The Devil and Rebecca Miller

Rebecca Miller discusses her new comedy Maggie's Plan, religion and art, in a story originally published in The Jewish Chronicle, July 8, 2016

It seems as if Rebecca Miller has been on a journey over the last decade that has brought her closer to her Jewish roots and, in some respects, led to her new film, Maggie's Plan.

The movie, her fifth as a writer-director, is not overtly Jewish (the eponymous Maggie is a Quaker), nor does it feature Judaic iconography the way that Miller's films have often featured Christian iconography. It does, however, continue a discussion about destiny and identity and freedom that she began in her acclaimed 2013 novel, and most Jewish work to date, Jacob's Folly.

During the five years she spent working on the book - an epic moral fable about an 18th-century Orthodox Jew who is reincarnated as a fly in 21st-century Long Island, New York - Miller, the daughter of the great Jewish playwright Arthur Miller and Magnum photographer Inge Morath, whose parents converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, experienced something new. "It was the first time that I really felt Jewish," she says, across a large round table in an anonymous London hotel room. "And I think it was to do with culturally understanding how Jewish I was."

Both the novel and the film share the theme of "choice versus destiny". But whereas Jacob's Folly often addressed it explicitly in angry conversations with the "Divine", Maggie's Plan slips its big philosophical ideas into a deceptively sweet, screwball comedy. The choice of genre is a first for Miller, whose films usually favour drama, and appears to have been partly a reaction to the zeitgeist.

"Humourlessness is the really scary thing right now," she offers. "I really feel that it's a time where comedy is the civilising thing. You know, intelligent, thoughtful comedy, just so we can laugh at ourselves and think about ourselves, our foibles."

In the film, Maggie (Greta Gerwig) sets out to have a baby, which she intends to raise on her own, using sperm donated by an erstwhile college friend, but her scheme is interrupted when she falls for an older married writer, John (Ethan Hawke). They seem made for each other, but when their marriage brings out the worst in John, Maggie plots to return him to his first wife (Julianne Moore).

There's a whiff of Woody Allen, a comparison not lost on Miller. Here, though, it is the older woman who ultimately gets the (slightly) younger man, gender-reversing the sometimes queasy age-gap relationships in Allen's films. "It is an inversion and it is playing Woody's game, a little bit," she agrees. "I was aware of it, for sure. It's there to be played with, and all artists play in a way."

Miller knew she was going to be an artist before hitting her teens. "By the age of 11 or 12, it seemed inescapable to me," she says, explaining that it had become clear to everyone that her creativity was her strength. "Without forcing it on me, I do think I was raised to be an artist. Like, almost cultivated. Somebody once described me as being like a racehorse that's been bred in a certain way, and I think there was a little bit of that."

She says her childhood in Roxbury, Connecticut, was "uncommonly quiet" by today's standards. "I remember we had a rowboat and a pond, and I used to go down there alone and just row around for hours, looking for frogs. I was almost in a trance." The solitude "built in me a big reserve of some sort," recalls Miller, "like a bubble that I could go inside. And I can still find that. Even in a crowded space, I can still enter that silence." Her childhood sounds lonely, I suggest. "It could be lonely at times," she admits. "But, for the most part, I wasn't lonely, I was just alone, which is different."

Her situation helped her imagination to bloom, but the directions it took her in weren't always healthy. The earliest thoughts she can remember having were about "religious things", she says -"Was there a Devil? What happened when you died?" Her mother owned a Mexican clay figurine of a chapel with people praying inside. On the roof above them sat the Devil, laughing.

"The irony that he was laughing on top of the church freaked me out so much, and really started this whole thing," Miller says. She became obsessed with the idea that the Devil lived in her house, and she got herself baptised because she feared going to Hell. Meanwhile, her parents were unaware of the darkness gripping their daughter.

"I was all by myself with that, which wasn't their fault. They were not cold people but they weren't the kind of people that were constantly asking you how you were feeling. Also, I was such a cheerful child. There was no part of me that showed what was going on. This kind of terror that was happening inside of me."

That terror fuelled her award-winning first feature, Angela, in 1995. The movie, about a highly imaginative 10-year-old girl hovering dangerously between religious fantasies and reality, was an exorcism, of sorts. But, Miller says: "I do think that my being infected by Christianity, like a kind of virus, [means] a lot of it has stayed with me, and I see the beauties of that religion, but also that there are some dangerous parts to it. And I think I was very vulnerable to those things because of guilt, and all the elements of guilt."

She wasn't drawn towards Judaism in the same way because it seemed to her like "a great male force. . . I couldn't hook on. Christianity - there always seemed to be more footholds, because it was more primitive. And there were saints and the Virgin Mary. And there were graven images, which I needed."

However, she realised while researching Jacob's Folly that there were dimensions to Judaism she'd been unaware of, and which resonated with her own interests and characteristics. When she dived into Jewish folklore, and the work of Bashevis Singer, for example, Miller realised it chimed with her own "storytelling and fascination with myth. Jewish folklore is just a goldmine of this stuff," she enthuses, "and really surreal and dreamlike."

Later, when she discovered gilgul (a Kabbalistic concept of reincarnation) and the idea of the return of the souls, and then saw how familiar it was to the family of ultra Orthodox Jews she occasionally stayed with, it made her think, "My God, this is so mind-blowing and so far away from what I thought of as Judaism."

