This introductory scene serves as a résumé of what Brazil was like under the military dictatorship and what it is like to try to make it here today. Oppressive, improvised, comical, dramatic, paranoid, and charismatic all at the same time, these qualities are blended under the peculiar writing and lens of auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho, as well as the world-class acting skill of Wagner Moura.

‘The Secret Agent’ dialogues with Mendonça Filho’s memoir-documentary ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ (2023): both use Downtown Recife’s classic film palaces. In the documentary, these theatres are fading memories of a bygone, elegant era; in the Solimões saga, they become a character alongside the picture, with a blend of colonial, neoclassical, and art nouveau architecture. The same sun that gives the distinctive coloring and shades also touches the skin of locals, granting Recife a unique look compared to more well-known Brazilian cities like São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, or Salvador. Mendonça Filho presents aspects of local culture that resonate abroad without losing identity—his film is a love letter to his childhood in Recife and its cinema culture.

Although Brazil has brought to the world many films depicting the dictatorship years, ‘The Secret Agent’ stands out. For the untrained eye, it feels like a B-movie, but this presentation is just a layer of a nuanced arthouse picture that can also entertain. The exploitation gene is more alive when the legend of the hairy leg is told during a friend’s meeting, and the narration is followed by scenes of an amputated hairy leg causing mischief in Recife’s night, which was, in fact, a way to expose the abuses of the dictatorial law enforcement agents during that era of suffocating freedom of expression. Not to forget that, according to the National Truth Commission, 434 people were killed or disappeared by the dictatorship. Nevertheless, experts like Eugênia Augusta Gonzaga believe this number exceeds 10,000 people.

Besides being another chapter of Brazil’s revisionism of its authoritarian past, ‘The Secret Agent’ follows the world success of Walter Salles’ ‘I’m Still Here’ (2024), in which a widow and mother of four defies the regime in search of her state-abducted, tortured, and murdered husband. Both films take place in the 1970s under the same government, but they feel very distinctive and showcase that Brazilian narrators have more stories from that period to tell, and ‘The Secret Agent’ keeps the Brazilian momentum in world cinema.

Since the last decade, Brazilian films have been gaining space abroad. To explore this trend, renowned Brazilian critic Sérgio Rizzo shared his perspective in an exclusive interview with The Big Picture Film Club. Rizzo explains the international award-winning picture in the global landscape: “For Brazilian cinema, the film’s successful international run represents yet another contribution to the self-esteem of audiovisual production in the country. Its international production and distribution alliances also help, following ‘I’m Still Here,’ to reinforce the image of Brazilian audiovisual production as a good partner, capable of creating works deeply connected to national culture and, at the same time, with the capacity to communicate with audiences in other countries, especially in Europe and the USA.”

Still, it is not an easy way to reclaim the role it had in the 70s and 80s as happened with ‘The Kiss of the Spider-Woman’ (1985) or the acclaim it got at the dawn of this century with ‘City of God’ (2001) and there is work to be done after ‘I’m Still Here’ and ‘The Secret Agent,’ according to Rizzo: “However, for the success of these two films to cease being merely episodic and become a permanent occupation of a space in the international spotlight, measures are needed in the area of public policies that strengthen the Brazilian industry in the medium and long term, which is not currently happening.”

A pool of international exchange under tropical weather

Brazilian pictures have attracted international talents like Italian legend Marcello Mastroianni in ‘Gabriela’ (1983), ‘My Hindu Friend’ (2015) with Willem Dafoe, and Frenchman Vincent Cassel, who has strong ties with the nation, was cast in ‘Adrift’ (2009) and ‘The Movie of My Life’ (2017). Late German veteran character actor Udo Kier was a collaborator of Mendonça Filho, playing the main antagonist in ‘Bacurau’ (2019), which also had a squad of foreign talents, and portraying a Holocaust survivor in ‘The Secret Agent,’ a metalanguage of authoritarian regimes and their everlasting impact on their survivors, and also his last role. These and other collaborations show that there is room for foreign talent in authorial and independent Brazilian films.
When asked what foreign talent can bring to the Brazilian table, Rizzo explains: “‘I’m Still Here’ and ‘The Secret Agent’ already feature foreign professionals, especially Europeans, in artistic and technical roles. These are concrete and successful examples of opening new avenues for internationalising work, which are fundamental to the audiovisual production system in the 21st century.”

