Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with Ghostboy's chat with John Cameron Mitchell about his new flick, a very dexual and controversial movie called SHORTBUS. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm a big fan of HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, so I'm sure I'll give it a go at some point. Here's the chat! Enjoy!!!

Howdy folks,

Hedwig And The Angry Inch is one of my all time favorite films, and so it was with no small amount of anticipation that I sat down to watch John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus a few weeks ago. Of course, by now, everyone knows that it's a film with lots of real sex in it, but the funny thing is that, for all the attention that might bring the picture, in the end it's almost beside the point. I suppose the sex offers a sort of full-blooded sense of intimacy that the film might have lacked otherwise, but the film is more about sexuality than intercourse - and more about human connection than sexuality.

For those expecting a feature length porno or a verite drama like Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs, you may be surprised. This is a real movie. Shot (on film, which almost feels like a luxury) in beautiful pastel hues by cinematographer Frank DeMarco, the film what I'm sure will become Mitchell's trademark visual stamps - and, even moreso, his remarkable sense of humor and pathos, which he manages to combine into one indistinguishable emotion. He laces the funniest moments of his films with a tender sadness, and never veers into tragedy without letting a few rays of light shine down.

This film isn't perfect - its improvisational form is sometimes is more clunky than cohesive - but it's so joyful and emotionally satisfying that it'll be easy for most viewers to overlook any shortcomings. All they have to do first is get past the sex, which technically shouldn't be a problem for most people. Once you get past the shock value, it's all rather funny, and then rather boring, and then you find yourself looking past it and paying attention to the characters and not their plumbing. Which, of course, is what Mitchell intended.

Here, then, for your further edification, is my conversation with the man himself.

GHOSTBOY: Were you at all surprised to have what is really the first breakout success from this year's Cannes festival?

JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL: Well, we really didn't know what to expect. We had a midnight screening, out of competition, which lowers expectations - it's better to be out of left field, because the French get their daggers out if you're nailed up to high. So we really didn't get going until about 1AM, and I had been doing press all day and I actually fell asleep during our screening. Maybe it was partly to escape it, because it seemed like, in a house of 2300 seats, only we were laughing - nervously, usually. I'd point to one of my actors and I'm like, "Your dick will never be bigger than on this screen," and we'd just start cracking up. But everyone else seemed to be so serious, and were like, "Oh my god, none of the jokes are going over, we're doomed..."

And I fell asleep. Narcoleptically, I guess. And then woke up to the marching band, and a ten minute standing ovation. We were like, "...wow. They liked it. They really liked it!" And the next day we suddenly had dozens of offers for distribution. We were ready to self-distribute, which is kind of like sucking your own dick, and we suddenly had twelve distributors who were offering money in the US alone. So we were shocked.

I guess we felt, since we started the film, there had been a bit of a change - and I think it's called Bush. People are just tired of being fed the same fear-based philosophy, in politics and foreign policy as well as their personal lives. There's that line in the film: "It's like the sixties, only with less hope." The thing that's like the sixties is that there's this thirst for something different. But there's also more of a feeling of powerlessness, because we're bombarded by media telling us that the highest form of empowerment is a reality show. Those things come into collision eventually, and I think by accident, Shortbus came out at the right time for people to feel a little bit of hope and a little bit of empowerment about a way of thinking that's not fear-based.

GB: While you were making the film, there were some other films with explicit sex that hit the big screen, and it became maybe a little bit less taboo. In retrospect, yours stands out not because of its graphic content, but because of its approach to the content.

JCM: I had been inspired by a lot of European films in the last ten years that used real sex, and some of them were quite powerful. Fat Girl was really amazing. But they're always grim; usually humorless; always end badly, with some kind of mutilation; and it was like - wait a minute, this is starting to feel like a cliche! The sex film that makes you want to kill yourself! Sex has more facets than that. Sure, it's connected to sadness, but it's also connected to joy. It's also one of the funniest things I've ever seen or experienced in my life. We all, in the middle of sex, go "what am I doing in this position, where the blood is draining from my - where am I?" It's a funny thing, it's an emotional thing, and it can be treated in a lot of different ways. Ours is just a very New York way of treating it, I guess.

GB: How do you feel about pornography?

JCM: I actually like porn. But I feel like porn is getting worse and worse, in that it's become even more formulaic than it used to be. It looks uglier. The video format makes it really alienating. And I don't believe anybody's having a good time! Porn itself is just one slice of sex. In fact, when you have too much narrative, or too many ideas, it interferes with arousal.

