Biography

When living in Portland, she worked as a tastemaker for a local ad agency, during which time she suggested the name "Coke II" for a new beverage. Much later, Coca-Cola rewarded her idea with a check for $25,000, which Miranda says arrived in the mail as a complete surprise.

In prep school, Miranda corresponded with an imprisoned murderer. She wrote a play about her experience called "The Lifers" and, at age 16, she staged it at a local punk club.

She co-produced a seven-year Internet project called "Learning to Love You More" with cinematographer Harrell Fletcher, in which over 8,000 people responded to online assignments such as "Take a picture of your parents kissing". The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently acquired the work.

Says she has been strongly influenced by the work of directors Paul Thomas Anderson, Todd Solondz, David Gordon Green, Jane Campion, Andrea Arnold, and Spike Jonze.

She met husband Mike Mills in 2005 at a party after her film Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) debuted at Utah's Sundance festival, which was the year his Thumbsucker (2005) premiered there. Four years later, in the summer of 2009, they married at Mills' house in the hills of Nevada.

When I was very little, I probably wanted to be more normal. I probably wanted the Laura Ashley bedroom, and instead I got thrift-store everything.

(About losing her virginity:) I was 16. He was a 27-year-old grad student at Berkeley. I was always interested in sex, even as a kid. Sex includes shame and humiliation and fantasies and longing. It's so dense with the kinds of things I'm interested in.

I'm not a cinephile. My films don't reference films. I'm more interested in rhythm and feeling.

(on certain male directors) They become kind of brands. It's much harder to do that if you're a woman. That's crucial for longevity...All those men are also personal. I don't mind that, but I do mind that it's not really questioned, whereas I or another woman is looked at as so self-obsessed. Men are just not being judged in the same way. They're never going to be annoying in the same way.

(On her parents' differing religious backgrounds) There was no one specific belief but a kind of looser spiritual believing in just about everything. I think there's something spiritual in a very day-to-day, mundane existence. It's impossible to articulate, and it's happening now, almost like a perverse secret. . . That's always sort of fascinating to me.