Getting Up to Speed

Liese Spencer

To what degree do we hurl ourselves and to what degree are we hurled through life, by our personal histories, our childhoods, the things that came before?" Rebecca Miller takes a gulp of tea and fixes me with a penetrating look through her black-rimmed spectacles before switching her attention to the heaving cake stand that has just arrived. Abandoing her definition of Personal Velocity - the title of her new collection of short stories - she reaches over her pregnant belly and grabs a cucumber sandwich, laughing at the mountain that remains.

"Daniel will be here later," she murmurs, "he’ll help with this." Daniel is her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis. At 39, Miller is expecting their second child in May. No weird cravings so far, she observes, "just food in general." Miller speaks as she writes, in short, emphatic sentences. Seen through the eyes of seven women, her tough little tales take an unsentimental look at fate, ambition, sexuality. The common theme is going at your own pace, until you find your place in the world.

Although she’s happy to identify some autobiographical strands - "the guilt of being a mother and having a vocation," the Bohemian artists she mixed with as a child - Miller’s pale blue eyes take on a steely glint if the conversation tiptoes too far from the book. Which isn’t all that surprising.

The daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and Magnum photographer Inge Morath, Miller knows more than most what it means to be defined by "the things that come before." Her parents met in 1960, on the set of The Misfits. Miller was still unhappily married to its depressed star, Marilyn Monroe. Morath was set photographer. When the marriage finally burnt out a few weeks later, they got together. Rebecca was born in 1962, the year Monroe died.

As a child Rebecca wanted to be a secretary, an air hostess, a ballerina, just like all the other little girls. But it wasn’t long before creative aspirations began to surface.On graduating from Yale, she embarked on a career as a painter. A deliberate decision to find a medium to make her own? "Not consciously. I always drew when I was very young, it was the thing that came easiest to me. I also had a high school teacher who was very encouraging."

After college Miller went to live in an artists’ colony in Munich. On her return she found herself plunged into the achingly-hip art scene of 1980s New York. She has drawn on her experiences of that time for the story, Louisa, in which an alienated young painter studies the pretensions of both wealthy, upstate New York and downtown Manhattan: where "they lived entirely ironically". "Louisa’s story is satire," she says. "Every milieu has something ridiculous about it - film-making, the music world, painting - because people who take themselves seriously become funny pretty quickly."

Then in the late 1980s, after a decade of taking painting very seriously indeed (in Munich she had thrown unsatisfactory canvasses into a furnace), Miller suffered some kind of creative crisis and quit. Strangely, for someone with no interest in fame, she turned to Hollywood. Acting roles in films such as Regarding Henry, Consenting Adults and Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle were not a great success.

"I never had any desire to become a well-known actress. I never thought I was great," she says, but the experience did prove useful when she switched direction again, this time to film-making. Her first feature, Angela, won a prize at Sundance in 1995.

It was around that time that Miller met Daniel Day-Lewis at a screening of The Crucible. Not only did the couple share a healthy scepticism about Hollywood, but both had been born to older, famous writer fathers. They married quickly and the press had a field day. The fitness instructor Day-Lewis had been living with claimed to have read about his new relationship in the papers. Having already allegedly dumped his former girlfriend Isabelle Adjani by fax, when she was pregnant, Day-Lewis was not hailed as great husband material. Columnists in both tabloid and broadsheets shook their heads and said it wouldn’t last.

But seven years later the couple are still together. And - from the way Miller keeps looking at her watch - perfectly happy. While their son, Ronan, is pre-school the couple have been enjoying bouncing between Europe and their home in New York. And Miller is not about to let shooting schedules get in the way of a good marriage. "We haven’t really been apart at all for any length of time yet," she says, "and I don’t think we ever really need to be."

Eventually, she concedes, when the children start school, "we’re going to have to settle down," and that might mean a move out of the city. "I had a real panic after September 11... we saw it happen, so it was pretty grim. Now I’ve calmed down. But I still don’t know if I want to stay there forever. I love New York. It’s my home town but I don’t know if I want to raise my children there. I grew up in the country. And writing there is easier… it could be good. I think you have to be open to the next stage in life, not hang on to things too much."

This philosophy certainly seems to have paid off professionally. When her film-making career stalled after Angela, and her scripts got stuck in development hell, Miller simply turned her hand to writing fiction. A great can-do attitude, but surely even she was intimidated by her father’s reputation as Great American Playwright? "I’d spent a good five or six years doing film writing before I started to write ficiton. So, no. Had I been a bit younger maybe I would have. But I didn’t think about it so much. I was just getting on with it." The result was Personal Velocity.

Ironically, she had little difficulty in developing three of the stories into a screenplay. "I wanted to be free from the idea of having to write for film because I found it so frustrating. You’re always having to wait for money. I was revelling in pursuing these characters when my friend approached me about making a low-budget digital feature..."

The film of Personal Velocity has just scooped the Grand Prize at Sundance and been bought by United Artists, which should ensure it is seen by an audience beyond the art house circuit. "Suddenly I’m being asked what I want to do next. So miraculously just as I turned away from making films there was a chance to make them. That seems to be the way, in love and life right? If you just say ‘forget it!’…"

In the first of her stories, underachiever Greta, who is stuck editing cookery books (365 Ways to Cook Rice), finds success as the editor of a fashionable first novel. At a party to celebrate, her father says, "well everybody has their own personal velocity". It’s hard not to feel that Miller is currenly at a high point in her own trajectory.

"I think the picture is starting to make more sense from the outside," she admits, "but from the inside it’s made sense for a longer time. I’ve always been very focused. Focused in obscurity but focused nevertheless." Miller is not someone hungry for public recognition. In fact she has spent most of her life working her way out from under the shadow of famous relatives. So what drives her?

"It’s a compulsion to make things. I’m always making something in my head. It’s my way of keeping sane. I can’t imagine my life without it. I don’t think I’ve shied away from recognition; the truth is, I’ve just kept my nose to the grindstone and tried to do my own work. Eventually people either notice what you’re doing or they don’t."

So now that Rebecca Miller is finally being recognised in her own right, are there any artistic fields left unexplored? The painter-turned-writer-film-maker laughs and says, "I think I’ve bitten off quite enough to chew for the rest of my life."