Chicago, 13 May 2001, AMC River East 21. [Photo: Ray Pride.]

One of the quieter, yet fantastically winning things about Mike Mills’ Beginners is how it casually moves through Los Angeles. On the Focus on Film website, Mills illustrates nine locations with stills and footnotes them in the most loving way. He shows all the tenderness that’s in his movie toward a city that seems in movies so often a location, seldom a setting. A sample from one of the nine pages: “The Health House was commissioned by the Lovell family and built in 1927. It is one of Richard Neutra’s most famous houses. But that is not why we picked it [for the father’s house]. It is gorgeously situated and the natural light that comes through is just amazing. It made sense, character-wise, that you would have this art historian man living there––and that would be the family house. Also I wanted to shoot in all natural light. And Richard Neutra is like the best gaffer in the whole world, with the light that comes through those windows. He has these built in sconce lights, and they create this amazing soft light. I love modern American architecture, and I know all about Neutra, so when Chris [Miller], my locations manager, showed me the house, I was, “You can’t be showing me the Richard Neutra Lovell House—we can’t get in there.” But luckily the recession really helped us, in that we could afford something’s we couldn’t normally afford. The Topper family has lived in there for, I think, like 40 years. So the house has a real patina, a real accumulation of stuff, like a real family has. The checkered bedspread that is in one of the scenes—that is just the Toppers’ actual bedspread. All the stuff that is in the kitchen, along the shelves, that is just the Toppers’ stuff. I love going in to locations and treating them in a documentary way.”

C’est anecdotique.

He’s Beginnering to blog his festival and press tour for the summer release of Beginners.