The Making of Jay Curtis Miller

Nashville filmmaker Jay Curtis Miller is not-so-secretly beloved by many at The Pamphleteer, and for good reason. He’s quietly brilliant and unpretentious, and his obsession with every aspect of filmmaking shows clearly in his body of work. Last year, Pamphleteer writer Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield interviewed Miller multiple times around the release of his short films MK Ultra Violence and Jack. Miller had been making films for over a decade, but it wasn’t until this year that he started getting recognition he can identify as quantifiable success—recognition at film festivals and in print. 

Still, the ever-humble filmmaker reminds us, “I still haven’t made a feature film.” There’s no such thing as an overnight success. The road thus far has been years of struggle with gathering resources, finding inspiration, and coping with the emotional intensity that seems to burden most artists.

HOW IT STARTED

Miller’s fascination with the filmmaking process was identifiable from the young age of six. In a one story house in Ohio, Miller’s room was one blessed with a television and VCR. While it was his room, he often had to share those blessings with his brother. “That room would get pretty small,” he remembers. At the time, six-year-old Miller knew that he loved film, but “didn’t know how films were made, so [he] wanted to act.” Even then, however, anyone with a keen eye could see that Miller’s talent would shine brightest on the other end of the camera. 

“My idea of playtime was taking all of my action figures and toys and recreating scenes from movies and shows,” he notes, adding with a hint of embarrassment, “this sounds weird but I would like, move my head like the camera.” This was Miller’s first exploration of filmmaking, and it wasn’t until the early years of high school that it all clicked for him: he wanted to be behind the scenes. No Country For Old Men was the catalyst—a film then fifteen year old Miller had to “make” his sister bring him to see due to the R rating. “I didn’t understand it at all,” he laughs lightly, “but that was the first movie I made a point to see in the theaters, and the first time I got a sense of a ‘director’s voice.”

By his senior year of high school, Miller had made his first short film, titled My Evil Ex—a slasher in which a teenager’s ex-girlfriend stalks him with a kitchen knife. At this time, he was already sick with that artist’s disease of comparing himself to those more successful. He lamented the fact that he “could have started in the 7th grade,” or that he was a “slow learner.” Almost in the same breath, however, he mentioned that during the summer he worked on this first film, he stayed inside to learn all he could about editing, lighting, and the composition of shots. When I pointed out that most teenagers wouldn’t spend a summer studying filmmaking, then create a film, he replied, “Once I have the blueprint of learning how to do something, I kind of become obsessed with it.” Filmmaking has absolutely taken up that obsessive drive in Miller. “I don’t have a backup plan,” he remarks. “That’s kinda it.”

HOW IT'S BEEN

When Miller created My Evil Ex, he says, he was largely finding inspiration in titles for films. Over the last 14 years he’s begun to find his muse in other films’ scores. He cites composers like Hans Zimmer, John Williams, and Jóhann Jóhannsson as some of those who create the “timeless feel” that sparks scenes in his mind. “Even if I'm not actively writing,” he states, “I like going for walks and listening to movie soundtracks.”

Plenty else within Miller's creative process has morphed over those years. The “basic level of depression or neuroticism” that afflicts many of compulsively creative types was always there. Then there was the monkey on his back: comparison. 

In college, he says, he never made anything he was proud of. It became difficult for him to see peers making something he thought was better, or seeing greater success. It wasn’t until graduation that Miller says he felt somewhat “unshackled.” At age 22, he watched Boogie Nights for the first time. Witnessing the seamless blend of film genres was a “pivotal moment” for him, creatively.

Throughout his twenties, Miller faced a lot of rejection and found it deeply demotivating. Still, he looks on this time fondly—taking in the works of Lynch, Cronenberg, and The Beach Boys to “eat a bunch of nutrients in [his] off-season.” Sometimes, he even wishes he could “go back,” but “time is much more valuable to [him] than it was ten years ago.”

HOW IT'S GOING

What Miller learned through those struggles—and continued ones today—is invaluable for any artist. “Early on I was very immature in how I compared myself [to other filmmakers],” he explains. “I had that inner demon of jealousy which is, dare I say, loser mentality.” After years feeling bitter about others’ success and insecure about a lack of personal “accolades,” Miller now just doesn't allow himself to do it: “At a certain point it just becomes mentally exhausting.” 

While showbusiness tends to breed a rainbow of self-centered, loathsome individuals, he states, “any win for your peers is a win for you, because you know it's possible and could happen to you one day.” That mentality has transmuted his old sense of jealousy into simply more inspiration. It’s all about how long you stay “in the game” and how hard you work. 

Struggles will always come up—that's life. But as we experience these hardships, we develop our own character, and are “bound to create something out of it, when [we're] creative.” However, Miller is wise enough not to recommend art be made from a place of total despair. As a creative man who's felt that, he knows motivation dries up. Even if he doesn't, he half-jokes, he doesn't “think it's good to wallow in misery and create from there, because you just end up as Lars von Trier.” Take care of yourself, carefully watch your own mind, and create as much as you can. Someday—even if that day is fifteen years down the line—your work will be known. If people call it an “overnight success,” feel free to politely correct them. There is no such thing.

You can follow Jay on Instagram and watch his movies on Vimeo.