<==Mitchell
Reviewer Greta Christina has worked in and around the sex industry for over a decade writing about it, editing books about it, and living it. She edited Paying For It, a collection of articles by all kinds of sex workers: dommes, escorts, peep show girls, T-girls. Her novella called Bending is out in Susie Bright's book Three Kinds of Asking For It (published by Simon & Schuster and can be found at amazon.com). In response to overwhelming member requests for reviews of sex toys, sexy films, and other sex whatnots, Ms. Christina brings her girl-about-sex wisdom twice monthly to AdultFriendFinder. You can check out Ms. Christina on her web site, gretachristina.com.
An Interview with John Cameron Mitchell
John Cameron Mitchell created, starred in and directed Hedwig and the Angry Inch with musician Stephen Trask. His style was glam, his statements were about bent gender. This time Mitchell makes a film that focuses on the sex lives of the characters, called Shortbus. Impressed with the film, Greta Christina decided to see what Mitchell was like in person. And here's her exclusive interview!
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John Cameron Mitchell looks nothing like your usual image of a movie director. He has a slight build and a mild, unassuming manner, and when I spoke with him, he was dressed simply and unobtrusively in jeans and a plain T-shirt. He was visibly tired from a long publicity tour, and he munched distractedly on a protein bar while we set up. But as soon as we started talking about his new movie Shortbus, he lit up like a candle.
This movie is clearly a labor of love, and he spoke about it with a quiet, stubborn passion.
If you've heard anything about Shortbus, you've heard that it's the Real Sex movie -- the non-porn movie in which the actors have actual, explicit, non-faked sex. This single fact about the movie is by far what's gotten most people paying attention to it. But even though the working title was "The Sex Film Project," Mitchell feels that this view of the movie is too limited. "This isn't a movie about sex," he said. "It's a movie about what sex is about."
We sat down together in a small, generically pleasant conference room at his San Francisco hotel -- an oddly impersonal space to be discussing such an intimate film -- and talked for a long time about how Shortbus was made, and some of the techniques he used to make it unique. Unlike most movies, where the screenplay is written first and the actors are cast to fit it, Shortbus was developed in workshops. The actors were selected first, and the script and characters were developed in collaboration with them... in a process that took two and a half years. I might have thought that this long development period would have become gruelling... but Mitchell seemed almost nostalgic about it.
I'd been particularly struck by how natural and authentic the sex in Shortbus was, how much it looked like what real people look like having real sex. This is extremely unusual in movies -- both movie-movies and porn movies -- and I asked Mitchell what he'd done as a director to make that happen.
"That was the purpose of the workshops," he said. "We worked for a long time." The workshops had obviously been a powerful experience for Mitchell
-- personally as well as artistically -- and he spoke about them warmly, with obvious affection for the actors. Developing the characters in the workshops, he said -- their sex lives along with the rest of their lives
-- was what made the sex integral to the characters. And he said they'd done sexual rehearsals before they started filming... both to draw out the details of the characters' sexualities, and to help the actors feel less self-conscious about having sex on film.
The question of self-consciousness brought up one of the biggest bees in my own personal bonnet -- the problem of sexual acting. Using sex to express moods and emotions is something most acting schools don't cover -- acting students can spend weeks learning how to drink a glass of water in a way that conveys different emotions, but never learn how to convey a character by fucking or coming. So I asked if it had been difficult for the actors to do sexual acting, given the lack of training.
He nodded, and acknowledged that this had been a challenge. But he added that, by the time they finally started filming, the characters had been developing for so long in the workshops and rehearsals that their sexualities had become as integral and natural as anything else in their lives. He seemed a bit frustrated at the idea that sexual acting should be seen as radically different from other kinds of acting -- the point of the movie, after all, is to depict sex is an integral part of human life -- and he pointed out that while sexual acting is hard, it isn't necessarily harder than other kinds. "When you have to do a crying scene," he said, "there's pressure too. It can be as hard to cry on camera as it is to come."
At about this point in the interview, I noticed something no interviewer ever wants to see -- namely, that my tape recorder was working only intermittently. Mitchell has a very quiet, unaggressive speaking voice, and while this makes him a pleasant person to talk with, it wreaks holy hell on a voice-activated tape recorder. So I spent much of the rest of the interview asking questions and then fiddling with the tape recorder to make sure it was working okay -- and we both spent the rest of the interview being alternately irritated and amused by the situation. It was so exactly the sort of thing that would happen in the movie -- a technological device that's intended to help with communication actually interfering with it -- that it was almost entertainingly ironic. And we got back on track without too much trouble.