Watching episodes of The Goldbergs, an American comedy-drama series from the '50s about a rowdy family of New York Jews, she started to recognise parts of herself in the character of the feisty matriarch, Molly. "She's like this big Jewish mother, sort of bossy and guilt-provoking, and a little bit of a caricature," Miller says. "But I was thinking, 'I'm a little like her,' and I started seeing that I have a lot of my character that's quite Jewish." She laughs loudly. "My mothering, I'm a very big mother. There's a lot of mother to my mothering. I run hot in that department."

She has three children: two sons by her husband, the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, and a step-son from his previous relationship with Isabelle Adjani. Not long after marrying Day-Lewis, Miller experienced severe writer's block and, in need of something to make herself feel useful, volunteered at a women's shelter. The experience gave her material for her first book, a collection of short stories about women at turning points in their lives called Personal Velocity.

This sudden inability to write was unusual - her mind is generally restless. Even when she isn't physically writing, she has "a story and it's like my invisibility cloak, and it's over me and kind of like protects me."

She adds: "I think that that's an extension of my childhood. Because when I was a child, I was always playing in my head. There was always some other game going on, and I don't know if it's a good thing or not. Sometimes I think it would be nice to just be able to live life, like really just live life, and have nothing else going on in my head. But whether it's a gift or a curse, that's who I am."

Given the vibrancy and vividness of her inner life, you have to wonder whether she finds it difficult balancing mundane reality and the world of her imagination.

She admits that "sometimes it can be very, very hard. But, overall, I am pretty good at focusing on my family when it's my family."

However, at "times of extreme intensity", this can still be difficult. "When I was finishing Jacob's Folly, it was really hard for me to do anything else," she says. "And when I was in pre-production on Maggie's Plan, I literally kept setting fire to the stove, to the point where my husband said:'Please, just stop cooking!'"

He may want to check that all the fire alarms are working in their New York home, because with promotional duties for the new film almost over, Miller is looking forward to her next screenplay, which she says will be more "operatic". She has also been thinking about adapting Jacob's Folly for the screen, but sees it more as a multi-part project than a movie, because of the book's scope and complexity.

"People have said, 'what a great idea.' But I have to figure out how I would do the fly. You know, what would you do with that?"

http://www.thejc.com/arts/film/160121/i-was-raised-be-artist

Marc Levin on his documentary Protocols of Zion

Marc Levin talks about his provocative documentary Protocols of Zion, and the impact of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, in an unpublished article I wrote for The Independent newspaper in 2005. With antisemitism surging around the world, Ken Livingstone obscenely linking Hitler to Zionism, and recent news that Gibson is working on a sequel to his biblical blockbuster, the article feels more relevant than ever.    

The New York filmmaker Marc Levin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The dust had barely settled over Ground Zero and conspiracy theorists were already blaming the September 11 outrage on the Jews. First there came the claim that there were no Jewish victims -- there were hundreds. Then the allegation that four thousand Jews had not turned up for work at the World Trade Centre on the day of the attack. In Brooklyn, a rumour circulated that rabbis had tipped off their congregants. Later, Levin, a humanist secular Jew, encountered an Egyptian immigrant taxi driver who put all the stories together, insisting they were true because it was written in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hundred years ago. “At that point I was like, ‘This is insane. What should I do?’”

Levin had good reason to be shocked. One of the most infamous examples of anti-Semitic propaganda, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion originated in Czarist Russia and purports to be a Jewish plan for world domination. Yet, despite being exposed as a hoax by The Times in 1921, the book became a crucial influence on Hitler, while one of the dictator’s most enthusiastic American supporters, Henry Ford, gave away a copy with every car. Disturbingly, it now appears that a new generation is turning to the Protocols for answers to their post-9/11 confusion.

“If somebody had told me in 1973, when I first read the Protocols, that this thing would be sold on the streets of New York, and would be sold out, I wouldn’t have believed it,” gasps Levin. “To me it was like a comic book from an age that had long gone.” 

But, as his unsettling if at times funny documentary, Protocols of Zion, reveals, Levin could not have been more wrong. Whether he is talking to a bookseller in the Big Apple, the tie-wearing front man for a White Supremacist organisation in the mountains of West Virginia, or a jailed member of the Nation of Islam, the story is always the same: the Protocols are hot. Even Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, appeared to have read them when he gave his incredible “Jews are ruling by proxy” speech, a clip of which is included in Levin’s documentary, at the opening of a 57-nation Islamic summit in 2003.

Maybe we should not be surprised. What with Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform to a party for a wheeze, Ken Livingstone refusing to apologise for likening a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard, and the Labour Party depicting the Jewish Leader of the Opposition as a pig and Fagin on pre-election campaign posters, it is hard not to feel that there is something in the air.

Meanwhile, according to the League of Human Rights of B’nai Brith’s 2004 audit of anti-Semitic attacks in Canada, media coverage of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ led to an upsurge of attacks against the Canadian Jewish community. In America the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has expressed concern that the Easter release of the Passion Recut will lead to the film becoming “the definitive version of the Passion story for the holy season”. Given this backdrop, the issues raised by Levin’s film are worth considering now, a few months before its US release.

