ryan Murphy tries to go there. I hope that doesn’t sound bitchy.

HARRIS: No, but I do think that doing it in television is different from film. 

MILLER: Yeah. Because it’s dangerous in film and it doesn’t feel dangerous on TV. 

HARRIS: As a theater maker, it’s becoming quite clear that television stars are the real stars now. A movie star is so much rarer.

MILLER: But I feel like the quality of television is no longer in the golden age. Was it Norman Mailer who was espousing the cliche of, “TV’s the new American novel”?

HARRIS: Yeah.

MILLER: You could watch the ending of that first pilot of Sopranos and go, “This feels like a great piece of fiction.” It did. That’s when no one was looking. And now, the paradise got discovered.

HARRIS: And everyone cashed out.

MILLER: Right. Where do we go now? I think we go back to indie film. I don’t think it’s television anymore. I was just walking through the Fox Lot, talking about rebooting a show we created a prequel for, and there’s no one there.

HARRIS: Wow.

MILLER: A friend of mine just sent me a video of him at Sony. No one there. It’s just tumbleweeds.

HARRIS: That’s crazy.

MILLER: Maybe it’s just doom talk.

HARRIS: I have to go to a meeting, but I want to end this by asking you—

MILLER: Where are we eating when you come here?

HARRIS: Yeah. No, where are we eating the next time we’re in France together? I have a place I love in Paris right now. It’s called Early June. It’s a pop-up restaurant.

MILLER: Did you want to talk about food or do you want to ask that last question? 

HARRIS: No, I think that’s a great last question.

MILLER: Food is where we talk about embattled actresses in Paris.

HARRIS: Yes. And when we talk about actresses, we’re talking about love.

MILLER: I think, when we’re in Paris, let’s go have dinner with Isabelle Huppert.

HARRIS: I would love that. 

MILLER: Talk about the grande dame of being able to do a woman on the verge.

HARRIS: She’s the queen of it. And if we can’t get her, I have an in with Isabelle Adjani.

MILLER: Oh, that’s easy. My brother used to go out with her.