Sexual identity -- not just gay-straight-bi, but all shapes and flavors -- comes up over and over again in Shortbus, and Mitchell discussed it at some length. And although his usual manner during the interview was quiet and mild, this subject obviously stirs a great deal of heat for him, and he spoke about it with animation. With some dismay, he sees people using their sexual identity in what he calls "niche marketing" -- putting themselves in categories, "twink or barely legal or daddy," to sell themselves competitively in the sexual marketplace. He fears that this makes people self-conscious, distances them from their own sexual feelings. And he was visibly distressed at the way young people put themselves into categories so early, cutting off possibilities for the future. "We decide who we are and what we want," he said, "especially young people... it's not particularly healthy."
I asked if he thought this was improving. In my own life, I've seen sexual identities becoming more fluid, and people from different sexual identity groups connecting and interacting more than ever. But Mitchell is not optimistic. "I think it's even more ghettoized now," he said, shaking his head. "Not so much in San Francisco and New York, but in the rest of the country."
"I understand it," he added. "I needed the Gay Pride parade when I was younger, but I don't need it now." He chuckled and rolled his eyes. "In fact, I try to stay as far away from it as possible. I know the necessity for it, but you also have to move on." He understands why people use the niche-market labels when they're younger or first coming out, "but you have to get over that." And in the calmly defiant manner of someone used to ruffling feathers, he argued that this applies to sexual identity politics, as well as sexual identity self-marketing. "That '70s gay thing," he said, "of sex as a political act, is kind of adolescent."
But he acknowledges that sexual labels can give people a sense of power and visibility -- even if it's only the power of the sexual marketplace.
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| Mitchell as Hedwig |
His compassion for people struggling to define themselves was visible, even when we were talking about how harmful these rigid definitions can be. And he pointed out that "people who are marginalized" are more likely to do this kind of sexual self-marketing. "A lot of gay people do it," he said, "more than straight people."
Unfortunately, he believes, this niche-marketing of sex does more than just make people self-conscious. Mitchell feels that it puts sex itself out of balance with the rest of our lives. He spoke with particular fervor about how this affects gay men. In recent years, he believes, sex for the gay community has become "an addiction, which happens when the lovely things in life, drinking and sex and politics and art and love and friendship, are out of balance. When one of them becomes way more important than the others, whether it's the friendship or the drinking...given too much power, it becomes a compulsion, and becomes a problem."
And he sees this happening even more when sex is repressed and sexuality is marginalized. "Definitely for gay men," he said. "Sex, because it was denied, became a compulsion, an addiction, and it lost its pleasure."
This is a large part of why Mitchell depicted sex in Shortbus the way he did. He deliberately avoided making the sex scenes sexy or arousing in a Hollywood or porno way, and he deliberately made many of them frustrating or unsatisfying. To get at other emotional truths about sex, he said, "the sex in the movie is actually de-eroticized."
"There are all these other aspects of sex that are much more interesting," he said, emotional or touching or "just funny. So I specifically made many of the sex scenes unsuccessful, so people could get that cloud out of their eyes." He felt that the audience would be less distracted, and could pay closer attention to aspects of sex other than sexiness, "when the sexiness is gone."
(Just for the record -- I happen to disagree with Mitchell here. I found much of the sex in Shortbus to be very erotic indeed. But I know what he means. Shortbus is erotic in an "I can get inside these people's skins, I feel what they feel like when they're having sex" way -- but it's definitely not erotic in a "wow, look at those hot people going at it" way. And many of the sex scenes do go wrong, tragically or hilariously or both.)
Talking about sexual self-consciousness led us to one last question, another theme that comes up in the movie again and again -- the theme of documentation and self-documentation, sexual and otherwise. The characters in Shortbus are constantly filming or taking photos, of themselves and the people around them -- trying to make connections, but often creating distance and putting the world at arm's length instead. I asked Mitchell if he thought this documenting/distancing tendency was a modern phenomenon... or something people with artistic leanings have always done.
He paused, choosing his words carefully. "I think it's both," he said at last. "There have always been those of us on the short bus, looking at the people on the long bus... And like it says in the movie -- voyeurism is participation." He observed that we have a culture of passive participation -- TV, movies, etc. -- but it's not really as passive as we think. The things we absorb affect us, and our passivity is a form of action. The problem comes, he said, when this passive participation is unconscious instead of conscious.
"Not voting is a form of political action," he said sternly. "That's why we have George Bush as President."
Shortbus opened October 4 in New York, October 6 in San Francisco and Los Angeles and is now playing at art houses across the country. The film is unrated.
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