“There are people in their 70s and 80s, like my brother-in-law’s mother who grew up in Poland and escaped right before the Nazis, who can still remember what Easter and Good Friday meant – they would hide,” says Levin. “Even before Nazism, it was fair game to burn some temples, kill some Jews, whatever. People are still alive that lived through that, so to ignore that is crazy.”

Levin wrote to Gibson because he felt that there were questions the Hollywood star needed to address, but neither Gibson nor his production company, Icon, replied. For Levin, the issue was not so much the film’s alleged anti-Semitism as “the context": how the film was released and discussed.

“[Gibson] was very skilful at making it a war with the Jews out to get him. A number of people have written that the martyr complex and violence, the two things that are glorified and celebrated in the Passion story, are the animating imagery in Mel Gibson’s life. So he would rather see himself martyred than as a peacemaker, bridge builder, or interfaith interlocutor. It fits his own self-image maybe more to be a battler who the Jews and others are after.

“That’s what disappoints me about the re-release of The Passion,” continues Levin, whose work, including the acclaimed docudrama Slam, has always been about trying to understand people from different communities, classes, races. “The guy already made half a billion dollars. He proved his point. So now why not use the movie to build some bridges, even if it’s to the more Orthodox Jewish and Muslim communities? Because, ironically, it is the most religious that have the most in common, because they’re all crazy. But I don’t see him doing that. And I can’t believe he’s not doing that.”

Maybe Gibson simply does not care, given the views of his Holocaust-denier father. There will no doubt be some who consider Levin’s inclusion of a recording of Hutton Gibson claiming that six million Jews were not killed by the Nazis but simply “upped and left” because they have to follow the money, a cheap shot. But, as the pugnacious filmmaker rightly argues, Hutton’s views form part of the background against which The Passion should be discussed.

“[Mel Gibson] thinks everyone’s trying to pit him against his old man. Hey, you could say you love your father and your father’s a great man but there are certain things you and he don’t agree on . . . but he’s never said that.”

The Passion section of Protocols of Zion, and a troubling journey through the world of perma-smiling evangelical Christians, takes us back to the historical roots of the deicide charge which led to the hatred underlying The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Holocaust. “You can’t ignore the question: where does all this come from?” says Levin. “It goes back to the charge that the Jews killed Christ. The Jews are evil. The Jews conspired. They’re always conspiring. So, in that context, the Passion story is radioactive.”

Nonetheless, Levin ultimately views anti-Semitism as just a part of a bigger problem of religious fundamentalism, and, apparently, as a symptom of the human condition. The September 11 attack, he confesses, “rocked some of my humanist assumptions” and awakened in him the “kind of tribal instincts that can be so destructive. That may be one of the reasons I was able to make this film when I did,” he muses. “I don’t know if I would be able to make it now. But right then, in the post 9/11 world, I felt some of that ‘Fuck it, they just blew up part of my neighbourhood. This is personal. This is war. Who gives a shit about humanism anymore?’

“That’s something inside all of us that has been manipulated and exploited so successfully by the Bush administration in our country. But this religious fanatic impulse, and how it can use some of your own humanist, democratic, tolerant and open society against you to destroy you, how you wrestle with that and not fall into the trap of just becoming a crusader who blindly marches off and creates more Osama bin Ladens, that is a dilemma. I still don’t have an answer to it.”

Ryan Coogler at the Zurich Film Festival, 2013

Ryan Coogler talks about his Sundance-winning film Fruitvale Station: a dramatic reconstruction of the last day of Oscar Grant, a young, unarmed black man killed by police in the early hours of New Year's Day, 2009

How common is what happened to Oscar Grant? 

“I don't have statistics for that. But I know that the idea of being shot by a police officer while you're unarmed is an issue that is much more prevalent in black males than it is in anybody else. It is something that does happen, and happens all over the country. The biggest fact, and it is something I have statistics for, is that the most likely cause of death for African-American males from age 15 to 35 is homicide, and primarily gun violence. Whether that's another black male that's killing or a police officer that's killing them, that's the way they're most likely to die.” 

Recently, of course, there was the Zimmerman case. Is the law is too soft on perpetrators? 

“I think this is the result of a lot of problems. There's not just problems in the justice system. There's issues in society that mean these lives are at threat in so many ways and in some ways can be considered to be expendable. I'm in no way, shape or form an expert on those things. I'm a 27-year-old film-maker. But I know enough about these things to know it's a human rights issue. It's an issue that is not specific to any one area. These are problems that exist worldwide and they manifest themselves differently in different cultures. Looking at the States we're looking at African-Americans, males, and we're losing our lives very often at early ages, very often through violent means or through incarceration. These are issues that are multifaceted.” 

How accurate is the re-telling of Oscar's last day and how much artistic license did you take? 

“When I started, the script was only from legal documents, from publicly available documents, things people, different witnesses, said in the trial, from all sides. And then from there I got access to the family. I was able to do interviews and talk to them about things that Oscar told them in the time they spent with him. Once I had done all of that, there was a small gap in the day, which is time Oscar spent by himself, and there I took some dramatic license with a certain scene I added with the dog. There was also a character that came from combining two separate real characters. Aside from those things, it was all real.” 

