Ted at Big Screen Little Screen has a nice phoner with Mike Mills on the occasion of his new documentary, Does Your Soul Have A Cold?, which premiers on IFC Oct. 22. In the movie, Mills follows around a group of Japanese early adopters, some of the first people to take anti-depressants for what is essentially a Western-paradigm condition:
What surprised you? For me, there’s a scene early on where we see their daily routines. You list off the different prescriptions that each of them were taking. Daisuke rifles through a large box of pills and then downs them with Dr. Pepper and alcohol…I assume it's in the film, but doctors in Japan make most of their money from prescriptions, so they overwrite and oversell like crazy. In any case, Mills' interest in the "everydayness" of his subjects is always a quiet treat.With a homemade White Russian; that was one. And I interviewed some other people for the film who took even more pills. And for whatever reason I just couldn’t film enough of their lives, and they didn’t end up working out in the film, but they’re very interesting. I met people that were taking eight pills at a time. Part of that is just the Japanese medical world where if you have the flu, you would go to the doctor and he would give you three or four different medications. With anything, they are prone to taking medicine or believing in chemical solutions to a problem. That’s part of the deal...
