When baseball fell through for Noah and Logan Miller, the identical twin brothers found themselves back home, in the backwoods of West Marin, living in their great grandmothers house, and reconciling a relationship with a father who battled homelessness and alcoholism. This year their debut film, Touching Home, was one of only four movies chosen to headline the San Francisco International Film Festival. I had the opportunity to sit down with the gregarious duo, who wrote, directed, produced and star in this largely autobiographical film...
Touching Home captures the timelessness of West Marin, but it could have easily taken place in any other small town in America. Equally universal is the deeply personal story, in which the Millers play fictionalized versions of themselves. In the film, the brothers struggle for their own piece of the American dream, while simultaneously coming to terms with their fathers debilitating alcohol addiction. “Our father was one of the hardest working men I know,” recounts Noah, but due to gambling and addiction he lived in his van for the last 15 years of his life. “This was a very personal movie, and it was something that we were compelled to make” say the Millers, “We felt that re-experiencing these scenes and this situation with our father would be very cathartic and it would help us move beyond all this pain.” On the decision to play themselves the Millers say, “We didn’t get a chance to say goodbye", "and we weren’t gonna find two guys who could play baseball as good as us.”
For the unlikely filmmakers a career in movies was both novel and daunting. “None of our buddies went to college”, says Logan. In West Marin no one makes movies and there are no silver screen connections. Despite these obstacles, the Millers say that everyone in their community was very supportive of the project.
“Once baseball came to an end, we knew we could do something involving manual labor”, says Noah, who along with his brother worked construction jobs before pursuing film, but says Noah, “we wanted to do something that could make us get out of the bed in the morning and movies was our second love.” The brothers say their background in baseball proved to be useful for filmmaking. “Baseball is very much a team sport’, says Noah, “and filmmaking is a team art.”
As the story goes, they bought a screenwriting manual and never looked back. However, as their project began to make headway, the brothers suffered a tragic blow; the death of their father, who lost his battle to alcoholism and died penniless in jail. “We wanted to turn the tragedy into an achievement” says Logan, “With death or any traumatic event, for some people it’s a bump and they keep going, for others it might change the course of their lives.” As fate and hard-work would have it, after the loss of their father, the Millers received the prestigious Panavision grant, which gave them access to the same state of the art equipment used by industry bigwigs like Steven Spielberg.
The Millers recount, that when writing, Touching Home, they always envisioned Ed Harris to play the role of their father. In 2006 they cornered the actor, in an alley outside of an SFIFF fundraiser, at which Harris was being honored, and pitched him their story. Harris, impressed by the young men’s energy and charm signed onto the film a week later.
With star power behind them, and a tenacious energy, the Millers have proved themselves to be unstoppable. Last week, audiences welcomed Touching Home with critical acclaim. The Millers have eleven other films on the shelf, and a book about making the film on the way. For future projects however, the brothers plan to stay behind the camera.
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