‘The Secret Agent’ features impactful cinematography by Russia’s Evgenia Alexandrova, while ‘I’m Still Here’ has a rich soundtrack by Australian musician Warren Ellis. Rizzo further elaborates on these symbiotic international relations:

Just as the US audiovisual industry traditionally relies on the talent of professionals from other countries; the Brazilian audiovisual industry has its doors open to the participation of foreign ‘players’ in strategic positions. Actors and actresses, for example, can revitalize their careers by participating in auteur films with strong festival presence and high circulation on prestigious exhibition circuits, which, in turn, allows them to occupy spaces in the global media spotlight. Producers can associate themselves with local projects and benefit from this same privileged circulation.” – Sérgio Rizzo

In this current high-momentum period, Brazilian cinema can accommodate both veteran and emerging talents. Names like Academy Award-winning Melissa Leo, charismatic 80s leading man Philip Michael Thomas, and New Queer Cinema mainstay Guinevere Turner come to my mind as they can offer much on and off-screen. While actors that deserve greater leading status include Ireland’s Mark Ryder (Borgia) and local Alexandre Rodrigues, who brought ‘City of God’s Rocket to life. Although the future is uncertain, the Brazilian cinema community, alongside local and foreign talents and fans, should savour moments like the one unfolding in this unique, sun-bathed corner of the globe.

The Secret Agent is in cinemas now

The post ‘The Secret Agent’ Unveils Authoritarian Trauma and New Narratives For World-Cinema appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

‘Chasing Amy’ tells the story of comic book artists Holden (Ben Affleck) and Banky (Jason Lee). The former diligently tries to win the affection of hip lesbian Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), while his homophobe friend tries to derail their romance.
One of the reasons that make the picture polemical for the queer community is that Alyssa and Holden become a couple, which can be not only interpreted as Alyssa being, in fact, bisexual or fluid but as a trope of “the right guy saving a girl from lesbianism.”
Another controversy is the character Banky, a homophobe who uses hateful speech to hide his own homoerotic urges; thus, ‘Chasing Amy’ blames homophobia in the very community that dies from hate crimes, endures lower access to health care, and has their careers blocked by thick glass ceilings.

On the other hand, ‘Chasing Amy’ brought a layered supporting character in Hooper (Mustafa Obafemi), a Black and queer comic book artist who lives as a minority inside a minority, and it has a scene in the rain with solid dialogue between Holden and Alyssa that also highlights the acting range of Adams

A “lovely and heartful” complicated staple of the 90s indie scene

The picture isn’t an outright full queer movie but a story about a white man who falls for a lesbian written, directed, and produced by other white men, Smith and producer Scott Mosier, and the former kingpin of indie cinema, the infamous Harvey Weinstein who was the patron of Smith’s career.

Nevertheless, ‘Chasing Amy’ is one of the few 90s movies that brought queer characters to mainstream audiences, and Rodgers found a VHS copy at their parents’ home and watched it over and over while building his personality and surviving harassment which helps to understand the emotional impact it holds with the upcoming director.
During the interviews, Smith thanks Rodgers for getting the original picture “back” to him, as although it received praise during its release, it has been bashed for decades and had been relegated to a quiet limbo in the queer film canon.

In the documentary, Rodgers displays fluency as an interviewer, researcher, and storyteller, which is even more impressive considering his age and that it is his first feature, in which he outgrows the teenage fandom to see the flaws of the movie.
‘Chasing Chasing Amy’ is also a beautiful queer coming-of-age narrative with Rodgers blossoming in his identity, developing his love life with girlfriend Riley, his family dealing with his queerness, his intellectual growth during the movie, and the endearing support of Smith. This story should be turned into a feature film somewhere down the line.

The house that ‘Chasing Amy’ built on the backs of the Amies

Kevin Smith is known in the entertainment world for his movies that appeal to 90s nerd teenagers and young adults, his public persona with quick-wit and self-deprecating humour, and his kidult lifestyle. Once the director opens his house to Sav Rodgers and the viewer, it can be interpreted as an extension of his personality, which dialogues with the current zeitgeist of adults who can’t stay too far away from their idealized teenage bedrooms.

Rodgers wins the interviewees with his admiration and sincerity. He doesn’t feel threatened or crossing lines, and this skill favours him because journalists and documentarists need to know how to enter the lives and houses of others and how to leave them, too. “Welcome to the house that Amy built,” exclaims Smith when opening his household. However, it is figuratively lacking the two women who inspired Amy and Smith’s oeuvre owe a great deal to them: Joey Lauren Adams and Guinevere Turner.
Like many women in Hollywood, Adams and Turner have to put three times the effort of their male counterparts to have less in an industry that is fuelled by egos, sexism, pettiness, racism, homophobia, and harassment.

