Actors Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor appear in Beginners, a film inspired by director Mike Mills's relationship with his father. (TIFF)

By Chris Berube, citizen contributor

When making an intensely personal work of art, there are so many challenges that have to be considered. How do you portray your family? How much will be literally real, and how much will be fiction or exaggeration? And, through the story, what are you trying to say to a broader audience?

Each of these issues were confronted in the process of making Beginners, the second film by former music video director Mike Mills.

"It generated with my real dad, who came out of the closet when he was 75," says Mills, whose first film, Thumbsucker, played at TIFF 2005. "He had been married to my mom for 44 years, and she had just passed away. The movie basically involves two love stories, one with my dad and his boyfriend, and him trying to figure out how to be gay. And the second story is about a character based on me, trying to figure out how to stay in love, or how to be in love from a younger context."

Mills wrote the script for the movie only six months after his father died, which influenced the dual narrative structure that runs through the film.

"This is like a document or a report of what it felt like for me. When someone passes away, and when your second parent passes away, especially, there's this river of unfinished conversation going on in you. You're constantly living in a world just aside from the world that you're in, where the unfinished sentence is still hanging in the air, where you are still talking back to them, a lot."

The process of working on the film was made much easier for the director after he found the perfect actor to play his father: Christopher Plummer, whose performance in the film is garnering quite a bit of Oscar speculation for the 80-year-old actor.

"He liked the story, and he said, there's no self-pity, not a drop, and I thought, 'That's my dad.' And that's something that people of that generation really share. And it's both this amazing, heroic thing, but sometimes you want to say, 'Come on, just tell me how it hurts! Let's be real.'"  

For Mills, the magic of Plummer's performance is how he manages to create a very real character that, while respectful to his late father, also exists independent of the person the story is based on.

"From the get-go, there was also this agreement between me and him that we were in no way stuck to my dad. I look at the screen and I don't think, 'That's my dad.' I think, 'Ah, that's Christopher Plummer doing a really nice thing.' That's an homage to my dad, in honour of my dad, but that's not him."

However, Mills's father is never far from his experience watching the movie.

"I often think of my dad as being right here," Mills says, motioning over his left shoulder. "Like he's watching it with me, still telling me things."

You can follow Chris throughout #TIFF10 on Twitter at @chrisberube