Did you get all the help you wanted from Bay Area Rapid Transport (BART) officials or was it difficult getting permission to shoot on the system? 

“We got a lot of help from the BART, which was ironic. I didn't expect that. I think it helped that the film was about Oscar and not about the case. Not just about the shooting. The shooting is a very small part of the film. Even though it has a major impact, no more than 15 minutes is dealing with that in a film that's an hour and a half. I think they were also excited about the fact it was going to be made in the Bay area; that it was somebody from the Bay area who's not pointing the finger at anything. It's more about this guy's life and the people he was close to.” 

So they were sympathetic to the project? 

“Well they were very interested in not being a hindrance to the film being made. They actually wanted to offer, like, an olive branch to the community. That is both to the film-making community and to the Bay area community at large. It was helpful that the General Manager that was there when Oscar was killed is not there any more. There's a new Police Chief. So they were very open to supporting the film.” 

How did Oscar's family react to seeing the film? 

“They came to the world premiere and that was the first time they had seen anything or read anything. I was nervous when they watched it and more than anything hoping that I got them right. You never know how somebody's going to view seeing themselves. And obviously it was tough for them because they were seeing things that not all of them knew about Oscar. Some stuff in the film, Oscar's mum didn't know. His family didn't know he was still dealing. So that part was very tough, obviously. And obviously it was very tough to relive that day for them, because it was not that long ago that it happened. But they were very positive and said very kind things about the film and about the performances in the film.” 

What impact did this case have in America? 

“Man, America's a very interesting country. It took me leaving the States to realise how different home was from other places. You got to realise when you talk about America that, spatially, it's a massive country. It's huge. So when you ask about the impact that this case had on the country it's kind of interesting how that works. It didn't get the national continuous coverage that other cases might have received. What did make it interesting was that the internet played a huge role in it.” 

People filmed Oscar's killing on phones, right? 

“Yeah, and you can still see what happened to Oscar on Youtube to this day, from several different angles." 

So what was the effect if not nationally then locally? 

“It kind of brought Bay area to its knees. It was right there in our community, man. It was something that everybody was aware of. Everybody talked about. People were in the streets marching and protesting in Oakland. And anywhere people caught the BART, they knew about this case. And the BART kind of runs like a vein throughout the Bay area, from the East Bay to San Francisco, so people knew about this. It happened right there.” 

What about elsewhere? 

“Outside of the Bay area, not many people knew. People who were tuned into these kind of things knew. There was a high awareness of it in New York, because in New York there's similar things like that and there's kind of a media time-line between New York and the Bay area. LA eventually became familiarised with what it was because the case itself got moved to Los Angeles, through a motion by the defence to take it somewhere people were less familiar with the case. So the case was decided by a Los Angeles jury that was actually absent with African-Americans.” 

There seem to be more movies being made about black issues that aren't just about, say, gang culture. We have had your film, The Butler, 12 Years a Slave. Is it getting easier to make these kinds of films? 

“Mm, I'm trying to think of the best way to say this. A dream of mine is to see media production, the people who are producing it, look like the people who are consuming it. And for a long time in the States that hasn't been the case. The people who are behind the scenes making media – and I mean artistic-oriented media as well as media produced for commercial purposes - they've been kind of homogeneous. They've looked the same way. No matter what the subject matter was about, it was coming from this certain perspective. So I'd like to see the day when there are more female filmmakers. More African-American filmmakers. More Asian filmmakers. More Hispanic-American filmmakers. I would love to see that day because there are people like that. There are stories like that that need to be told and I think art would be better for it. I think people consuming it would be better for it and more knowledgeable.” 

So are things changing? 

"I think what happened in this last year, not just on the scale of these films that are getting distribution, but also in the independent landscape, having gone to Sundance and to these other film festivals I met some of these other filmmakers that are coming up. Incredibly talented female filmmakers. Incredibly talented Asian-American filmmakers. Destin Crettin made this film Short Term 12 which is exceptional. Meeting these people, it brings huge excitement to me as somebody who watches film to see stuff from these perspectives, and to see a diversity of perspectives that are behind the camera. And in terms of the timing, I'm not sure why all these films are coming out at the same time. I think if anything it's coincidence.” 

Money is the ultimate deciding factor? 

“This is the thing. When it comes to money, film is the most expensive art form to make. Maybe building buildings, architecture, is something that's close to how expensive it is to make cinema. But cinema isn't painting, it's not music, it's something that takes a lot of money to do. And they weigh the risk and if something is proven not to make its money back, then people aren't going to put money into it. So my hope is that people see that these films are worth putting money into. That it's worth supporting these filmmakers that come from different backgrounds and different perspectives. And I hope it starts a trend of that direction.” 

At the moment these films are all being made independently, aren't they? The Butler was an independent film. So it's not cracking the system, as it were. 

“I think it's actually a good thing that these films were made independently. I know 12 Years was. I know our film was. We'd have had a tough time getting our film made with a studio.” 

Do you think the existence of these films suggests that the issue of race in America still isn't being dealt with properly? 

“Oh man, it's so complex. It's a complex situation. And it's a situation that's existed since the country's been. African-Americans have been there since the beginning of the country, so it's a situation with a long history.” 

These seem to come in waves so that's why I'm asking. 

