Miranda July Talks The Future, Tina Fey, and Writing to Prisoners

​We have seen The Future , and it is forlorn yearning and time-warping magical realism, with Miranda July and Hamish Linklater as a Los Angeles couple whose life together changes a lot when they prepare to adopt a cat.

Subjects under artful scrutiny in writer-director July's much anticipated second feature include artistic paralysis and the limits of its maker's own adorableness, a hot topic since her 2005 feature-film debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know.

July appears Thursday evening at SFMOMA, where a 7 p.m. screening of The Future already has sold out (although some rush tickets will be available), and her project Learning to Love You More, a collaboration with Harrell Fletcher and thousands of online participants worldwide, is on view. (For more about July's many other projects, click here.)

The Future opens locally on August 19. But here she talks about it right now:

How do you feel about watching people watch your movies?

I never watch other than the first time. I mean, I haven't seen the last movie since Cannes.

Is that a rule for you, or are you just busy with other things?

Ha, no, I'm not that busy. It's just not desirable. Not that the audience isn't important. It's like it's so important that I'd rather just let it happen without me. I think I'd be tempted to just run up and be like, "Let me just redo that scene."

That might be fine: You're in friendly territory.

I think the audience here is smart, interesting, Bay Area weird, and it's very familiar to me. But there's also a little more baggage, like I'm more exposed or something.

Because you're from here?

Yeah. I grew up in Berkeley. In high school, I wrote a play that I put on at 924 Gilman. It was based on my correspondence with people in prison. It was called The Lifers. I was 16. To my mind, it was my first professional thing. I put an ad in the paper for auditions, and hired adult actors to be in it. I cast a Latina woman in her 20s to play me. It somehow didn't seem professional enough if I played myself.

How did that correspondence start?

There was an alternative magazine that my parents subscribed to and somewhere in the back there was a prisoner penpal section with a list of addresses. I just picked a name, and we wrote for like three years. It was the first thing I couldn't really process just through normal channels, just by talking about it. It kind of forced me to make something to try and describe what it meant.

Is that a criterion for your creative work: something you can't process otherwise?

Maybe. But it's tricky because I think there also has to be something that can't even be articulated at all.