So if I was to make a porn film, I would take a page from what I learned from Shortbus - which is pretty non-pornographic, even though it's explicit, because there's nothing particularly arousing about it - and I would remove narrative and ideas and make it much more nonlinear and mood-oriented. I would shoot on film. I would let the actors have free range and spontaneity. In porn nowadays, everyone has sex in the same order, and you know the woman is not having an orgasm! You have to project so much of your own life onto porn to actually get aroused by it that it's frustrating.

I think porn has its use, and it's place. Unfortunately, it's become way more important than it should be, because young people now learn about sex only from porn, because it's available on the internet. It's a weird way to learn about sex, as opposed to learning about it from your friends and your own experiences and maybe your family, maybe health class. When I was growing up you got a little bit from everybody, and then you synthesized something on your own. Nowadays, getting it only from porn means that sex is associated with credit cards, with consumerism. You start thinking you have to have sex in a certain order. You have to figure out who you are sexually, what you're into, what your profile is. You end up being sixteen and saying "I'm barely legal!" You fetishize yourself in a certain way, almost like an Amazon.com profile. "What are you into?" "Oh, I don't know, I'm only sixteen, I'm still experiencing life!" "Are you bi?" Give us some time! It really is a skewed way of learning about sex that I think has to be combined with other things. And nowadays, because sex is being crushed by government and religion, from top down, it just balloons out into places like porn, and sex as currency, as illustrated by Britney Spears or somebody, women thinking about it in terms of power instead of enjoyment and connection.

GB: Did you have a healthy perspective on sex when you were growing up?

JCM: No, but at least I got it from different sources and could figure it out. Also, I grew up gay in a time when there was nobody out, nobody of interest, no role models at all - which in some ways was kind of freeing, because you could create yourself, you know? Nowadays, growing up as a sexual minority, you have all these people who are out, most of whom are pretty lame, and you grow up feeling weird and not belonging, and when you come out you spend all your time trying to belong, and you end up getting...really unimaginative bad gay disco music. Which is even more conformist than a frat party.

GB: Let's jump back to when Hedwig first came out. Did you already have follow-up projects on the burner, or were you even planning on being a filmmaker at that point?

JCM: Yeah, you know, the filmmaking bug bit. I wasn't really interested in acting anymore. I started thinking about what I wanted to do next, and I'd seen a lot of these European films that had sex in them., and I thought that they were interesting but could be done differently. So back at the time of Hedwig, I was thinking about this film, but I was also thinking about a childrens' film that I was working on at the same time, and this was the one that got financed first - the childrens' film required a lot more money because there was a lot of animation and effects in it. So yeah, I lost the interest in acting, was much more interested in writing and directing. And you know, I want to write a novel some time, make an album, go back to the stage. I don't want try to limit myself by saying this is only what I want to do. I tend to be more project oriented.

GB: The way you developed the script with your actors, in Mike Leigh's fashion, struck me as somewhat similar to the way in which you developed Hedwig on the stage over a few years. Do you gravitate more towards this organic sort of writing, rather than sticking with a set script?

JCM: Well, it really was about getting a sense of naturalism from the actors. And also being partners with them, because they come up with stuff that's so much better than you can write. In our case, the script was very tightly written, but they still had to hit every beat in the scene. A beat might be a line, or a moment, and they still had to hit all those moments, but I told them "I'll fire you if you say it as written. You have to paraphrase it every time you do it." And that would really stimulate this naturalistic aura in the scene.

And you can never over-rehearse it. Oftentimes, when you have a set script, actors don't want to rehearse too much, because it squeezes it dry, emotionally. But with this style you can really do it over and over and over and not feel like you're ever going to kill it. And often you get more and more ideas the more you do it, which is how we could actually rehearse a scene for two years - granted, every six months or something - and still have it feel fresh on the scene. We borrowed a bit of that from Cassavetes. Actually, Mike Leigh works differently in that he has a set script; the actors create the dialogue, but they settle on something. But for someone like Cassavetes, who would use his mom - who is not particularly a professional actress -doing a scene with one of the great film actresses of all time, Gena Rowlands, you can't quite tell who's the actress and who isn't. He found a way of working with non-professionals that's still structured.

GB: I think the marks of both Cassavetes and Leigh are evident in your film, but you also mentioned European films like Breillat's Fat Girl. What are some of the other works you turn to for inspiration?