The Vices of Harvey Weinstein gives another scope on the 90s indie scene and what the duo had to endure in a “universe” ruled by the silver screen indie Caligula. The documentary shows a flaw when it doesn’t go hard on Smith’s relationship with Weinstein, and Adams defines the latter by saying, “We all knew who he was.”
At the time that Adams was dating Smith, Turner, a bold lesbian activist, had a “romantic friendship” with producer Scott Mosier, and Smith is very indiscreet and infantile when describing said relationship.

Turner linked with Smith and Mosier during Sundance 1994 when she was promoting her lesbian rom-com ‘Go Fish’ (1994) alongside director Rose Troche while the budding duo was there with their comedy ‘Clerks’ (1994). Both pictures felt like siblings as they had a limited budget, were very conversational, and were shot in Black and White. Still, the Turner-Troche rom-com is more experimental, aged better, and feels more like a true-to-life lesbian depiction than ‘Chasing Amy,’ which was inspired by a scene from ‘Go Fish.’

The lingering pain of the Amys

Rodgers first interviews Adams together with Smith, and she is pretty amicable. Still, later, the director has a tense round with just Adams where the actress describes that she would tell the movie story in another way, how damaging it is to go back to that era with all the hurt she had put through and the immaturity of Smith dealing with their relationship, supporting her professional outings after the picture and the harassment she faced in the industry.

Adams was expecting “another bullshit” ‘Chasing Amy’ interview, but Rodgers, with his naïve persistence, got one of the best interviews out of the actress. “I don’t love looking back at that time,” says Adams with a sombreness that gives gravitas to the moment.
‘American Psycho’ (2000) screenwriter Turner talks about how for years she felt enraged but now has made peace with the “lovely and heartfelt” rom-com, and while Smith is always respectful about the influence of Turner on the character and the story, Turner saw herself struggling to advance in her career and back then expressed to her friend Smith that he built a following after ‘Chasing Amy’ while nobody was watching ‘Go Fish’ and in response Turner heard that she was ‘jealous.’

There is a line from Turner’s lips that lingers and expresses how privilege works in Hollywood and in the world as a whole: “Kevin got an empire, and we were just some dykes.” It becomes even harsher after reading her powerful memoir When the World Didn’t End (2023) and knowing that she still struggles after her troubled coming-of-age.
The fanboys talking about their love for Smith’s work aren’t memorable; therefore, Rodgers could have gone deeper with Adams and Turner, who are the strongest interviewees of the piece, because ‘Chasing Amy’ is a small sample of the power dynamics in Hollywood, and Adams and Turner deserve to be acknowledged and have better opportunities.

Nevertheless, Rodgers dismounts a picture with high emotional value to him by a director that plays an enormous influence on his creative process without being offensive neither to ‘Chasing Amy,’ Smith nor Adams, Turner, and the queer community.
‘Chasing Chasing Amy’ also has a fluid editing process that avoids the stale images that plague many documentaries. In the end, it is a great emotional experience that reevaluates a picture that deserves to be remembered for its good and bad aspects, the representation of queer lives in mainstream media, and how other and better depictions came after it.

Rating: (5 / 5)

The post ‘Chasing Chasing Amy’ Delivers a Heartfelt Reexamination of a Controversial Queer Classic appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

Created by podcast veterans Todd Luoto and Jon Frechette, The Skies Are Watching pays homage to the golden era of the radio dramas of the past century with a cutting-edge story that won the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival for “Best Narrative Award” and an eclectic cast with veterans and upcomers from the entertainment industry.

WWE Legend Jake “The Snake” Roberts voices David Vance, actress Caitlin Stasey (Smile) plays Heather Haskins, actress and screenwriter Guinevere Turner (American Psycho) is Constance, musician David Yow (The Jesus Lizard, Under the Silver Lake) is Rodney, and voice-actress Caroline Morahan, a past collaborator of Luoto and Frechette, is Jana, among others that round up the performers.