“I think it will take a lot to resolve these issues. The issues keep changing. They keep morphing. You look back to what African-Americans were dealing with 50 years ago and it's very different from what we're dealing with right now. It takes on different characteristics. Now you have an African-American president and we still have young African-American men being killed in the streets, and life goes on. It's this huge complex thing to deal with and this huge complex thing to look at and it's difficult to point at what the solution is. And nobody wants to point the finger at themselves in the situation. Nobody involved does. Everybody wants to point the finger away. So it's something that as a country we've got to deal with, and as a people more than anything.”

 Fruitvale Station screens at Sundance London April 26th & 27th 

Copyright Stephen Applebaum, 2014

Daniel Radcliffe on Life After Hogwarts

Daniel Radcliffe Excels As Allen Ginsberg In Kill Your Darlings

If ever there was an actor who seemed in danger of being trapped by a role, it is Daniel Radcliffe. After playing Harry Potter in eight movies, there cannot be many places on the planet where his name is not associated with the Hogwarts hero. But Radcliffe is refusing to be boxed in, as his new film, Kill Your Darlings, amply demonstrates.

It is all a matter of attitude, he says, when we meet in London. Potter had been “the most incredible opportunity in the world as a start to a career. For me, that’s the only way you can see it,” he explains. “Because otherwise, it becomes whatever everyone else seems to want to see it as, which is a handcuff or a hindrance.”

Read the full story here:  http://www.thejc.com/arts/arts-features/113581/there-life-after-potter-and-radcliffe-does-not-miss-a-beat

Andrew Logan: Artist And Alternative Miss World Founder

Flamboyant London artist Andrew Logan, 66, discusses Jes Benstock's affectionate documentary The British Guide to Showing Off

There have been films made about the Alternative Miss World before. How was this presented to you and how was it different, conceptually, to the other films?

“Ever since I began, every single event has been filmed and documented.The first one was [Jack Hazan's film about David Hockney] A Bigger Splash, wasn't it? It really started with that one. I just felt that, living in a world where things are easy to be archived, it was an important thing to do. They're such wonderful events, I quite wanted people to be able to have a little glimpse of them."

So how did Jes Benstock's film about the staging of the 2009 event come about?

“We had three people up for the 2004 Alternative Miss World event,  which was held at the Hippodrome in Leicester Square, and we met three of the filmmakers. Two of them were very businesslike, and the third was Jes Benstock. I think he had an award-winning film and we just got on, really. So he documented the 2004 and went away edited it. And then he came back and said he would very much like to, in fact, cover all the events and my life. He felt it was an important part he wanted to give to humanity."

How long did he follow you for?

“For about two years. And then he spent two years editing. So it was truly quite a remarkably long time [laughs].”

Were you comfortable being followed around like that? You do seem – in fact everybody seems – comfortable on camera in the film.

“[Raucous laughter] I think, Stephen, you just have to get used to it. And he's such a nice man and all the people that work for him were very nice. So I think if you've got nice people around you, it doesn't really matter. He's part of the family now." 

Were you brought up around film?

"My parents never had movie cameras and things like that. Derek [Jarman, his friend] had quite an archive that his father shot, but I never had that. But I've always enjoyed being in front of the lens, I think. Showing off, really.”

Your art is very flamboyant so do you see it all as performance, in a way?

“Oh yes. When people say, 'What do you want to be called?' I say 'sculptor', because to me that embraces everything I do, from the small pieces like the little scuptured jewellary to the big one: the Alternative Miss World. It is still, to me, a sculpture. It's just working with a lot of people and they all have this amazing input.”

The Alternative Miss World is an ephemeral, one-night only event. So is that why it's also been important to document it?

“Well yes and no. I mean I do quite like ephemeral as well, because like all of us, we're only here for a split second really. We think we're here forever, but we're not. So it's really, I suppose, a reflection of our lives. But then I just think it's such an inspiration for future generations, hopefully.”

Were you surprised by the way the event took off and the way that it captured people's imaginations? Did you think, when you first did it in 1972, that it was going to be a one off?

“Every time I come out on stage or appear, there is an atmosphere that I've never felt anywhere else. And so far I have the same feeling every time I come out. It's just warmth, really. Just a warmth and expectation. It's just this feeling. I would like to carry on until I drop, really. And also because I think it's fascinating going over different generations. There are people who are now entering that are children of people who entered originally. So it goes from generation to generation. And it's such a simple idea. I suppose I do give it my little angle.”

Does each event, then, feel like the first time in a way?

“Almost, yes. Although organisation-wise it tends to get more difficult. I think when we first started we simply woke up in the morning and said, 'We'll do it,' and just did it. Now, of course, there's so many restrictions put on events and things.”

I got from the film that while you love the party, the organisational bit is not your favourite part.

“[Laughs] And that's part of it, I suppose. I've lived through it and come out the other end. Which is what's so wonderful. You do come out at the end and the event was exactly the same as before.”

Do you ever do these events to coincide with or as a reaction to events on the social and political landscape? In the film, Michael Cashman says he saw the event he co-hosted as a response to Clause 28, for instance.

