Having burst onto the scene with Hedwig and the Angry Inch and continuing to shock with Shortbus, writer/director John Cameron Mitchell is back with an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s short story How to Talk to Girls at Parties. We caught up with him to find out more about the boy-meets-alien film set in the punk rock suburbia of Croydon in the seventies…
STARBURST: What drew you to Neil Gaiman’s short story?
John Cameron Mitchell: It was really my producer who got the rights – he produced my film Shortbus – and he wooed me over a couple of years. At first, I was like ‘I don’t want to do someone else’s story’. But Philippa Goslett, the first writer, really created such a beautiful world and extrapolated the story into a larger story that was becoming more of a Romeo and Juliet story. Bringing the punk element in, which was really Neil’s youth, the comic book artist element, all of that stuff started drawing me in. I grew up partially in the UK in the early ‘70s, my mother’s Scottish, and I was having memories and always wanted to do a story in the UK. My sense of humour springs from my years there and I was just drawn in – I fell in love. About two years into being wooed, I committed – just like a lover.
That’s some courtship!
Yeah – then it took a while to finance it because it’s not necessarily a genre film; it’s not the kind of film that is easily marketed. It’s more like a ‘70s midnight movie and a fairy tale, a YA romance. Things that have formulas today. In the ‘70s, you could make hybrids and it wasn’t a big deal; nowadays we’re a bit more rigid in our categories, and we need to have stars and things like that.
Were you a fan of punk back when you were growing up?
I wasn’t, because it was the glam period when I was there – so I was a fan of Bowie and The Sweet and in the punk years, I was in Kansas and we didn’t really get much punk. It was only in the ‘80s that I discovered the ‘70s punk. Oddly, it was coming out as gay that opened me up to all kinds of music – punk stuff especially. Being queer, certainly in the ‘80s and even now, was an oppositional orientation. It was the time of AIDS, and ACT UP was kind of punk organisation trying to fight AIDS and fight government inaction so it felt kind of punk to be queer at that time. I developed my character of Hedwig in a queer-punk scene – a club called Squeezebox – in New York in the ‘90s so my punk life came later.
Did you have to do a lot of research into the UK scene then?
I did! I worshiped the Buzzcocks and knew a lot about Sex Pistols and such but it was really fun to go through all the histories of the Roxy club and find out about all the characters, the Bromley Contingent, Vivian Westwood and Malcolm McLaren and get more details. There are a few lines in the film that came out of that research. At one point, our character Enn tells the story about picking tomatoes over by the sewage plant because tomato seeds don’t digest so they go right through the sewage and lots of tomatoes grow where there’s shit. They pick them to get money for photocopying. I thought that was a great punk thing to do – to sell the fruit of shit to make your ‘zine. So I loved going through all that history to find detail for our admittedly fairy tale punk scene. The punk enclave in Croydon that we create, ruled over by a fictional Queen Boadicea is a less patriarchal one. As she says, Boadicea was the first punk so that has a more matriarchal and queer setting – more of a Peter Shelley/Steve Strange punk than the macho versions of The Clash and such.
There is a heavy female presence in your punk scene, much like there was back in the day…
Yeah, we have a lot of queen mother figures. Ruth Wilson, Nicole [Kidman], Elle [Fanning], even Edward Petherbridge, who plays our Trans-Queen Elizabeth of the aliens, is a kind of matriarchal figure too. So I like our matriarchal punk.
Since the film was made, there has been a real surge of youth rebellion again, which is very much like the ‘70s, is that something you could see coming or just hope for?
Yeah, thank god! I was hoping for it because we shot this before Trump, before Brexit, but we have an accidental Brexit metaphor with the aliens wearing Union Jacks jumping off a building to avoid contamination. It’s taken Trump, Teresa May, Boris Johnson, Putin, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary to see the budding of a new kind of punk. It’s best exemplified by the Parkland teenagers in Florida who are incredibly articulate and are saying ‘no!’ Rather than just smashing the system, it’s about tearing down the NRA and other structures in order to correct the ills. As Enn says ‘to fix what your parents fucked up’. Sometimes that can come out in a political correctness sort of way, punk did disintegrate into a system of rules: ‘that’s not punk, that’s punk’ – it was an anti-conformist music that became kind of conformist, and that’s always a danger when you have a movement. It’s certainly coming from the right place. Punk never really died, it went dormant for some; it’s always rediscovered in a new way and redefined. So I’m really hoping they get more done and demand more change than the millennials did.
You got Nicole Kidman in again [she appeared in Rabbit Hole], did she really throw herself into the part?
She said that she hadn’t played a role like this and she had a good time with me, so let’s do it’. It was a bit of a rush job because she was coming off a West End play, and she was sick on our first day – vomiting everywhere, it was very punk! But I had to send her home. She came back and did two day’s work in one day and really killed it. We were moving so quickly that there’s wasn’t always safety concerns, she got hit with a guitar in the head and spat on by some of the punk actors – by accident! But it kept happening, so she smacked the actor across the face and I kept in the film so it was all good.
There’s been a rise in younger protagonists in TV and film – such as Stranger Things – since you made the movie, do you think this will reach that sort of audience as well?
Oh, I don’t know; that’s for someone else to decide. I can only make it for myself and my friends. If I made Hedwig thinking about the audience, I would have cast a star or something or when making Shortbus, I’d have cut out the sex to broaden the audience, but then it wouldn’t have been the same film. I do want them to be liked by people who are like-minded, which is why I’m very open to comments and input when I’m making the film. I also don’t want to kowtow to the current trends or tastes. I’m making the kind of films that I grew up with in the ‘70s. I’m making a midnight movie teenage love story, a punk fairy tale and if people come, they come. All my other films were not easily marketable because they didn’t fit into perfect genre slots but they were discovered later over time. I’d rather have a film that people want to make a tattoo of, than one that ten million people saw. It’s really more important to me how strongly people felt about it than how many people saw it or paid for it.
I have good feelings about the UK but I’m not sure about the US. I think people might come but then sort of pass it along later when it’s visible on other forms. I really do want it to be for the teenage Goth girl in all of us.
HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES IN CINEMAS FRIDAY MAY 11TH, 2018
