Kimberly Pierce, in her directorial debut, directed Hilary Swank to an Academy Award for Best Actress. She spoke passionately about her experience at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge before a packed audience of Women in Film and Video. Photo Credit: Bill McCormack

On April 15th, I had the unique honor and pleasure of interviewing Kimberly Peirce backstage after her presentation on making and funding her film BOYS DON’T CRY at the Women In Filmmaking event at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. Kimberly, a thirty-two year old alumna of Columbia Film School, has an incredibly expansive, down-to-earth way about her. Her creative brilliance shown through her answers to the questions that follow.

Q: When did your appetite for filmmaking begin?

KP: Probably when I came out of the womb; it got much larger at eight years old when I was doing an animation. I loved bringing characters to life - they were like little friends to me, little human beings. I would draw them, cut them out, and photograph them. Then, when I was in Japan for two years, I had a dark room, and I used to [film] Sumo wrestlers, what used to be the geisha girls. I [was inspired] particularly by the neo-realists—Pasolini, Cassavetes, Scorsese—guys who picked up the camera and went out and photographed people "the way it was"; and then, on the other side, the poetic realists and the surrealists: Mizoguchi, Michael Powell, Irvin Lee Roy—people who entered into the imagination. And then my love affair with film catapulted.

The term "visionary," to me, meant "personal stake." It’s a person or a person’s passion being worked out through their craft. I love the idea that you can look at a movie, and you can tell when it was made. The thing that’s interesting is that as much as my movie is personal, it’s also a completely cultural product. I am a moment in this time that never was, particularly as a woman making films. My movie is a reflection of that. In the same way, I could not make BOYS DON’T CRY next year. It is what it was, and that’s why you have to move on. But it’s an ongoing, endless love affair.

Q: You’ve spoken about being a part of the culture and, at other times, as having a political component in that it makes a statement against hate crime. Do you feel that it’s important to make a political statement with all your films?

KP: No, I actually didn’t set out to make a [political] statement. I think the statement was the product. What I did set out to do was to get over, first of all, the grief that I felt over losing Brandon, and the only way to do that was to bring him to life. So, it’s like going back to being eight years old and bringing those little people to life. It’s that there’s such joy to me in the character, to animating them, bringing them to life, and then, particularly with these kind of movies, in [figuring out the answer to the question] "How can we make people connect to them?" And I can tell you about the process, which is "if you can love this thing that I created, well then you won’t destroy it the way you did in real life." So it is political by its nature, but I don’t start out with a political agenda—I start out with a pure love of drama. But yes, my next film is actually incredibly political. But, if I think politically, then it won’t be human and fun. It’s the same thing with the actor. I can’t tell the actor "What you’re doing is important, or complicated, or political"; I have to just say "You want to prove your worth," or "You want to get love". I have to just make it the simplest thing possible so that it’s tapping into that emotional charge.

Q: You loved Brandon’s character so much. When you wrote the script, was it difficult for you to then have to write his demise?

KP: You have a weird relationship to scenes, because you actually do go through the emotions of the scenes. I have a writing partner, and we’ll fight when were doing the fight scenes, and we’re laughing when we’re doing [a lighter scene], so you do go through the emotions of it. It’s funny, it’s not fully real when you’re writing it, because you’re thinking about emotional information. So, in part, it’s real in one hemisphere of your brain, but then there’s another part where you say, "Oh, this is where the love triangle comes to fruition, and therefore we need to have Brandon, John, and Lana in the same space and we need Lana and Brandon to connect. And then we need that connection to be seen by John and then John lashes out and he destroys that connection and therefore he kills Brandon." You go in and out of being completely inside the emotions and also really looking at it [from the perspective of] "what’s the information that the audience is getting out of this?" I think the hard part was just filming. Filming [the murder] was really painful.

Q: More painful than the rape?

KP: The most painful was the stripping, actually. Oddly enough the murder was the least painful, the rape was the second least, but then the stripping was terrible for us, because it was the destruction of his soul. When they stripped him and when we filmed it, it was very claustrophobic — that was the scene that when we filmed it, we filmed it in a proscenium style, we ran out and were sick.

Q: The stripping was, I felt, from the viewer’s perspective, the most humiliating thing that happened to Brandon.