The renowned Roberts is known for entering the pro-wrestling rings embraced by a piton snake to face the likes of Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold Steve Austin; however, in The Skies Are Watching, Roberts gives life to an elusive ufologist holding a secret in a performance showing his successful transition from the squared circle to audio drama.
“I’ve had many unique experiences as a performer, but this project was something different,” said Roberts in the press release. “It was exciting to bring new life to the timeless medium of audio drama and explore something different at this stage in my career. Working with such a talented cast and crew was a great experience. And, for once, no one expected me to bring the damn snake!”

The Skies Are Watching made history at Tribeca, where the jury explained that the accolade was given due to “drawing from the historic past of radio drama and presenting a story that feels breathlessly of the moment, this genre-bending series brims with intrigue. Its shifting, stylish approach to the medium always kept us guessing as top-notch sound design introduced us to its cast of bewildering yet relatable characters. Classic and timeless meets cutting edge.”

The influence of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre’s 1938 radio production of War of the Worlds is notable. In an interview with Big Picture Film Club, producer Jon Frechette affirms that his duo with Todd Luoto drew ideas with “a fantastic hook that we then approach with a degree of skepticism, regardless of how bizarre the situation might first appear.”

Frechette also explains that the impact of the media on the real world led to the question: “What if someone believed what they’d heard on the radio had been a real event?”
In an interview with BPFC, Luoto attests that the appeal of the show comes from the idea that “stories about the unknown are timeless, and one could argue interest in extraterrestrials, or UFOs/UAPs, has somewhat piqued over the last few years with real world research and revelations. Of course, these stories have never been out of vogue, but it feels like a particularly rich time to circle around them given what’s been in the zeitgeist.” Turner points out to me the factors that make this story work:

“Though the show is about UFOs and conspiracies on one level, it’s really about family and the universal anxiety we all have of growing apart from someone we love, of not connecting with someone who used to be central to our life. It’s also exciting because Jon and Todd did such a great job of making it sound like a nonfiction podcast that a huge part of the enjoyment of listening is being in awe of all the subtle ways they crafted the story to make it feel that way.”

– Guinevere Turner

Not only War of the Worlds but other narratives across different media attest to the power of extraterrestrial stories with human connections and their place in the collective imaginary, as the comic book character Superman was created in the same year that Welles performed his transmission. Cinema and TV have classics such as ‘Alien’ (1979), ‘E.T’ (1982), ‘The X-Files’ (1993 – 2018), and The Skies Are Watching is joining this group.

Promoting a grounded and natural environment for creativity

The Skies Are Watching is engaging because although it deals with extraterrestrial phenomena, it is still believable in the line of Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Arrival’ (2016). To add naturality, the actors interacted in the same environment and could give their input and improvise in the story.

“We feel this results in performances and characters that feel authentic and sheds artifice that can become evident, if not very off-putting, in the medium of audio,” says Luoto.
One of the performers who benefitted from this dynamic is Guinevere Turner, the Renaissance woman who is a screenwriter, actress, director, producer, cinema professor, scholar, activist, and author. Turner is known for ‘American Psycho’ (2000) and ‘Go Fish’ (1994). Nevertheless, in The Skies Are Watching, Turner jumps into the new challenge of playing Constance, a mother and a new persona in her thirty-year acting career.

“So interesting and unexpected! Acting in a narrative podcast was a first for me, and I expected that I would be in a recording booth listening to other actors in headphones – but no! Jon and Todd had us all together to record, running through the woods, hugging – everything we would do if a camera was rolling,” says Turner on the methods employed at the podcast.

Turner is enjoying a good professional moment as by March 2023, she released the book When the World Didn’t End: A Memoir (Crown Publishing, Penguin Random House), about growing up in a cult. The New Yorker nominated it as one of the best books of that year. With the award-winning The Skies Are Watching, Turner shows a nuanced range in her skill set and finds a new venue to showcase her talents.
Turner is used to cinema and TV, so working with only audio was “very fun and freeing” as it allowed her to be more playful, do more takes, and try different approaches. “I absolutely love the process and hope that the success of The Skies Are Watching leads to more chances for me to work in this medium.”

The Skies Are Watching premieres on July 5th, 2024, on BBC Radio 4 and Limelight from BBC Sounds. Produced by Jon Frechette and Todd Luoto & Executive producers Jon Scott Dryden and Emma Hearn via Goldhawk Productions.

Also Read: ‘American Psycho’ to ‘The L Word’: Guinevere Turner Details Her Transformative Storytelling

Also Read: The Influence of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds on Fiction Podcasting

The post BBC’s The Skies Are Watching: Reviving Radio Drama with a Modern Twist appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

For a long time, there have been groups inside the Catholic Church opposing each other. The latest example happens today as Pope Francis has more amicable eyes on the LGBTQIA+ community, which has drawn ire from conservative sectors.