“No, no, it comes entirely from me, I think [laughs]. I do it when I feel the time is right. Or I could be prompted. I remember Piers Atkinson, who is an up and coming Milliner now, and he was at the time working for me, some years ago, and he was sitting in the back of the car and said, 'Oh, why don't you another Alternative Miss World?' and I said 'Good idea.' And I did it. So sometimes it can be literally a response to somebody. It happens in mysterious ways, I never know what will happen. As an artist, I kind of open myself up to the world, which is important. So you open yourself up and all this stuff comes pouring through you, and sometimes you click in and sometimes not. I think that is exactly what the Alternative Miss World is saying: I will open myself up and see what happens.”

You talk in the film about transformation and people transforming themselves. Does this bring it into line with your work in general, because much of what you do is about transforming found materials into works of art?

“Absolutely. So that's very much the same, yes. The transformation. Through the different generations different transformations occur. Of course, I must say, I will see a costume come on and I'll think, 'Oh, that was 1978' or something. But they are different, of course. Nothing is original, as we all know. It's all interpretations of . . . . It's the same with this event.”

Do you think that through this process people sometimes discover things about themselves?

“Yes. I don't think we've ever had a baby born at the event but we've certainly had marriages formed and things like that. Life and death occurs. I think people do discover parts of their lives that they might have ignored or didn't know existed.”

Do you think there's a possibility that people then come away from it more complete?

“Yes, my message is about joy and happiness. Celebrating life. I think people forget it, don't they? They have so many pressures. So I'm hopefully there to be able to encourage them to realise this fact.”

Are you, in a way, giving people the space to play in that your parents seem to have given you and your siblings as children?

“I hand't thought of it like that, Stephen, but I think perhaps you're right. Yes, you're given a framework and you [play] within it. I give the contestants the day and the place and the time and everything, and then they do anything they want.”

I wonder if people sometimes feel that they need permission to express the more outragous aspects of their personality, and that's what you give them?

“I think this is true. As I said, there are so many limitations being put on us all the time.”

In the film it mentions that you had an experience with acid. How defining was that in terms of the way that you subsequently pursued your art?

“It gave me the confidence to actually create the art. Until then I had been an architecture student and thought about making things and doing things, but never had. I didn't have the confidence, which I think a lot of young people don't. Mine happened to be through that little trip. I only had one and I never touched it ever again. But it can come through other ways as well. This event, possibly will give people that confidence or make them think suddenly they want a change.”

How important was becoming part of the London scene in the early 70s?

“I suppose the London at that time was very open and the artistic community was very small. And fashion, really, things were very open. You could just move one to another. Everyone had gone to New York in the Seventies, so London was ignored, which was fabulous, because it was like a playground. You could just do anything.”

You went to New York but it didn't work out for you. Why was it a bad fit for you?

“Well there was a famous gallery downtown, I think Any Warhol was exhibited there, and I showed the guy my book of sculptures I had done, the Biba roof garden and things, and he just looked up at me and said, 'Smiling is out this year. Good bye.' So, as I say in the film, I became almost an alcoholic. Everywhere I went I was rejected. Everywhere. I was just interested.”

You've never lost your kind of joyful outlook. Has it been difficult at times to retain that?

“Of course there's pressures and things. I think you have to work on these things. That's why I took up yoga, which I've been doing quite seriously. And it's funny because it was age 50, I think, when my body suddenly said, 'I want to do yoga.' It wasn't my decision, it just happened. It was announced.”

You say in the film that if something is not flowing then it's probably not supposed to happen. So is this how you have led your life in general?

“It may indicate another direction, yes. So if something happens it means you just have to step sideways and you'll see another door, and you go through that door.”

How did you feel what you watched the film for the first time?

“[Laughs] I felt very humble. And yet, one thing that I thought that was fantastic was that Jes has created an entity. Okay, it's about the Alternative Miss World and me, and Michael [Davis, his life partner] and my art, and life and everything, but he has created something that stood up by itself. I just thought that was magical. He had created this living being. The message of joy really. He had created the message.”

The British Guide to Showing Off is out now

©Stephen Applebaum, 2011

John Cameron Mitchell: "A viewer can look at the Da Vinci Code and be aroused."

John Cameron Mitchell explores sex and relationships in post-9/11 New York in Shortbus.

Cannes, May 2006

Briefly, what impact did your last film, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, have on your career? Did you get offers from Hollywood as a result?

“I did get offers from Hollywood and stuff and they all felt weird. I know how people get fucked up in Hollywood, and I was old enough not to get seduced by the money or anything. I have my rent-controlled apartment in New York and I don’t have to pay a mortgage, so I decided to wait it out and work on stuff that was more personal.”

Some of the bigger distributors were initially considering picking up Shortbus. Did that surprise you, and do you think people want to make a statement with the film?

"I think there are people in all companies that aren’t necessarily happy with Rupert Murdoch or whoever’s in charge, and they try to stick it in. But it’s kind of fantastic that some of the larger ones were considering it, because it would be nice to actually get a little dialogue going in the press and stuff about the nature of sex in film and how it differs from pornography. I want to be a little bit provocative with this, obviously.”

How does sex in film differ from pronography?

“Pornography, to me, is pretty much defined as something whose priority is to arouse. You could define it by the intent of the maker or the intent of the viewer. A viewer can look at the Da Vinci Code and be aroused! Anyone can be aroused by that bottle there. But, in our view, we weren’t necessarily making anything erotic – and I haven’t heard of anybody who’s got a hard-on from watching this film. Therefore I wouldn’t say it had any pornographic value.”

