Miranda July on Overcoming Doubt to Tell Oscar-Nominated ‘Fire Of Love’, ‘What Do I Know About Volcanoes?’

When filmmaker, actress and writer Miranda July was asked to make the documentary fire of loveShe didn’t see herself as an obvious choice.

“I thought, I don’t know,” she recalls, “I’m not much of a storyteller.”

Then there was the subject of the film – which received an Oscar nomination – the story of the French couple Katia and Maurice Krafft, who gave their lives to the study of volcanology.

“What do I know about volcanoes? Nothing,” July told Deadline. But then the film grabbed her. “I saw that kind of early draft, I think early draft. And I was so shocked that by the end I was really emotional was like volcanoes were mine thing. And I realized, oh, it’s just this obligation that I’m dealing with. It just hit me in the chest or something.”

What finally convinced Julie to say yes to storytelling was a conversation with director Sara Dosa.

“I met Sara through Zoom and I was like, oh, a lot of that commitment and kind of daring and passion that they are is the Kraffts, but a lot of it is this director who’s just so emotionally present and there, in a way I completely related to… We both found that we processed everything through our work.”

Juli delivers an atypical documentary narrator – the antithesis of the authoritarian “Voice of God” style so common in non-fiction films of yesteryear. Instead, she offers a softer, reflective and penetrating way, her voice somehow imbued with the doom that Maurice and Katia will not survive this fascination with volcanoes, that their passionate pursuit will lead to their downfall, as it indeed did in 1991.

Unbeknownst to Julie, Dosa and her co-authors had invented an entire backstory for their narrator, introducing her as a librarian who had stumbled upon a fragmented archive of doomed scientist enthusiasts. But they didn’t tell Juli when it was time to pick up the narrative.

“It’s one of those director tricks. I do that too. You come, you put all these things in your head, you don’t share them,” mused July. “But it gives you a lot of confidence in what you’re asking for… Not only did Sara know what she wanted, but the whole team knew it. They would soon be discussing something I wouldn’t hear. And then I found the simplest piece of paper in the dressing room.

July has spoken versions of her own work – a novel and short stories. In the case of fire of loveOf course, the material was written by someone else – Dosa, producer Shane Boris, and editors Erin Casper and Jocelyn Chaput, the award-winning screenwriters.

“Besides knowing the film, the story and the pictures, I want to be well prepared. And then I realized that I really had to get involved [Sara’s] Hands, because she knows these pictures and she knows so much more than I do and has a vision,” says July. “Just like my actors [in my films], I won’t be able to see it 100 percent, but it doesn’t matter. I just have to trust him completely. I was surprised to see, oh, there is as much direction in this as there is in me. And she was Well… I loved it. I loved being on the other side.”

It wasn’t a one-time thing either.

“We did it, we recorded it, and then she brought me back and I thought, what else do I have to do?” she remembers. “And then Sara showed me some footage of my voice, some of which she was really happy with. And it was quite emotional – I remember doing it and really feeling into the story – and she said, ‘I want it to be like that, so we’re going to reshoot some bits.’ I didn’t care if it was more work… It feels so good to be in someone’s hands. It’s a real choice to make it so vulnerable. Storytellers are usually not that vulnerable.”

July, whose writing and directing credits are cajillionaire And Me and you and everyone we knowcompares the experience of recording in an audio booth to a kind of space travel.

“I kept thinking of the Bowie song ‘Major Tom’. You are in the can. You feel like an astronaut or something talking to the earth. It’s almost like you’re in a brain or something. I have the images on the monitor and there are beeps to help you line up.

Still, there was more involved in the voting process than expected in July.

“I went in like, ‘Well, I’ll just throw it down and they can line it up [in edit]”But there’s a lot you want to make sure works now, like ADR,” she says. “You’re like, oh, save us all the time and effort and just get into the flow, really hear the flow of the film and the cuts and the tempo. And so it almost becomes a kind of musical. If you just intellectually can let go and flow with it, like a beat, like a rhythm, then things go much better.”

The National Geographic film received a host of awards along with its Oscar nomination, including awards at Sundance, the Seattle International Film Festival, Nyon Visions du Réel in Switzerland, DocsBarcelona and the Directors Guild Award for Sara Dosa’s Work Month. . .

July expresses particular admiration for the film’s sound design, which had to be created from scratch because the Kraffts’ footage of volcanoes contained no sound.

“I’m a real sound nerd,” she says. “That’s my favorite part of my movies, all those sounds, all that stuff. So I was kind of blown away on a purely technical level… That was something that really blew me away, how crazy it was to create all this powerful sound.

She believes the film resonated with audiences in part because it is the story of a couple “who died with what they loved… I think it had something to do with people’s relationship to life, to mortality and to make love. I thought, okay, it’s going to be a little dark [like volcanology] where we are now…if it’s that deep, the core issues.