Interview:
John Cameron Mitchell
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AW: The myth is very strong. I immediately noticed the almost fairy tale quality of the story. And for me, that lends itself almost to a kind of genderlessness for the story; it’s beyond gender ambiguity, and it’s beyond the whole gender-blender thing. It’s something almost new in a way, in that although it’s got a powerful sexuality, it just gets totally beyond gender, centralized, of course, by Hedwig.

JCM: Yeah, and to me sexuality and gender, which are often mutually exclusive, are just givens, but fluid givens, and in the story of Hedwig, I wanted to set up that these things were fluid, and ultimately kind of unimportant – to Hedwig, at least. They’re just part of the stew. One of the ways I ended up doing that was to have a woman play a man who wants to dress as a woman as one of the characters. I, of course, am playing a man who is sort of forced to get a sex change, and ends up sort of adopting his womanhood, and using it, having fun with it, but then abandoning it at the end. And sexuality is really kind of barely a problem for anybody; everyone’s just what they are. Coming out was never a problem for Hedwig – she had other problems. (laughs) So it’s the way I feel about sexuality, and to other people it’s more of a thing they have to deal with, especially in less enlightened places. But getting to the core of what we all think about, what it comes to is: Should I think of myself as partial? What does it meant to be whole? Can someone complete me? Why does this myth resonate for everybody? Which is why I think it’s by accident kind of political, because it assumes that those things that seem to separate us really are as simple as eye color, when you’re thinking about what really matters. But doing it with some humor and some animation and having fun with it along the way.

AW: Have you had the reaction from audience members that they think it’s going to be a gay movie, it’s going to be a bi movie, but they come out going, "Wow, that’s got universal appeal."

JCM: "Gay movie," "bi movie" – those are definitions that haven’t really been defined, though certainly a lot of annoying filmmakers are trying to define them as such. Gay culture can be as equally parochial and dimwitted and conformist as straight. So never having really felt a part of any culture, ‘cause I moved a lot as a kid and never really was from anywhere, it was really important for me to adapt and fit in wherever I was, but also it was important for me to move on, because I felt a bit trapped. Hedwig’s transplantation and citizen-of-the-world status allows for her to play around with all kinds of cultures and all kinds of genres and styles. It seemed appropriate to make a film that combined all the elements of the kinds of films that I liked, as it was to make a theatre piece that combined all the kinds of things that could be on a stage that I liked. Rock, drag, and performance art, stand-up and straight theatre – why can’t they have elements of all of those if the story is strong enough and the central voice is strong enough? ‘Cause anything goes now. The form really is so diluted and scrambled now, it’s like, pick the best. Pick the best of the form.

AW: You’ve got a natural gift as a film director. And I was really impressed with how you made the transition from stage to film so effectively. What kind of changes did you make, and what did you learn from by shooting film?

JCM: Well, we had a real strong structure of story. And the play structure actually was very useful for the film in that the play is in the form of a single night’s rock gig where Hedwig is telling what happened in the past and then returning to the present, and dealing with the situation in the present and hopping back to the past; a flashback structure that is very language heavy. And I wanted to preserve a lot of language, and I feel that some films don’t revere the word, don’t take advantage of the word these days. So we’d had a lot of time to hone the word, and Hedwig’s point of view through the words was important, but much less important in the film. So I’d keep the stuff that was really important, and then slowly, over a year, year-and-a-half, pare away the words that could be better and more comprehensively shown with images.

For example, we’d had a joke that kind of happened in the middle of a gig, as often the lines did happen in the show. I just wiped my face with something, and there was glitter on it, and I said, "It’s the shroud of Hedwig, ladies and gentlemen. It’ll be on sale in the lobby after the show." It just seemed natural for me to transmit that visually. I wasn’t wedded to any words; I was bored with them, in fact. And then in the film you actually see Hedwig doing that, and then magically, on a towel, appears a full transfigured face of Hedwig. So there was a lot of that going on. In fact, all the scenes described in the play you see in the film – everything was there.

One thing we also did, instead of one rock gig, we had Hedwig on tour so she could still talk to people, still talk to audiences; the film audience, ultimately. That preserved a lot of the language. And I looked at something like "All That Jazz" for the license to play around with styles and just write through her eyes and her memories. A style can be as varied as a person can be, so like "All That Jazz," scene to scene you can really change the way you shoot as long as it’s still coming from the same mind. I wanted to action very realistic. Like my favorite comedies in the ‘70s, like Hal Ashby, and Michael Ritchie, and Altman, you know. I didn’t want it to get into a generic drag queen, overdone, fake, camp, situation. And we had projections from the play that seemed natural to extrapolate into animation. So many years of working on it really gave us a lot of material to work with.

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