An Interview With John Cameron Mitchell
by D-L Alvarez
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During the Berlinale film festival, I had a brief (tealess) afternoon
tea party with John Cameron Mitchell of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," my friend Dan, and an American queen who was hot for the waiter. The night before, John was present at the midnight screening of his film, which won the Teddy Award for best feature.
PlanetOut: It was amazing that you were able to get a German audience to jump to applause in the middle of a film at the first screening.
John Cameron Mitchell: They jumped to applause?
PlanetOut: Well, they clapped after the "Wig in a Box" number. That was jumping to applause for a German audience.
JCM: The screening last night went late -- it ended at 3 a.m.! I actually fell asleep. But the audience was great. Members of the German stage production from Cologne were there. The German Hedwig was there. He's great, a cross between Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen, a big, strapping, good-looking guy in a very traditional way. He has his own version. It's really different, and I love it. His interpretation is very low-key. He's a real rock star, and an actor second, well-known in Cologne.
But also last night the interesting thing was, this older
couple came up and said they were friends of my father's when he was Stadt Commandant in Berlin in the 80s. I said, "Oh thank you," because not many of my dad's friends from the Berlin elite came to the screenings. He said his name was Walter M--. I didn't know who he was, a businessman or something. After he left, people told me he was mayor of Berlin when the Wall came down! I thought, "Cool!" That's a good audience.
Dan Borden: By making this film, you were going where angels fear to tread, taking a beloved stage production and turning it into a film. Many great directors -- John Houston, Sidney Lumet -- tried to do this and failed. What films did you look at as examples of ways to turn stage productions into films?
JCM: Bob Fosse was probably the most influential as far as tone and just freeing it up. Especially "All that Jazz," where almost every musical scene has a different style, but the acting and the story are in the same style. The acting was very real throughout, but then the camera changes from scene to scene and the performances are motivated by these shifts from a real place to one of fantasy. "Hedwig" leans more toward being in a real place with two or three songs more in an internal place, a fantastic or surreal place. Fosse's films are the best example of combining theatrical and cinematic elements in a way that's integrated and works. Definitely "Cabaret" and "All That Jazz." It freed me up, and I realized I didn't have to do the same thing in every scene. Just like Hedwig didn't have to sing in the same style of music in every scene. What had to be constant was her performance. We're seeing the world through her eyes. That view can change, but we have to believe that it's her who is looking, that she's real and she's possible.
American Queen: Call me ignorant, but what does it all mean? The ending left me befuddled.
JCM: I used to be more the kind of person who needed everything to be clear. Some people found the last 20 minutes, which is similar to on stage, to be unclear as opposed to ambiguous. Unclear is more pejorative than ambiguous ... which is a good thing. Right?
American Queen: In the stage production, you can almost think that Tommy doesn't even exist.
JCM: That's an interpretation. I've never thought of it that way. My composer pushed me in the direction of a live rock concert, where you bring your own associations to what you're seeing. My favorite rock people use a little bit of theatricality and a little bit of narrative -- "Ziggy Stardust," "Tommy," Pink Floyd with "The Wall." I love that. It can be pretentious, if it's not done right. But I like the fact that at some point, "Hedwig"'s narrative story is over, the linear narrative. We have all the information we need for her to go inside her head.
In the play and in the film, she exits the real world and goes inside and has a dialogue with Tommy. On stage, she becomes Tommy so there's more to kind of chew on. That was the hardest thing in the film, what to do with that scene. And in a way, I really didn't know. Tommy was telling her that she had to rethink the way "the origin of love" is interpreted. He's saying maybe there is no other half, and you have to look within. She interprets and looks at it in a different way.
She used to think that everyone in her life took a piece, cut a piece off. But then she starts to think that maybe she's the sum of everyone.
We're really the sum of our memories, which means we're the sum of the people we know, for better or worse. So maybe Tommy was kind of a soul mate, but that doesn't mean she has to be with him. He was able to give her some information so she could move on.
