IT'S STRANGE, but I feel like I've met Miranda July's first feature film before. And maybe that's not so very bizarre, considering its title: Me and You and Everyone We Know. Films about "human connection" rarely actually connect the way July's does, which is why it's thrilled so many people so incredibly quickly. A little over a month ago, it won the Camera D'or at the Cannes Film Festival, which might just be a first by an artist whose performing career began at Gilman Street. But is it really such a long way from Artists' Television Access and Bottom of the Hill to the Palais? I spoke with Miranda July the day after her film was accepted at Cannes.

Bay Guardian: Not to overstate it, but your film made me really happy. Every line felt so authentic, and lived – like when the shoe salesman (John Hawkes) asks your character whether she feels she deserves shoes that feel good: "How did you know just how much my feet hurt?"

Miranda July: I approached the whole movie as, "Well, here's a chance to make all the things I would want to see." And I did have my friends – especially the women I know – in mind too. I thought, they've got to be disappointed by some of the things that I'm disappointed by. And shoes are interesting, just as objects. There's a certain amount of intimacy to selling shoes, and yet it's not intimate.

BG: How did you arrive at the two shoes marked "Me" and "You" moving toward and away from each other as a metaphor for relationships?

MJ: One day we needed to come up with one more scene. We're in the editing room in my house, [using] Final Cut Pro, and I said to the editor, "Hold on, I'll be right back." I went into my bedroom, and I thought, "What does [Christine] have? She's alone. I have to show more connection with [Richard] and what's going on inside her." I had my bedroom slippers and a paint pen, and I just wrote "Me" on one [shoe] and "You" on the other, and I put them on my feet. I had my little video camera, and I shot that thing. As with writing the script, I used the feeling I had right then in my life. I was having problems with a boyfriend, and it wasn't hard to have this scene be very emotional – the attraction-repulsion thing.

BG: I loved your emperor-has-no-clothes approach to the curator in your film, who's choosing work based on crass, marketable identity categories. It seemed to reflect the democratic impulse behind your earlier Big Miss Moviola campaign to break away from art-world gatekeepers. Where are you now with all of that?

MJ: It's a weird place to be, given my pasts. Now I'm in Hollywood. I have agents now, oddly enough, and take meetings with studios, to just see what that's about. Now I wonder how I knew, back when I was doing Big Miss Moviola.... It's not like back then I knew the statistics on women in Hollywood, but now that I'm there, it's glaringly obvious. It only seems more and more relevant, all these alternative ways of getting art out there. And I guess I've always thought of making art as a certain kind of activism, too. The meaning of the art can get so changed by how you do it. At some point, I'll probably do something like Big Miss Moviola on a larger scale within the industry.

BG: How did the various scenes in Portland during the '90s contribute to what you're doing now?

MJ: It was really the music scene up there that I was in, even though I was doing performance. People like Slim from Kill Rock Stars and Calvin from K Records were both like, "Wow, if you want to put out CDs on our labels ..." It wasn't a perfect fit, but it was an accessible scene. I responded to anything that didn't involve an institution, or didn't seem adult. I just wanted to be free, at that age, to create my own context. Even if no one knew what the hell I was doing, I would just keep doing it until people started knowing that, "OK, this isn't a band where no one plays instruments. This is Miranda July." It took awhile. I made a sudden leap to the performance world proper when the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art put me on their program. They took a risk on a local performer. (They were definitely much better to me than the curators in the movie – but there's an echo there.) Then I began to do a lot of stuff in New York and Europe. But I never really was in the "art world" – though being in two Whitney Biennials may make it seem like that. Now that I'm in the film world, I'm sure the art world would say, "Miranda who?"

BG: I've been loving your blog entries; you're drawing back the curtain on "celebrity." Does this world of moving from festival to festival get weird, depressing, and lonely? Or is it exciting? Is there an end in sight?

MJ: I could have talked about that for the whole [interview] and used this as a therapy session! It's all those things: weird, depressing, and lonely for sure. And really exciting and what I hoped for, the best version of what I hoped for. But it's also really unusual for me not to be making something every day. That blog is the only real outlet I have. I don't have any more energy beyond that when I'm doing 14 interviews a day. I can see why people get really weird in this business. I'm starting to have a little more sympathy for all those total freaks. (Susan Gerhard)