In its history, the Catholic Church has problematic passages such as the Holy Inquisition, its role in the Colonization and the Atlantic Slave Trade, and the paedophilic scandals shown in the picture ‘Spotlight’ (2015). On the other hand, it is also regarded for its charity work as giving voice to the Indigenous community in the Amazon that suffers from human rights violations, providing food and shelter to São Paulo’s homeless population and chemical-dependent population, and in the recent past with some relevant voices opposing the late 20th Century South-American dictatorships and its abuses which led to priests being tortured themselves amongst politicians and activists. For good and evil, the Catholic Church has a rich history with dogmas, iconographies, characters, clothing, rituals, and other aspects due to its century-old existence, and ‘The First Omen’ makes good use of it alongside the moral dilemmas.

‘The Omen’ questions Christian morality by presenting if the adoptive father would go as far as killing the satanic child on holy ground to prevent the rise of the incumbent apocalypse Damien would bring. The sequel ‘Damien – Omen II’ positions the same question to the new guardian, Damien’s uncle, who grows wary of the teenager. In the third chapter, ‘Omen III: The Final Conflict,’ Damien is a wealthy 33-year-old man, and finally a journalist who is also his former love interest delivers the killing blow. The fourth entry, a made-for-TV movie that is also the lowest point in the franchise, brings the daughter of Damien as the satanic antagonist and once more questions if the protagonist would slay a child to prevent the advent of doomsday.

Much of the Catholic thinking lies on guilt, and ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a moral imperative included in the Ten Commandments. Killing is already a problematic action due to its moral and emotional implications, which makes slaughtering a child an even more abhorrent act that movies and TV series, in general, avoid. If they have it in the storyline, it is primarily off-the-screen.

Enter Damien…

The series ‘Damien’ (2016) is a sequel to the original film, but it erases the other instalments. In this tale, the moral question rests on the shoulder of Damien himself, a good-hearted 30-year-old war photographer who starts to slip into his demonic urges and surrenders to his heritage after asking Satan to resurrect his girlfriend, who took a bullet for him. Thus, love leads Damien to accept his role as the herald of humanity’s downfall.
In ‘The First Omen,’ the moral question is more insidious. The protagonist, Margaret (Tiger Free), a young American novitiate, goes to Rome to work at an orphanage as requested by the Church.

The caring Cardinal Lawrence, her old mentor, and the stern Sister Silva (Sônia Braga), leader of the nuns, represent masculine and feminine archetypes, as well as the father and the mother images, inside the film and Church structures. But the moral issue goes more profound than the previous entries in the franchise because the place serves as an incubator of hellspawns, showing the lengths that a sect inside the Catholic Church would go to see it once again rising in a world succumbing to the questioning of values by counterculture and civil rights movements, including in 1970s Italy. Father Brennan (Ineson), the expelled member of the Church, represents those who are considered rogues for taking a stand against unethical practices inside powerful institutions. Nell Tiger Free surrenders her talent and prowess to become three separate entities, whether as a caring older sister to the children, a seductive succubus, or a tested survivor.

Braga gives another showcase of her world-class talent. This time, she shows her shops as a full-blown villain, which serves as a dark opposite to her portrayal of the Portuguese nun who had visions of the Holy Mary in the Christian movie ‘Fatima’ (2020). When viewed in retrospect, both characters serve as a metalanguage for complex positions and portrayals of the Catholic Church.

Novitiate Margaret and Sister Silva represent pious and motherly images of sacred women ingrained in the collective imagery. Although there have been in cinema previous Catholic priestesses who broke the vows, these two compose a disturbing image as the former gives in to lust. In contrast, the latter is not a caring mother as she favours the male descendants of Satan while being negligent and abusive towards the female ones, bringing more moral drama into the narrative.

The behaviour and organization of this group acting in favour of Satan inside the Church can be interpreted as a cult. When I interviewed screenwriter and author of When the World Didn’t End (2023) Guinevere Turner (Charlie Says), she stated that one of the common patterns of cults is “patriarchy on steroids and in the rare case when there is a woman in charge it is still power dynamics on steroids in which women and children usually suffer.” Although describing real-life cults, which Turner knows from personal experience and extensive research, the writer’s words mirror the dynamics seen in ‘The First Omen.’

