John Cameron Mitchell, the ostentatious director behind Hedwig and the Angry Inchand orgasm drama Shortbus, wouldn't seem the most likely candidate to direct Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole, a film about a couple grieving for their son, but then his has been a life less ordinary, he reveals to TARA BRADY
'I was just a teenager when I met Beckett," recalls director John Cameron Mitchell. "My friend Alan brought me along. He was Lucky in Godotand Nagg in Endgamein Beckett's own Parisian productions. Beckett was 85 but he still had an Irish lilt and his eyes vibrated. Alan asked him if he was writing or reading and he said 'No, I wouldn't be doing that' because his wife had just died. He was just putting things in order and enjoying coffees. I asked him to sign a poem he had given to me. Halfway through he said 'I've forgotten the end. Do you really need all three?'"
A baby-faced 47-year-old and a soft-spoken raconteur, if there were no John Cameron Mitchell, JD Salinger might have invented him as cheerier companion for Holden Caulfield or a long lost Glass brother. His biography reads like a vaguely absurd novel. Born in El Paso, Texas, the former army brat grew up between military installations in Germany and Scotland. During the 1980s his father was Stadt Commandant in Berlin until the wall came down. Mitchell the younger, meanwhile, spent many of his formative years at a Benedictine boarding school in North Berwick where older monks remembered notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley as a “nice gentleman”.
The film-maker can still, in common with his Scottish mother, speak fluent Glaswegian should the occasion demand it.
"I felt like I was in The Magdalene Sisters," he says. "I remember thinking: 'Am I actually getting caned here?' The sexual tension with some of the monks was fucked up. You know that play Doubt? There was this priest who was actually very kind and seemed to take pity on me, this little gay American guy who needed help. He was accused of sexually molesting other boys later on. It was so confusing.
“I was surrounded by the kids of lords but at the same time everyone in Scotland was super socialist: ‘we’re all the same; we all treat each other like shit’.”
He insists he has recovered from the traumas of his Catholic upbringing, though he acknowledges its lasting artistic influence. “I can’t ever escape completely,” he laughs. “All of my stuff has religious tones to it. I’m doing a series of films for Dior bags, all starring Marion Cotillard, at the moment. During the last one I realised I had turned her into a blend of Jesus and Mary Poppins, who then winds up in heaven. I was shooting before I noticed and thought: oh God, I am so Catholic.”
His screwy sense of spirituality has, to date, served him well. He caught the acting bug after the monks cast him as the Virgin Mary in a school production, and soon progressed to Broadway and TV, with roles in The Twilight Zone, Head of the Class, MacGyverand Party Girl.
He was already a regular feature on critical shortlists, having snapped up multiple Theatre Desk noms and a Village Voice Obie Award when he teamed up with co-writer Stephen Trask after a chance encounter on a flight. Their aim was to reinvent the Bob Fosse musical for a post- Diamond Dogsera. The result was Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a rock extravaganza detailing the misadventures of a botched, scorned transsexual out to take revenge against her former goth-rocker lover.
The project, an off-Broadway sensation, then a movie, parachuted Mitchell right on to Hollywood's lap and earned him another Obie, a New Yorkmagazine award, a Drama League gong, and an Audience Award from the Sundance Film Festival.
“So suddenly I’m at the Golden Globes,” he says. “The Globes are like our Hollywood prom. Attitudes are levelled out because, whoever you are, for once you are not the most interesting person in the room. The TV guys are like the student council commenting on the decorations. The bad boys and girls are in the smoking area, where I wound up with David Lynch and Steve Buscemi. It really was like being back in high school.
“So I am friends with everyone and am accepted by the stoners. Lynch says ‘nice hair’ as I walk away and into an elevator with David Hasselhoff and Helen Mirren. We all agreed that was surreal.”
He has since carved out a niche as the grimy, ostentatious film-maker behind the raucous 2006 orgasm drama Shortbus, and promo movies for folks such as the Scissor Sisters and Bright Eyes. Pundits were, accordingly, quite taken aback when news emerged that this unique talent had signed on for Rabbit Hole, an awards-season prestige flick for Nicole Kidman.
“I never like to do things that are just for money because I invest so much,” he says. “It’s really hard to make these things. I’ve said no to things that could have made me quite rich. I was too old to really be seduced by this stuff when I started. And I’m too much of a benevolent control freak to do stuff for cash. Doing something you are half-hearted about makes you a hack. There are nice people who are hacks. They are less demanding about what they do. Maybe they are more demanding in private life, who knows? But I have a cheap apartment. I don’t have any family. If my mom needed an operation I could pay for it.
“I am doing these commercials right now, but that is because they are fun. I get to work with Ian McKellen. This is a dream. I can make a living and have fun. I’m like the king of Thailand.”
Returning to the fray after a series of box- office disasters, Kidman was taking no chances with Rabbit Hole. She snapped up the rights to David Lindsay-Abaire's play about a couple grieving for their son on the strength of a theatre review in the New York Times– farewell then, Cynthia Nixon, who won a Tony for her performance in the same role on the original Broadway run – and went straight to Mitchell.
“I was off doing my artist thing at the time,” says the director. “I was really enjoying college tours and cabaret. Then suddenly a Nicole Kidman film project falls in my lap. Fortuitous, really. I had a 20-minute conversation on the phone with her, telling her how much the script moved me, and then we were shooting – just like that. We didn’t pal around a lot. She has a regal quality. But you immediately see the overly tall 11-year-old somewhere. Those are my people. They go in to theatre because they don’t quite fit in anywhere else.”
There was a little more to it than Kidman’s frosty allure. Growing up, Mitchell’s younger brother died at much the same age as the child in the script. This wasn’t his play, but he felt sure it was his own story.
“This is from the heart. We grew up quite Waspy. There was not much talking about feelings. ‘Just get on with it.’ My brother died when he was four. I was 14. My mother would think he’s up in heaven and that worked for her. It never worked for me. I was super- religious as a child, but I couldn’t believe in God afterwards. Doing this film was like dealing with unfinished emotional business. I needed to work through a few of those feelings in a way that would have been regarded as indulgent. I was in full therapy mode. The premiere was good. It was like a good cry. Like throwing up. You feel better afterwards. I lost a boyfriend, Jack, to addiction, and his family was there. We really went through it. But if you don’t go through it you never get to the other side. That’s what the film is for. It’s a good cry. It’s throwing up. It’s awful but you’ll feel so much better afterwards.”
Mitchell, who came out publicly in a New York Timesinterview in 1992, says he's happy to be a "queer" director, but hopes he can ultimately transcend the semantics.
"I am fine with the term 'queer'. But I'm so over all that formulaic, Lady Gaga gay culture. My job isn't to categorise or seek out commonalities. I am moved by what I am moved by and experience what I experience. Nicole's character in Rabbit Holeis a fish out of water just as Hedwig was, just as everyone in Shortbuswas. It's important for me to give people tools to make your life a little better. Anyone can make a film about how doomed we are. But what we really need is something to remind us that life is beautiful and that we find mercy in unexpected places. Stories like this one are like drugs for me. They alter my state. And I'm handing out my stash."
Director's chair His films so far
* HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)
Mitchell directed and starred in this film about a rock band fronted by an East German transgender singer.
* SHORTBUS (2006)
A sexually diverse group of emotionally challenged characters trying desperately to connect in New York.