JCM: Some films influenced Shortbus more than others. There's a film called Taxi zum Klo, which is a German film from 1980 that used real sex really well. But I really love all kinds of films. Fellini's Nights Of Cabriria was very influential on Hedwig, and on the end of Shortbus. It's a sort of musical ending. I love Bergman's films, like Fanny & Alexander. I'm a huge fan of 70s American films, like Nashville, Network, Dog Day Afternoon, The Conversation. My favorite Scorsese film is King Of Comedy, which is the one that he likes the least. Albert Brooks, Woody Allen, when they were good in the seventies, when they had humor and pathos in equal measure. I love good schtick, old W.C Fields and Buster Keaton. I'm interested in all kinds of stuff, and try to ram as much as I've learned into everything I've learned.

GB: What's your opinion on the current state of gay cinema?

JCM: Well...that's a hard one to define. There's some cinema you can definitely call gay date movies, like Another Gay Movie or Trick or something, and they serve their purpose. They have a certain form to them, and they sort of assume that because you're gay you're going to like everything in it. You could say the same about certain African American films - they're like genre films. You're going to relate.. There are codes involved, because you feel more part of a community when you respond to a code.

But I would differentiate that from queer filmmakers who have maybe a queer sensibility, like Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant, but their characters are from all sexualities and genders. And you could say that people who are sort of crypto-gay, like Visconti and Cukor, people who were closeted, have a completely different version of that. Almodovar his own thing that he works with. Ozon has his own thing. To me, it's much healthier when gay directors work with straight characters and straight directors work with gay characters. Brokeback Mountain had its own value; it reminded me of an old fashioned Sidney Poitier movie. Or Wong Kar Wai, who did Happy Together, which I think is his best film.

So I would say that it's a healthy environment because it's cross-sexual now. There's a teenage filmmaker in high school who's the nephew of my producer, who's straight but is totally making this gay love story about the football team captain and some nerd. He loves the idea of transgression, and he's a little straight boy.

GB: Going back to the film itself - of all the characters, the one that really interested me the most was the Mayor. Can you talk about him for a moment? It might be a case of cultural ignorance, but I wasn't sure if he was suppose to represent an actual person or not.

JCM: Well, you know, he's not based on anyone real. Some people are saying, "oh, is that based on Ed Koch, who was the mayor when AIDS broke out?" We don't really say - for obvious reasons, because we don't want to get sued. We say imagine there was a mayor, a congressman, a governor, who was closeted. And because of that, anyone who has some kind of power, imagine their position, where they, through self hatred and cultural bigotry, felt the need to stay in the closet. Imagine that impermeability, the negation of connectivity, trying to be an island and impenetrable. Imagine if that actually affected your job, which is obviously easy to imagine. And imagine that, because of a health crisis spread by sex, you were actually forced to deal with your self hatred in your policy. And you didn't want to get into it because you thought people would stigmatize you, and label you, and you wouldn't be able to be re-elected. You'd be a worse protector of the public health. Imagine that character knew it, later in life.

GB: His scene was really powerful. I was really sheltered from that sort of thing growing up, and only recently, with stuff like Angels In America, come to realize exactly how serious the AIDS epidimic was.

JCM: Kids growing up now, especially in the gay world, are very cavalier with their health. They're coming into a place where there's less stigma, but they define themselves only by the sex they have. Things go out of bounds, people aren't safe with each other. HIV is still around, and we still don't know what's going to happen to people after twenty five years of being positive. There's still a sense of Russian roulette. And this internet age of sex is really breeding a disrespect for people and for themselves. Crystal meth is part and parcel in it; it's the perfect drug for people with low self esteem, and it's worse than heroin in many ways, I've seen a lot of people fucked up by it. And I get really disappointed by gay dudes lately because there's this lack of respect - which I see throughout all parts of American society, obviously, not just gays - but there's this weird sense of "we're all going to hell anyway, let's just treat each other like shit." Granted, that's just a generalization, and I see a lot of love too, and creativity, but there's a weird sense of powerlessness that I've never seen before. You could see in the seventies and eighties that there was a fake sense of powerlessness, fueled by coke, but at the same time there was an idealism, and I want to see that coming back. Youth by definition is idealistic, and it seems like we're raising all these weird, jaded adults.

So the film has a lot of forgiveness in it. It's a pretty soft-hearted film, despite its agressive sexuality. We're all in the same boat. We all have experienced self hatred and or a lack of permeability, and we all have to decide whether we're going to be alone or not alone. I would argue that, to be truly alone, the natural conclusion of that is death. If you take it all the way down the line, if you really want to be alone, just end it. The film argues that it's impossible to be alone - and that actually might save us.

And there you have it. Shortbus is already open in select cities, and expands throughout October. Don't miss it. Go for the sex. Stay for everything else.

Until next time,

Ghostboy