American Queen: Good casting, by the way. Wasn't he also in
"Finding Forrester?" Yummy!
JCM: Luckily I didn't find him sexually attractive at all. That would have made it a lot harder to work with him. I don't recommend that.
Dan Borden: Andrea Martin was also great.
JCM: I had to cut a lot of her stuff out. It was hilarious, but the tone just didn't work. I wrote some scenes for her just to be funny, but in the editing we saw they weren't necessary. On the DVD we'll have some of her scenes. She has a scene where she has a cellular phone
surgically implanted in her head, so she's taking calls like on her tooth. And then she gets hit in the head with a dryer and the phone goes off and she's off the hook. It sort of stuck out.
American Queen: Didn't you cut out the first version of "Little Town"?
JCM: No, remember the scene with the Korean women, the Korean band? That's what they were playing.
American Queen: For some reason I thought that was "Long Grift".
JCM: "Long Grift" is gone. In the stage play it was the composer Stephen Trask who sang that, but he isn't really a character in the film. It had no place in the film. It was actually the only song that wasn't written especially for "Hedwig." It was written by Stephen at another time, but it was never narratively vital.
PlanetOut: Many gay filmmakers of our generation -- Todd Haynes, yourself -- are using rock music to expand the idea of gay identity to include rock stars and their fans.
JCM: The gay identity really has expanded in the last ten years. We all know "queer" straight boys, or women who are dykey. They have a queer sensibility, but they're straight. Rock-and-roll always had that.
The hardest-rocking people always had it. Little Richard was the hardest-rocking man for the first couple decades of rock-and-roll; the Beatles acknowledged that. But he was always in touch with his feminine side. So it was always there. I think a lot of gay guys especially got scared off from rock-and-roll because it was the music of their
"oppressor" when they were in high school. It felt like sports. It had to be reclaimed when you got more comfortable with yourself, when you realized it really is better to be masculine and feminine. You know, when you get to our age and you realize all that experience was useful.
At a certain point, you realize, "thank God I wasn't like that straight guy in high school I had a crush on," because that was limited. I guess when I was a kid, and Todd too -- he discovered Glam rock a little bit later -- but when I grew up in Scotland in the early '70s, I liked all kinds of music. Rock-and-roll was the music of rebellion against
the school I was going to and stuff. So it always felt natural for me. I get very frustrated when gay culture limits itself to a certain kind of music or body type.
PlanetOut: Or history. I'm not saying we [gay rock fans] weren't there, but the history is sort of ignored.
JCM: Yeah. It's like some kind of weird 1984 limited history. Right now, a "gay identity" doesn't necessarily put you in a defensive position. It's wider. Still, I'm so glad I'm gay and it made me a better artist, but it's not necessary to exclude anyone from an audience. "Hedwig" has always had a mixed audience.
PlanetOut: Are you a fan of Patti Smith?
JCM: Yeah. I didn't really get it at first. I remember seeing a drag queen at Squeezebox doing "Rock and Roll Nigger" for the first time, and I thought, "Oh my God, this is the best song ever!" But I wasn't a "Horses" freak or anything. Then I went to see her at a bar in the East Village, a private show at Nightingales. I was sitting right in front of her in this ultra-awed audience, then she grabbed me and just started dancing with me during "Rock and Roll Nigger," and I was completely converted.
PlanetOut: You said Hedwig was based on a babysitter ...
JCM: Yes, my brother's babysitter. A quiet, Germanic woman in a tube top, very still-waters-run-deep. She just seemed to be this cauldron of hidden stories, and making Hedwig was a way of going back and playing with that mystery, of filling in that silence with this nightclub, other personality, a woman who could be more verbose and act out.
American Queen: Did she masturbate you in the bathtub?
JCM: That came from this guy who lived next door who used to masturbate in the tub and tell everybody about it. That wasn't her. I never had an affair with my brother's babysitter. I swear.
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