Not quite so angry - An interview with John Cameron Mitchell

I have to admit, I was a bit apprehensive going into this interview with John Cameron Mitchell. No, not because of his "angry inch," but rather for fear of being the last in line to a buffet long since raided for leftovers. Watching the excellent "Whether You Like It Or Not" documentary on the just-released DVD - and shame on you if you haven't seen it - it begins with a montage of never-ending obnoxious journalists asking boring questions of Mitchell, so what to ask of someone who has heard it all a million times before? But danger is our business here at DVDFILE, and we needn't have worried - Mitchell proved to be more fun, witty and wry than Hedwig himself. Time to take the wig down from the shelf...

DVDFILE: Is the film and now the DVD the sort of "taking down of the wig?" The last bow for you and Hedwig?

John Cameron Mitchell: Yes, it really is.

DF: What, no sequel? No "Hedwig 2: Electric Boogaloo?"

JCM: (laughs) Shock Treatment?

DF: Oh, no, please don't go there! How about you at 80 in a wheelchair with the Hedwig ‘do?

JCM: I really don't want to. Maybe someday I'll do a performance of the show for a benefit or something, but I'm quite ready for it to be on its own. I think it'll be a little harder than I thought to let it go...

DF: Are you afraid of being typecast forever as Hedwig?

JCM: No, because I'm not really interested in acting for at least the next couple of years, so that danger has disappeared. It's going to be all writing and directing, and I know what I want to write now.

DF: You've obviously had quite a year. Was there any particular moment in the past few months when you realized that you had created something that really connected with people?

JCM: I think it was the first screening at Sundance. We had just finished it, and as any filmmaker will tell you, you don't know if it is all in your head until that first real screening with real people. And when I heard people reacting...I really need the laughs to really know quite what was going on, because that is what I'm used to in the theater, that instant feedback.

So when we had our first screening, I could hear that it was the right kind of laughs, the same feeling that I'd get when we gave a good performance. From that point on I just really relaxed about whether this was gonna be received or apprehended in the way that I had hoped.

DF: Were audiences laughing in the wrong way really something you worried about?

JCM: No, I wasn't, I just needed to hear real people. You know, when you are in the editing room and shooting for a whole year, you start to lose that objectivity and you wonder if you're just fooling yourself about what's interesting. And also, having done it for seven years on stage, the sense of what's interesting to me might not be interesting to someone else because I'm bored with certain elements of it.

But, with the help of a great editor, we kept it in line. I was actually more interested in doing stuff that didn't have to do with Hedwig in the film, but when we're editing, I was like, "Oh, okay, this is Hedwig's story," so we cut some stuff out. Even some of the stuff you see in the deleted scenes, which didn't fit.

DF: The scenes on the DVD are presented in an interesting way...

JCM: We wanted to do a special thing that was a real sequence rather than just cut-out scenes, that told a little story. Which was actually fun, because we showed that at an awards show recently, and it was probably our only opportunity to hear it with an audience, and we got laughs, it was great.

DF: How do you think you managed to create a rock musical that, for once, didn't suck? Some have called Hedwig the "new Rocky Horror," which in a way seems like an unfair burden. For me, I don't think we've had a decent rock or pop spectacle since the 70's - and I'm leaving Xanadu out of this - but did you feel any sort of pressure to live up to the legacy of Rocky Horror, Tommy, or the like?

JCM: I think it is because we weren't basing our thing on other rock musicals. I came from a more traditional Broadway musical background - Fosse, Sondheim, things like that - so the way we went about making it was pretty traditional, it was just that the subject matter and some of the music was not as associated with theater. But the techniques were the same as the techniques I've been using forever in both theater and film.

We didn't really think "Tommy" or "Rocky Horror" as antecedents. It was really more about narrative as well rather than Tommy or Rocky Horror, where the songs are more important. Stuff would just be cut (from Hedwig), even songs, if they didn't serve the story. Which was alarming to my songwriters! (laughs) But everything has to be necessary for me, which is maybe a little bit different than some of the other rock musicals that are more about tangents, where going with your feeling is more important than a tight story.

DF: Another big problem is that most movie musicals or whatever tend to focus around a star, so you get all these silly sequences designed to be rock video montages...

JCM: Yes, or when you've got musicians making a movie, you get things that are musically fabulous but boring story-wise. Vice versa, when you get things that are more like Rent or Jesus Christ Superstar, it is more about the story and you lose the rock element. With (Stephen) Trask, he did encourage me to go with our ending, which is like a little concert and allowing things to be more free-associative like they might be at a rock concert. Which was hard for me to kind of go there, but when I did it was kind of liberating. So we learned from all sides.