/ 17 March 2000

Director out to murder

First-time director Kimberly Peirce has been described as fiercely articulate, favouring a lot of eye contact. On the phone, she’s laid-back, even soft-spoken.

You wouldn’t associate her with a film about cross-dressing, lesbian sex and bloody death in the Midwest. But that’s what Boys Don’t Cry is about, the true-life story of 21-year-old Brandon Teena who was murdered in a farmhouse outside Falls City, Nebraska, by John Lotter and Tom Nissen – friends of Brandon’s girlfriend, Lana Tisdale, a factory worker.

This was no ordinary murder: the “he” (Brandon) was a “she” – played in the film by Hilary Swank. Peirce read in the Village Voice of April 1994 of “the extraordinary story of Teena Brandon, a girl who’d been living in a trailer park, had little money, no role models, and who fully transformed herself into her fantasy of a boy”. She just had to make the film.

She refused to sensationalise the material. Yes, sensationalised, gratuitous stories “sell easily in Hollywood”. However, her producer, the formidable Christine Vachon, known as “godmother to the politically committed film”, and the driving force behind independent movie-makers, “took the big risk and stood by a first-time director. We got so much opposition with this movie. We also ran out of money.” Then, ironically, to get more financing they moved “from an indie film into a Hollywood film”.

“Christine protected the movie in that transition and helped me navigate the studio when she brought them in.”

Is the film gay? “Well, yes, it does come out of queer culture, and there are so many elements completely important to gay people that it would make sense if they felt completely connected. But I want the audience to look at Brandon as a person, to get past the category, to love him. And that’s what I’ve heard straight people say, how I love that character. Had they said, ‘Oh he’s a gay character’, then they’re judging him. I want people to think of it as a great love story.”

Would the lesbian sex between Brandon and Lana titillate a straight male audience? “If you look at the sex scenes, they are completely loaded with emotional information. They’re always about forwarding the story. I watch two men in a sex scene, I get turned on. That’s just human nature. I mean, this is the year 2000.”

Directing the film, in fact, was a love story. She attended Tom Nissen’s trial. At first, she couldn’t make sense of him, but then “I saw the dynamics between Tom and John, and I began to see that they were vulnerable.

“That Tom and John wanted the very same thing Brandon wanted, love and acceptance. They were trying to be men as much as Brandon was. And ultimately, Brandon was a better guy, and that dealt a double blow to their masculinity. So they struck out and destroyed him.

“The whole movie is a psychological exteriorisation of Brandon.” You learn “how fragile John and Tom’s masculinity must have been”.

Peirce, however, excluded the one black male in the story, Phillip DeVine.

“In real life he dated Lana Tisdale’s sister. In the movie there was no place for her. There was also no way to put him in the final murder scene.

It would have derailed the climax. He would have come across as a coward. It would have been racist and gratuitous.”

Peirce has always been interested in women dressed as men, because, she says, that’s how she grew up – a tomboy swinging from trees. She studied film at Columbia and the Sundance Director’s Lab. As a kid, she didn’t see enough films. “My understanding of film developed when I was older, but I had seen some things at that point that stunned me, the early Hollywood stuff.”

She has been influenced by a host of directors, from classicists like John Ford to neo-realists like Pasolini and Rosellini. However, John Cassavetes is major: “He took the camera, went out and photographed the world.”

Her next project is another true murder, a cover-up, that she won’t talk about except to say that she’s reading Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler and learning “how to reconstruct the form of murder mysteries”. She also reads scripts, hopes to co-write another script and “would be a director for hire”. To judge by the outstanding Boys Don’t Cry, she won’t be out for hire for long.

William Pretorius is the movie reviewer for Offbeat at www.news24.co.za