With its unholy cult as antagonists, ‘The First Omen’ positions a bigger picture than going up against the antichrist by questioning how a small group of people without considerable means can go against a powerful institution while questioning their own morality and choices.

Also Read: The Greatest Horror Villain of Each Decade

The post Navigating the Complexities of Good and Evil in ‘The Omen’ Saga appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

Still, although known for her maverick writing style, in 2019 Turner wrote an essay for The New Yorker that told her ordeal about growing up as a member of the Lyman Family cult and by tail end of last season she published the memoir When the World Didn’t End (Crown Publishing, Penguin Random Books, 2023).

Turner is known for the creative partnership with veteran director Mary Harron which generated four movies, among them the horror satire ‘American Psycho’ which follows yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale). As an independent artist Turner broke through with Cheryl Dunye’s ‘The Watermelon Woman’ and Rose Troche’s ‘Go Fish,’ with the latter she would work together in ‘The L Word.’

Meanwhile When the World Didn’t End allows us to understand the places she comes from as she was raised in a secluded cult managed by Melvin “Mel” Lyman, a self-proclaimed saviour who defended their isolation from a world that “had lost its way.”
In a video interview with The Big Picture Film Club, Guinevere Turner, one of the brightest of her generation, speaks about the creative process, the Harron partnership, pioneering lesbian representativity in film and TV, ‘American Psycho’s cultural impact and coping with trauma while working on her memoir.

Gabriel Leão: You’ve been contacted by publishing houses to write about your early life experiences with the Lyman Family Cult for decades. What made you feel like writing it at this stage of your life?

Guinevere Turner: The reason I wrote the book is because I wrote the movie ‘Charlie Says’ which is about the women who killed for Charles Manson, and their time in prison.
It was then that I realized that I’ve been avoiding talking about my childhood in the press. Because often I had been asked; however, it wasn’t relevant to the movie I was promoting, and I know how it is relevant to talk about it now.

In 2019, I wrote a piece that was published at the New Yorker Magazine, and it was one of their top 25 most read stories of the year and people from all sorts of platforms reached out to me, regular people who had been in cults or raised in cults like me, and then also publishers and agents saying: “Are you going to write a book about this?”
For years people had been saying: “You should write a movie or a TV show about it.” Because that is what I do, and I thought: “I got to write a book first to control how I’m going to tell this story.” It is tough to work through all that with a crew, a cast, and opinions of people with money.

Therefore, it seemed like now was the time to write the book, I wasn’t ready before, but then the opportunity was here. Hence, I decided to tackle it and it was not easy.
I haven’t written a book before, I write screenplays. The publishing house said: “Here is your contract, and you have two years.” I thought: “I’m not going to need two years.” And two years later I was astonished and figured out that I need two years, so I had to use these two years better.

GL: One of your most known working partnerships in cinema is with film director Mary Harron. How do you both operate, and why does it work so well?

GT: It is funny, I was just talking with her on the phone, because we are in different places, we are just about to make our fourth film together that we wrote, and she is directing. It has been a while since we’ve written together and just because we’ve been doing other things, and I forgot how much we laughed, we exceptionally have a dark humour which really makes us laugh.

We try to be in the same place, but for years I’ve been living in LA, and she lives in New York, and now I’m in Syracuse, New York which is just five hours North from New York City. We’ve known each other so well at this point, it is our fourth film and we’ve written other scripts together. We like to be in the same room because it is the reason that it works, and it was almost immediately as we met in 1997 and started to write together.
We are not competitive, and there is no sort of ego, so I’ll say some really dumb ideas and she will say really dumb ideas too. We are not embarrassed about that; we are not also shy to say: “I don’t think that is a good idea but what about this.”
There is a lot of ego in collaboration and sometimes people want their ideas to be the one that gets used, and with us is just the opposite, it flows easier in that way, and I think that is important as we are not competitive or self-conscious, we just try to make the best thing.

We have the same sense of humour, and although not all of our movies are funny, we have a sensibility in common, we work really well together. What is crazy is that when I met her, she was single, no kids, and we were just starting on our first project, and now her daughters are on their 20s and giving me notes and they give really good notes. I remember when I was in the hospital room, and they were born.

GL: One of the reasons you wrote When the World Didn’t End was working with the script of ‘Charlie Says.’ Do you see any similarities between the Manson Family and the Lyman Family?