I think one of the differences is like what one of your characters says, they “own” the experience, whereas in pornography it’s the viewer who owns it.

"There’s a lot of projection from the viewer, yeah. I actually like porn, once in a while. I think the porn business is weirdly polarised the way that interesting, smaller films are from Hollywood, like rich and poor. There’s huge blockbusters that feel like they want to be Oscar-nominated movies and then there’s a lot of small movies that are really individual, and there isn’t really very much in between. Porn is the same way. There’s like the factory, formula porn, where everyone has sex in the same order in the same video in the same bodies with the same music, and then there’s this very amateur stuff that comes out too. So it’s interesting how economically porn parallels Hollywood. There’s not much difference in Hollywood to porn.”

In the press kit you say that watching two actors having sex tells us a lot about their childhood and what they ate during the day. Can you develop this idea?

“I think that sex is kind of like reading your palm, it tells you something about your life. For example, for some reason a lot of people in charge, like politicians and stuff, like to be very submissive in sex. So I might make some extrapolations about someone from having sex. If I see two people who are very much having a conversation in sex, I can maybe tell there’s a certain sensitivity going on and maybe there was a certain healthy childhood. If there’s something a little more violent, maybe there was something violent in their childhood. I feel like it’s a metaphoric language that can be used more comprehensively than it has been. Certainly a lot of films have been using sex lately and they’ve tended to be very harsh, in my view, and a little kind of negative. I just think it’s pretty funny.

“I love, for example, some of Catherine Breillat’s films. They’re dark. Fat Girl is terrifying. It’s fantastic! 9 Songs has its own structure, it’s very different from Brown Bunny or Ken Park or Battle in Heaven. Not that our sex is really good sex. Everyone is trying really hard, but it’s maybe more ridiculous. It’s like people are trying too hard. But they’re also having fun sometimes, too, like in the national anthem scene. So there are other aspects to sex that I hope people will take of advantage of, because it’s just as varied as something like music. It really is a language that can be used in all kinds of ways.”

Can you develop a sort of psychological profile out of it?

“I don’t know. You tell me. The exposition of my characters is in that opening sequence, in the way that they have sex. The couple is acrobatic, running from one thing to another, ADD. They’re trying too hard. Something’s wrong. They’re jumping all over the place and it seems very strenuous. Is there something wrong in their relationship? Some people might intuit that. The other guy’s trying to get his dick in his mouth. It seems like too much hard work. I mean he’s trying so hard. Meanwhile, someone is talking about the orgasm being the most lonely place and that’s a wonderful thing. She’s saying I want procreate in the dark like a worm and we cut to him trying to get his dick in his mouth. He’s trying to self-fertilise or something. I don’t know. To me it’s like sex can be interpreted different ways character-wise, theme-wise. Another character’s whipping and not being very happy being a dominatrix. We’re getting to know her through the sex. That’s what I mean when I say it can be used in different ways.”

What was your mandate when you were casting? Obviously there are no “well known” stars in the film.

“Well try getting Jennifer Aniston to give a blow job! I don’t know if you would have any success. You know, I get really distracted, often, with certain kinds of stories when stars are in them. You can’t get past them. It’s like ‘Look, he’s doing a working-class guy. Isn’t he good at that?’ rather than just buying into the story right away. It feels like a stunt sometimes. Someone like Cassavetes, who would use a lot of the same people, and certainly Gena Rowlands was a star of a certain indie magnitude in the 70s, managed to get past that. You weren’t aware of, ‘Oh look, there’s Gena Rowlands. Isn’t it amazing she’s so different?’ You’re in the story. So we avoided stars. And, of course, sexually, American stars would have nothing to do with this. We also avoided professional actors, because they’re worried about getting a sitcom when they’re 45 and can’t do indie films anymore, or whatever their career goals are. So we had an open call. We just let people find out about us. We did a lot of articles in papers and had a website. People sent in audition tapes.”

So people knew from the beginning what was required?

“Oh yeah. And I knew that they should be co-creators. If they’re going to be this exposed, they should create their characters, they should name their characters, they should discuss what their characters’ goals are and have input in all sides. I would have the final say but I would never ask them to do something they didn’t want to do. For example, Paul [Dawson, who plays James], in our conversation, was like, ‘When I was a kid, I used to be able to suck my own dick.’ I was like, ‘That’s great. You know that’s kind of a fascinating image of a sort of feedback loop of somebody. It’s kind of funny, too.’ So we would think of it in those terms. I said, ‘How would you feel about introducing the character like that?’ and he was like ‘Wow, I guess I should practice to see if I can still do that.’ So that was how a scene would come about. So we cast the actors first and then came up with the stories through improv.”

Was there anything that you wanted somebody to do that they particularly wouldn’t?

“I really asked what their limits were as we went along. Like there was safety concerns and condoms, and this and that, testing, and everybody discussing all that kind of stuff. The women were a little more nervous about the sex beforehand. I think guys can approach sex and separate it from feelings a lot easier. It’s funny because when we finally got to the days of shooting, that’s when the guys freaked out, when they realised they had to keep it up. So our friend Viagra was on the craft service table. Sometimes they took it too early and it wore off, and they were flushed for the wrong scene.”

