Miranda July: who says there aren't any more renaissance men ? Enter a dame of pure independent spirit: Miss Miranda July

Capturing the essence of multimedia performance artist Miranda July is as futile as trying to bottle the wind. But with Me and You and Everyone We Know, her quirky first feature--which won a Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at Sundance this year--you can definitely call her an accomplished filmmaker. Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein catches up with the boundary-buster just after her triumphant return from the Cannes Film Festival, where her film would go on to win a Camera d'Or.

CARRIE BROWNSTEIN: How was Cannes?

MIRANDA JULY: Actually, I was just trying to

take a picture of my blisters for my blog.

CB: [laughs] From what I read the film seemed

to be very well received.

MJ: Initially I had no idea, but by the time I left, the critics were like, "There's lots of great buzz!" If you're a little provincial like I am, you don't know what looks American and what's universal, so I found the reaction really great--there'd be 16-year-old French girls coming up to me saying, "This is just like my life," and elderly Frenchmen saying, "You've brought us this beautiful flower from America." Since the movie is so much about loneliness, that was especially moving--like in sharing the film I actually had the feeling that I'm not so alone.

CB: Did you get more of a sense of what it means to be an American filmmaker?

MJ: A handful of critics wanted me to talk about how the movie was a critique of the U.S. or if it was meant to be ironic, but it's neither. Sometimes they'd even say it was a parody or something, and I realized that was just what they wanted to hear. It's like the way we think if a film is French it must be deep and intellectual, or that an indie film is a genre movie about pedophiles in the suburbs--it's all a cliche.

CB: [laughs] Do you see a distinction between how American films are received by the critics over there versus European movies?

MJ: My French distributors were concerned that the critics wouldn't be able to take a movie seriously if it had humor in it, because there's this idea that a movie has to be dark to be good. The programmer of the section of the festival my film was in actually thought it was daring because of its humor, and he was curious to see if the audience would be willing to laugh.

CB: That's so interesting, because I think a lot of films that are billed as comedies end up failing because they don't present a contrast to the humor--there's no darkness, so the humor doesn't offer a release. The reason your film is profound is that it is dark but also has moments of levity. To me, that complexity is crucial. I would think that ambiguity would be more accepted over there.

MJ: Yeah, well, I feel like I kind of lucked out. Of course, some people hated the movie.

CB: I guess there will always be some people who don't get it, but I'm curious: As someone who works in different media, do you think that each one tells a different kind of stow, or do they all tell the same stow but in a different way?

MJ: I think different mediums are good for bringing out different things. If I'm sitting down to make something, and I feel very fragile, I want to work against that, so suddenly the idea of performing that fragility is totally liberating--or maybe the perfect thing is to protect myself and write a short story or something that's actually much more in its own world, and I'll never have to face people feeling that they have to come to me and inhabit it.

CB: Is film somewhere between writing a novel and doing a performance piece because you have a certain distance from it, or does it feel completely different?

MJ: I guess it's like performance. But whereas performance has this totally graceful thing about it because it exists in the present, movies are so much more an illusion--you can actually make the experience of real time feel like a mask. I mean, in the film some of the things that the 6-year-old boy Robby does he just couldn't have ever really done. I think that's quite a good use of the medium, because while he didn't do it, it feels like he did.

CB: So, is it scarier to take that leap or to watch somebody perform in real time and wonder whether they're going to falter?

MJ: I think people love to have that faith--that's part of the escape of film. In the movie my character is an artist who makes things based on her feelings and experiences, and people ask whether that's me, and while it's not exactly, I've come to realize that maybe subliminally one reason I wanted to show that process was that I hoped the audience would understand that the movie itself was created in that same simple way--you feel something, you know you have to express it, so you make something up and put it together.

CB: Were there any moments when someone who had worked on other films came up to you while you were shooting and said, normally when you shoot a movie it's done like this?

MJ: Yeah, like, normally you start a scene by yelling "Action," but sometimes I'd just be waiting, and there would be total silence--I'd be like, "What are we all waiting for?" And then somebody would tell me, and it would be hugely embarrassing. Actually the first scene I shot was of this bird--I think his name was Spike. There I was directing my first movie--I'm terrified and totally faking it and don't know what anyone's job is or when to yell action, and I was directing a bird that just wouldn't turn his head the right way. I'm going, "Here Spike--over here."