GT: (Breaths)… There are many similarities. But that said as a person who studies about, has been in a community of cult survivors, deprogrammers, counsellors, and is very up on cults. The similarities across countries and decades of cults are kind of shocking sometimes. It is all just patriarchy on steroids and in the rare case when there is a woman in charge it is still power dynamics on steroids in which women and children usually suffer. I have never met Mel Lyman. I know Manson better than I know Lyman because I did a lot of research on Manson and he spoke every time a camera was pointed at him, not so for Lyman, and Manson lived about 30 years longer.

I don’t think Lyman cared about being famous, he cared about getting his music out there, about whatever his philosophy was, bringing people to a different kind of consciousness and way of being, whereas Charles Manson really wanted to be famous.
In my research, and in the way that I crafted my film, I really started to understand the reason that Manson practically lost his mind and started encouraging his followers to prepare for “The War,” “The Apocalypse,” and eventually killing these people. What else made the Manson Family infamous is because he realized he wasn’t going to get famous; therefore, he needed to crank up the stakes to keep his followers.

Manson was like this because he wasn’t going to get a record deal, on which he crafted the whole family around like he was going to get this deal, his music was going to get out to the world, and that didn’t happen. Manson was a con man; Lyman was an acid-using deep-thinking musician who got a lot of people to follow him though, still not always to everyone’s benefit. There is a lot of that man that I don’t know.

GL: Is there any possibility of When the World Didn’t End becoming a picture?

GT: Yes, I hope that it begins this year, I have just finished the script. Absolutely (want it), it was hard to write the book, to go through all of the press and talk about it, but also in both cases great. Still, it is very personal, has lots of traumas, and people connect to it in a way as they share their trauma. So, it is a lot and now I’m going to put myself through all of that again: write the script, get the movie made, go to the screenings, talk to the movie people, and journalists. I’m really putting myself through this several times, but I feel wise and strong enough to handle it without it really getting to me in the way it would when I was younger.

Because it has to do with my writing and I’m working on an adaptation to turn it into a screenplay and a movie or perhaps a limited series. It is too much story to fit into in just a 100-minute movie, but my manager was blunt: “We want it to be a movie.”

I tried, though I just wrote her last week and said: “I’m at the page length that an average feature film would be but I’m only twelve (years-old).” (Laughs)… Which is about the middle of the book. And she was like: “Maybe it is a limited series.”
It is hard because it is a difficult book to adapt and adapting difficult books is what I do, but not the ones that I’ve written.

It has hit me: “Who wrote this? How are we supposed to make this a visual thing?” Because so much of my book happens in my head, so much of it is what I’m thinking and not being able to really tell anyone while in screenwriting terms you give the character a best friend, a guru that they can talk to, you have voice over, but none of those things are true or seem right for this. I’m really challenged about how to make it cinematic, how to separate myself from the actual story, and just look at it as a professional. I feel very challenged, and it might be the most challenging experience I ever had.

GL: Another work featuring a toxic male figure is ‘American Psycho,’ which features Patrick Bateman, who is adored by bros and is the face of the sigma male movement. What are your feelings about Bateman’s position in culture?

GT: It is strange, surprising, and hilarious when it is not so disturbing, which is to say that there is passionate fanbase for this movie as we are still talking about this movie 24 years later which is great. I hope that everything that I make gets talked about 24 years later.

A part of the huge passionate fanbase of this movie are just toxic men who just didn’t get a whole layer of the movie, that it is a satire on a set of men, on commodification and capitalism at its worst. They think he is a “cool dude.” (Laughs).

That to me is the sort of thing you couldn’t do on purpose. I just assume that those that watch this movie understand that Patrick Bateman although handsome, flawlessly worked out, donning very expensive clothes, is still a desperate man who is killing to get noticed and still can’t be noticed.

A loser with all the worse kinds of hyperbolic male traits: he wants all the things, and it is not enough; women are just like nice suits to him, maybe not even that important; he is an actual murderer of women for sport, and everyone (in the movie) is like: “What?” (We both laugh).

I find him very interesting because this movie was not very well-loved when it came out in 2000, wasn’t well-reviewed, and at the premiere screening at the Sundance Festival it received awkward applauses at the end. It was painful.

But it has just gained momentum. Once, I asked my students who weren’t even born when it was released: “Why do you care?” One of the girls goes: “Memes. There is just so many memes, you have to know what it is.” (We both burst into laughter).
We made a very ‘memeable’ movie before memes were a thing.

