John Cameron Mitchell

I know Jason the singer and they’ve asked me to do all their other videos but this is the first time I was free.

It’s for the song Filthy/Gorgeous which is about hookers mostly. So it’s set in a whorehouse.

Yes Ana is the madam, one of the band members is a john and the rest of the band is hookers. They all did great.

No this is my first one.

I approached it like a movie. It’s very Hedwig in a way because we used the same cinematographer, makeup and hair people. We shot it on 16mm so it looks very 70’s. It’s got a little narrative and there are performances. We followed this nude tranny hooker, who is a performer who does this great hula hoop act. So that gave it this theatre element. A lot of people from the downtown queer club scene were in it. We went to Club Edelweiss which is a tranny/hooker bar and got some girls. It’s going to look very real.

Probably it will be out in November in Britain and on the Scissor Sisters website. I’m not sure if it will play on TV in America. We will probably have a dirtier cut on the internet because it is risqué and we will probably have a fight with the label.

Yes they did goddamn it.

Jonathan auditioned for my film Shortbus which is the one that’s sexually oriented. He sent in an audition tape with parts of Tarnation on it and it was quite stunning. I kept up with him and encouraged him to keep working on it and he submitted it to the MIX Festival which is headed by a friend of mine named Stephen Winter. I alerted Stephen about the movie, then he became a producer and they brought me on as executive producer to help edit, advise and godfather it. Then I brought in Gus Van Sant as producer.

I only watched a two and a half hour cut of it. But we really wanted to get it down to an hour and a half. So we discussed structure and I suggested a different ending which he had to shoot. It was really just being a dramaturge for a play.

It’s absolutely honest without being self indulgent. It’s a true memoir rather than just a diary. Reading someone’s diary might be interesting if you know them but not as much if you don’t. A memoir is something that is more crafted and hopefully useful to other people. So many people have been moved to find some kind of catharsis in their own life but also moved to create. Creation was his salvation and he really truly was saved by making this film.

When Jonathan was 12 he was in the Big Brother program because he was a fucked up kid and smashing things. His “big brother” was the Houston Chronicle film critic and instead of playing baseball they went to art movies. The critic came to Sundance, saw the movie and was so moved that he came up to me and said that he thought this kid was going to end up dead in the gutter or do something extraordinary and he’s done the latter. The other thing that struck me in a purely aesthetic way is that to me it’s the first great film that is a true outsider film. It’s the first outsider film that has reached out to a mainstream audience in the way that Daniel Johnston makes music or how Henry Darger makes his visual art. They weren’t in any system or network but they just did it on their own completely without being in touch with anything you think of as the scene, culture or school.

He wasn’t really right for anything in my movie but he is going to have a cameo. I do want to work with him again because he’s a really good actor.

It didn’t so much in form because no one is going to make a film quite like Tarnation because there aren’t too many people who have taped themselves in that way for so long. The idea of a diary or an autobiography is something that I think people will warm to. I think it will spark a lot of homemade films in an autobiographical way. The reason the movie was so cheap was because he was using footage that he had shot all along rather than have a film shoot. But I think the price tag reminds people that it’s within reach financially to make a film your own way. I think it will have an influence that a really good rock record like the first Velvet Underground had i.e. not that many people bought it but those that did started a band.

I’m a film buff so I see a lot of movies. I don’t see many Hollywood movies because they seem to get worse and worse. I often have to be forced to see a major studio film. The art wing of the Hollywood studios still put out good films like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.

I’ve seen some old movies lately but I’ve been really busy. I saw the Ramones documentary and loved it. What I hear is great is Sideways.

I am going to be producing Shortbus but Tarnation was a bit of a fluke. I loved being a helper and if something comes along that blows me away I will continue to try to get it out there. Tarnation really moved me and really needed help. After Sundance, even though people loved it, no one was touching us as far as distribution. I couldn’t understand why because people are going to be talking about it. Just from a purely mercenary side it’s a great story for journalists. But they don’t trust that anymore, even indie distributors want tried and true stuff. Wellspring is the only one that stepped and they are the most adventurous distributors of art films today. Whatever you think of The Brown Bunny, they did put it out. That’s the kind of company I want to keep working with because they are just wonderful.

We have about 40 percent of our budget. We have to finalize certain things before we go to private investors for the rest.

It looks like it’s going to be cheaper. It’s definitely under $2 million but I think we’re thinking in the $1.3 million range now.

When all was said and done, about $6 million. So this is a lot cheaper and if I was an investor I would totally invest in it.

It’s crazy. But we’ll find it somehow and it will probably be a lot of wining and dining rich people. I have no problem selling it to people. I don’t get discouraged because I know it will happen and it will be great then those people that didn’t participate will be sorry. That’s what happened with Hedwig, some of the people who said no to Hedwig have been big enough to admit they made a mistake.

Eventually [laughs]. If there are private citizens investing sometimes they want a little special attention. I understand, it’s their money so they want to hang out.

No I’m not really interested in directing myself anymore because there are just too many things to do. We’ve been working with the actors for a year and a half off and on. We’re getting comfortable and working on the script which we will continue to do up until shooting.

Yes there is some but it’s very structured. They can say whatever they want but they have to say it in a certain order.

We kind of avoided that because we knew it would be a nightmare. Known actors don’t want to have sex on camera. There were a couple of people who were former sitcom child stars who were interested because they really wanted to bust out. But there was no perfect place for them. Everyone is virtually unknown.

The characters converge on kind of a modern day salon, in the Gertrude Stein tradition, called Shortbus in Brooklyn. It’s a salon for the challenged and gifted i.e. the short school buses.

Yes there is nothing gratuitous to it. All the sexual scenes are necessary to tell the story. When films don’t show sex they have metaphors for it. In our case we can show the sex and that will be the metaphors for other things in their lives. If someone is masturbating and tries to get his dick in his mouth it becomes a metaphor for him trying to be alone in life and not procreate with someone else. It’s not necessarily to be erotic though there may be erotic byproduct to it however the purpose isn’t to get the audience all hot and bothered. It’s really to go places they haven’t been emotionally and even intellectually. People keep telling me that if I show everything it’s not hot but I’m not trying to be hot, sex has other levels. Sometimes sex is sad and sometimes it’s hysterically funny. We forget that when we see only porn and only European art films which tend to be very grim.

I’m not so much into video anymore. I used to watch video but erotically I’m more turned on by images because there is more imagination involved but I’m definitely not as much into porn as I was when I was younger.

Very briefly. He was an investor in the Hedwig production in LA.

I didn’t but he was very sweet.

It went great. It was a smash sellout. I sang with Le Tigre, Margaret Cho and Bob Mould. We did a second wedROCK with Henry Rollins, Bob Mould and Sandra Bernhard.

I would under the right circumstances but it’s a hard thing to say. I can’t really decide it until there is a person.

They have a dream. But to me it’s only going to work if someone else wants to. Marriage isn’t in my agenda right now but someone telling me I’m subhuman is in my agenda to resist. Fuck you hands off. You’re supposed to be Republican and supposed to want government out of your lives and they’re just hypocrites. A lot of people are being political right now and I’m just so freaked out so I’m just going to go to Ohio next week and work through the election. There is a group in Ohio working on the youth vote so they are having parties every weekend to mobilize so I might DJ or sing there.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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