Did you want to make a comment about New York, the city being much more interesting and free 10 years ago and now it’s so clean, 42nd Street is not there anymore?

“Ten years ago, I guess it was before Giuliani, no-one really knows when they’re in a golden age, right till later. I’m sure right now people will look back on their youth and go, ‘2006 was fucking amazing!’ It’s what you’re experiencing at that time. Yes, New York is way more expensive than it used to be, though under Bloomberg it’s less repressive than under Giuliani, the nightlife is better. But this idea of the salon being in New York, it’s an ancient European tradition of welcoming people into your house, offering art, food. The salon in the film was based on some places I had been, and there was a place called Cinesalon that was similar; it was more on the queer side than the Shortbus salon. But these places exist, and maybe the film will inspire more people to do that instead of gathering in a bar or some place that is less conducive to sociability.”

How much is this coloured by post-9/11 trauma and the question of how one lives in New York alongside Ground Zero?

“It’s very much in the shadow of 9/11. Many of us in the cast experienced it and experienced the blackout that was not too long afterwards, where they thought they were dead, and then realised, you know, it’s just a blackout. There really was no violence, it was a beautiful, beautiful experience where you’re walking down your street and didn’t know if you were on your street, so you had to deal with the person that was right in front of you and meet the people in your building and have a party on the stoop. I was with some of these actors that night and remember going to a bar with no air conditioning, so everyone took their clothes off. Someone was deejaying on an iPod with a transistor radio. You know, it was fantastic. So it’s definitely a love letter to New York in the shadow of 9/11, in the shadow of Bush. Because, you know, it’s probably the place where he’s least popular in the whole country, even though he pretended to defend our honour. You know, coming to New York. Who asked ya? He’s fucked up in so many ways. If we could secede from the Union we would. It’s also a difficult place to come to now because it’s economically difficult for young people. There’s a line in the film, ‘Why do people keep coming to New York after 9/11, it’s so expensive?’ and someone says, ‘Well, I’ve actually heard it’s because 9/11 was the first real thing that ever happened to some people. The first unedited thing they could experience in real time.’”

Do you think that 9/11 has had the same effect as AIDS in the 80s? They’ve both created an atmosphere of collective fear.

“Well, I don’t know whether you remember right after 9/11, people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell said, ‘Well it’s because of homosexuality and foreigners, that’s why 9/11 happened.’ At least they’re honest. At least they’re speaking the certainty that they’re feeling. Because somehow the other - terrorists, the immigrant, the homosexual, whatever - they’re all the same thing for many people in their minds.”

Why do America stars find it so difficult to portray sex on camera?

“They used to say that all those sex stars of the 30s and 40s and 50s had terrible sex lives - you know, Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner and everything – and that’s why they needed the camera, to fill up something they couldn’t experience. They don’t in front of the camera because they tend to be the international stars and in the States as opposed to Europe, once their career founders they’re probably going to have to go on television and the networks are not going to want Jennifer Aniston having sex because the sitcom might then be threatened. It’s a career-oriented thing for American stars whereas in Europe it seems like it’s much more about the project.”

Now you have people like Paris Hilton having sex.

“Well she doesn’t really have any talent, so she has to use what she has.”

Do you think that sex sometimes correlates with loneliness? Sometimes when you see it as a single person in movies, it’s a flipside of loneliness, where they’re trying to get out of their head.

“Yeah, thank God for sex drive because a lot of people would never leave the apartment. At base it’s an appetite, like any other appetite. You know, for some people food is connected to love as well, but sex has all these tendrils and synapses that connect to other parts of our lives. Sometimes love and sex intersect and it’s very powerful, and dangerous to the heart. But yeah, the language of sex is kind of the language when we’re talking about connection. For me the film is really about the question that we all have to answer: are we going to be alone or not alone? James, for example, tries to be alone and ultimately alone by ending it [suicide]. You can’t get more lonely than that. He can’t feel past his skin because whatever has happened to him, he hasn’t been able to let anything penetrate his mind and body and soul. I think we all have to make that decision at some point and in a way it’s the most important decision that anyone can make, because it involves politics and it involves sex and it involves love. For the last few years, we Americans have been alone. We don’t want immigrants. We don’t want anyone. And it doesn’t work. Americans now are realising the mistakes that have been made lately based on these kinds of fears.”

The final song in the film talks about embracing your demons because they’re actually your friends – and it’s I guess what all the characters learn to do in the end – and I wondered what your demons are/were?

“You know, certainly I wanted this to be useful to other people but it’s been very useful to me. I grew up in a very repressed Catholic/military environment and sex was very scary to me. Growing up gay and in the closet and all that, it was like the chimera that was there all the time, because who you were attracted to was taboo. The distillation of this was the sex act itself, which was a symbol for all these things, and that was reduced. You know, like in the Catholic Church, for example, that act has to be a certain way, it has to have a function, be procreative, and it has to be within marriage. It’s so frightening to so many people that it has to be bottled. And, of course, we see the result of trying to bottle and crush something that basic. You can’t do it. It’s impossible to crush and destroy it. So I’m learning about that, too. I find sex much less scary having done this film. And I think it was the same for some of the actors, they wanted to confront some demons.”

© Stephen Applebaum, 2006