GL: You’ve been for long a champion of LGBTQIA+ representativity on the screen, in particular lesbians. How do you feel about newer generations catching up with your early works, such as ‘Go Fish’ and ‘The Watermelon Woman’?

GT: Amazed and very pleased, especially in the case of ‘Go Fish.’ It is so very analogue (laughs)… We used (tele)phones and everything about it just feels very much of its time which was early 1990s. They just showed it as an anniversary screening at the Sundance Film Festival a few weeks ago and a young Brazilian woman was crying and told me: “I come from a different culture and things are different for LGBTQIA+ people in my country, but this movie has moved me so much, I feel like it is about me.”

That makes me happy because you really don’t know that if you made something universal until a lot of time goes by, and in the case of this movie 30 years.
I feel continuously surprised and sat through with it at Sundance, we laughed at ourselves, and we were so young, I was 24 (years-old) in that movie. It is also so interesting to have a record of yourself at such an age, not only what I looked like, but I wrote it, thus what I thought, my perspective on the world.

‘The Watermelon Woman,’ is so interesting because (sadly) people didn’t pay attention to it for like 25 years. Now, every time I turn around there is a still from it in something either about queer cinema, Black women directors, or what they call the construction of auto-fiction with Cheryl (Dunye) playing a Cheryl who is kind of her with this sort of half documentary style.

I was in my first semester here at Syracuse University, my students didn’t know, they hadn’t seen my name, they had just to take my class, and so it came up that I was talking, and I mentioned ‘American Psycho,’ then one of the kids checks his mobile and comebacks: “Excuse me, you wrote ‘American Psycho’?” And I was like: “Yeah, don’t you guys google your professors?”; “We didn’t know who you were. We didn’t have your name.”

And them everybody is googling it, and another student goes even more excited: “You were in ‘The Watermelon Woman’.” And I was like: “How these 19 years-old people knows this movie?!”
Apparently, it was a required class for freshman in this college, 90s queer cinema, and they show ‘The Watermelon Woman.’

GL: You also played an essential part in the writing of ‘The L Word,’ which you also named, and later, the series would have a sequel for a whole new generation. How do you feel about being part of and living through those days?

GT: It was my first and only time working in and writing for television. It is different from movies, it’s a room full of people, deadlines are strict, and it is fun; writing for film is so solitary, it is just Mary and me.

Before it had come out there is an excitement: “Is this going to work?”
It is the first television show that is specifically about lesbians ever, at least in North America. So, there is an energy about it: “How can we make this a fun show while also maintaining its politics?”, “How can we make it speak to lesbians, obviously our audience, but also to people outside of the community?” In the end, it has to be a good show, regardless of who it is about.

It was exciting, to write something in May and it is on TV on December. In film, something in May is like three years later (laughs) in May.
The TV show ‘Broad City,’ is about two millennials who are best friends, in one episode they mention both ‘American Psycho’ and ‘The L Word,’ and I was like: “I’m so famous.” (Laughs).

I worked with Rose (Troche) in ‘The L Word’ and ‘Go Fish,’ and it is interesting because a generation of lesbians grew up with the series; if we were told in our early 20s that there was going to be six seasons of a TV show that then would be turned into another TV show, and there would be a reality TV show that was just focused on lesbians, we probably would burst into tears of joy and say: “So many changes.” But I mean not that many changes.

What really happened was that networks and corporations realized that LGBTQIA+ people have buying power, and if you build it, we will watch it, especially lesbians as we were also starved for representation. They probably thought “fools” (of themselves) because they didn’t do it sooner. The show was well-received, it was on the cover of New York Magazine before it even came out. It is thrilling that the concept of ‘The L Word’ has become a shorthand for “lesbians,” a cultural mark, and a way of talking about a community, including making jokes that are not homophobic.

GL: How do you process having fans ranging from your queer stories and ‘American Psycho’?

GT: Hilarious. There is this small group of people who just love independent film who have seen both, but I think most of the fans of ‘Go Fish’ have never seen ‘American Psycho’ because, I, myself, would have never see ‘American Psycho,’ I probably would have eventually, but I would have been scared and I don’t like scary movies. And the idea of making those bros sit and go through ‘Go Fish’ and make those lesbians of my generation sit through ‘American Psycho’ (We both laugh), I’d love it. You know, we have many sides (gestures over her head), at least two, the one who can write satires about serial killers and the other who can write romantic comedies about lesbians.

Note: This interview has been condensed and edited for reading purposes.

Also Read: Iconic Scenes: American Psycho – Business Card Scene

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