![Mike Mills Says His New Film Shoots This Fall, Hopes To Make It “A Little Rougher” & “More Feral” [Exclusive]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/17143236/Mike-Mills-Directing.jpg "Mike Mills Says His New Film Shoots This Fall, Hopes To Make It “A Little Rougher” & “More Feral” [Exclusive]")
Writer/director Mike Mills has spent the bulk of his career returning to the same intimate territory: fractured families, parent-child bonds, memory, and the people who assemble around us when traditional structures fall short. His upcoming Criterion Collection box set, “I’ll Remind You of Everything,” gathers “Beginners,” “20th Century Women,” and “C’mon C’mon,” three films built from that soft, tender, and humorous emotional landscape. But as Mills looks toward his next movie, he is not planning to abandon that world so much as roughen its edges a little.
Speaking with The Playlist ahead of the Criterion set’s release next week, Mills revealed that he plans to begin shooting his still-unannounced new film this fall—and hopes to push his typically gentle filmmaking toward something “a little rougher” and “more feral.”
“I’m going to start a film in the fall, and it’s in the same planet,” Mills said, discussing the production start and how the tone and sensibility of the new movie will relate to “Beginners,” “20th Century Women,” and “C’mon C’mon.”
Mills declined to discuss further details because the project has not yet been announced. He did confirm, however, that it will remain rooted in the parent-child relationships, unconventional families, and interpersonal connections that have shaped much of his work.
“I am very interested in the parent-child situation or, like, how we make each other, like, the intersubjective world of, like, I become myself through my relationship to you,” he explained. “And those primary relationships are key.”
“Yes, all my films have, like, a family situation,” Mills continued. “The family’s always broken in some ways or not, like, totally traditional. So that to me is, like, a key element.”
“It’s like who shows up when you’re in need and becomes the constellation, becomes the community that you discover yourself in,” he added.
Mills’ films are emotionally generous even when confronting depression, grief, fractured families, and the difficulty of understanding the people closest to us. He says his next film will remain in the same thematic world, but the filmmaker hopes to push its tone—and perhaps its form—into somewhat less gentle and more emotionally unruly territory.
“The next film is—it has a very different…I can’t really talk about it because it’s not been announced and all that—but it has a very different quality to it in one way,” Mills said. “And in another way, it’s very much the same thing of how we impact and discover each other in relationship, you know?”
Asked specifically about the film’s potential stylistic direction, Mills cautioned that the movie has not yet encountered the realities of production, where things can shift when you stay open to creative collaboration. Although he has spent years writing it and already has ideas about its form, he expects to discover much of the film while making it.
“Well, it’s not—it hasn’t happened yet,” he explained. “So, part of my process is—I’ve been writing it for years, and all that, and I have ideas, but it hasn’t hit reality yet. So, I like to discover it as I go a bit.”
Still, Mills knows that he hopes to stretch beyond some of the sweetness associated with his previous work and make room for a broader range of emotions.
“I’m interested in being a little less sweet, being a little rougher, a little more feral, a little bigger bandwidth of feelings,” Mills said. “I want that a lot.”
One formal preoccupation will carry over, he said: his trademark porous line between documentary and fiction.
“There is always this play between what is documentary and what is narrative,” he said of the memoiristic collages drawn from family history that recur throughout his films. “That remains endlessly interesting to me, filming things in a way that have both of those histories inside them.”
Mills worked with a different cinematographer on each of the three films in the Criterion set: Kasper Tuxen shot “Beginners,” Sean Porter shot “20th Century Women,” and Robbie Ryan shot “C’mon C’mon.” Mills confirmed that the pattern will continue with another new cinematographer on the upcoming film, explaining that previous collaborators he would have liked to reunite with were unavailable due to scheduling conflicts. However, he did not disclose the name of the new DP.
Mills plans to begin shooting the still-untitled project this fall. “I’ll Remind You of Everything” arrives next week. More from The Playlist’s interview with Mills soon.
Born in Chile, raised in Canada, now living in Brooklyn, NY, Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, MuchMusic, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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