by SARAH ROWLAND

"As you're talking to me, I have a pair of scissors in my hand."

Meet Miranda July. And don't worry, she's not about to off herself. The multi-disciplinary artist just can't keep her hands still. At any given time, the award-winning director could be (a) putting the finishing touches on a multimedia performance for a European exhibition; (b) rehearsing for a nationally broadcast radio play; (c) writing a book of short stories; or (d) all of the above.

"It's a compulsion, actually," she admits, calling from her L.A. home. "It's just how I process everything. Whenever I go longer periods of time without making anything, I start to feel like I'm going a little bit out of my mind.

"So right now I'm cutting out pictures of jewellery from magazines and pasting them on photos of my family. It's giving me something to do during interviews to calm me down."

She needs help with her nerves these days because in the span of a six months, the eccentric waif has gone from being a respected performance artist with a small cult following to the darling of American indie filmmaking. This is thanks to her whimsical and poignant debut feature Me and You and Everyone We Know, which she wrote, directed and starred in. This month alone, you can see her blue-eyed mug on the cover of more than a few industry rags, usually with an article inside about how she's the number one director to watch out for - something she finds a little intimidating.

"I know it's really nothing compared to what some people deal with, but for me, just being recognized once in a day is pretty alarming," she says in a cracking voice. "I spend so much time in my own thoughts that when I suddenly realize somebody is looking at me, I usually have to call a friend right away and tell them - which is probably going to get really old after a while."

Layers of loneliness

The film, which has that early-'90s, Slacker-esque feel to it, follows several overlapping stories of loneliness - including a heartbroken shoe salesman dealing with his divorce, a perverted art broker trolling the Net for someone to fondle and two mean-spirited teenage girls teasing their sexually frustrated neighbour. And drawing on what she knows best, July cast herself in the role of Christine, a struggling multimedia artist. Sounds easy enough, but it turns out that playing someone so close to home was harder than she though it would be.

"On kind of a general level, I have a basic embarrassment of what I do for a living, so lot of the things she said or did made me cringe," says July. "It would have been much more comfortable for me to make fun of performance art somehow instead of just having it there. But I knew that as an audience member, I wouldn't want to see my character portrayed in an extreme and over-the-top way."

Other parts of the movie that July refused to compromise were the blow job scene, involving three underage actors, and the scatological content, where Peter (Miles Thompson) and his six-year-old brother Robby (Brandon Ratcliff) discover the thrill of anonymous chat rooms. This is where July earns her Cannes accolades; both Thompson and Ratcliff give such natural performances without a hint of pretension, that watching them feels like you're eavesdropping on the two kids doing something they kind of know they shouldn't be.

"That was a pretty hard scene," she says. "We kind of had to go line by line, sometimes word by word. I knew when he said, ‘I'll poop in her butt hole then she'll poop in my butt hole,' that it had to be pitch-perfect or it wasn't going to work."

Her patience paid off.

And as far as adjusting to her newfound (and somewhat overwhelming) notoriety, July says that it's not going to keep her from making movies.

"Just in the last few weeks, I've been able to take a deep breath and go, ‘Okay, I can do this. I can have a minimal relationship with the industry and still keep making features the way I want to.'"

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW OPENS AT CINÉMA DU PARC FRIDAY, JULY 22

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