KP: So, in a weird way, when you’re writing it and directing it and making it, you’re not "dead on" in the emotion, but you’re in that emotion. The murder, though, was tough when I saw him get shot. But [Hillary Swank] did this thing—I said to her to look at Chloe [Sevigny, who played Lana], and she didn’t, she looked at me, and we only had one take on the murder scene, because the squib makes such a mess. So, we set it up, and then I told [Hillary] what her emotional need was, and right before she got shot, she looked at me, and it was like an absolute moment of joy, and then he was dead, because I said to her, "Brandon finds peace with Lana before he gets shot." So, him getting shot was life of the spirit, death of the body, which is classic heroic structure. So even though it was incredibly painful seeing him dead, filming it had a moment of freedom to it, and yet I think when I watch it, it’s very sad to me. It’s still like, "Oh my God, they killed him."

Q: Was it very important to the representation of truth and to you in making the film that Lana ultimately accepts the sexual identity of Brandon?

KP: It was crucial in the barn scene that this character Brandon who had spent his life binding his breasts and hiding his sexual identity and giving pleasure, not receiving it, finally was in a point, having lost his male identity, where he could not fall back on being either Tina or Brandon, but [instead] he found a deeper, truer sense of himself. What Lana is accepting is a human being—not a girl, not a boy—and she’s finally giving love. And Brandon is courageous enough, because I think in this scene, it’s the hardest thing for all of us—the real growth for Brandon is that he can accept intimacy and he can be touched—he, she, whatever you want to call Brandon.

Q: Does gender then become a nullity in the film?

KP: Gender, to me, is a factor of your identity. I am biologically female—you know that, right? I was born as a girl. There’s days I wake up and feel like a boy. There’s days I feel like a girl. They say gender is not what’s between your legs, it’s between your ears. Gender’s what you make it. If you have to categorize it, you can say there’s biological gender, but I think how you feel, it’s all in the performance. It’s in a thing that’s inherently true and then it’s how you perform it. The best we can do is continue talking about it and not try to reduce it to categories.

Q: With all the years of research you did before doing this film, were there things you found out about Brandon that you didn’t want to portray because you felt it might have taken away from our ability to relate to him or for him to be portrayed as the affable and wonderful human being that we connect with?

KP: Yes. He used to stand outside girls’ windows and get angry and scream and yell if they didn’t continue dating him. To show that—it wasn’t like I was trying to tip the deck in his favor, it was more like, movies are so incredibly powerful. If you show something that is a dose negative, you can totally alienate your audience. So you’re very careful when there’s anything negative to say, ok, what’s the effect on the whole story? If I have him being an asshole to women, and being a pain, is the audience going to identify? No. So we cut it out. Was there a loss to his character? No, because there’s enough other things that tip you in that direction. Another thing was the common feeling was that he committed suicide at the end, that he was like a scared animal who was hunted down, because he was shot lying at the foot of the bed, hiding. And that is probably what happened. But dramatically, you can’t show a character doing that, because then the question is, ok, if he was committing suicide there, when did he give up? Because whenever he gave up is the last moment that I can really show him without showing gratuitous violence. Because to continue to beat him up, to beat him up, and beat him up, without any emotional growth, is to damn the character, to hurt the audience, to do all those things I said I didn’t want to do. So I could only show Brandon as long as he was active. And so in the end, again, what you’re doing is creating drama. Reality is important, but the question is there’s the reality, there’s the drama, the drama holds emotional information, then what’s the translation process? Because what matters is, when the audience sits there and they watch it, what story do they connect to? And that’s what I care about.

Q: Do you have a favoite actor?

KP: I have many favorites: Brando, Meryl Streep, Montgomery Clift, Greta Garbo, Marlene Deitrich.

Q: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming filmmakers?

KP: If you love something, then it’s right. That’s all there is to it. The fact that I stayed up every night, laughing my head off at Brandon and just liking him is why when after four years, people were like "Kim, is something wrong? Why are you still working on that project?" And my reaction was, I knew [the film] was getting better. And the same thing now with all this awards stuff. People are saying "What now? Is it freaking you out that you won all these awards?" I think it’s nice, but the through line is still the same. I still love characters. And this was a great gift. If you just stay centered in what turns you on, that’s really important. It’s a process of individuation. Just keep finding out about yourself. And I would say "Just don’t give up." When MGM rejected us, you could say "Oh God," and feel negative like that means you’re a failure, or, you know what, that was when I went back and said, "They rejected us; I bet this structure is no good." And it was a structure when we used to tell it in flashback. Lana would come back, and it was Lana’s story. And my writing partner, he’s great. He said he thought MGM was wrong. I said I think there’s something wrong with the structure. It gave us an opportunity to go back to the drawing board. Again, people have to stop thinking of the end result and really just love their craft. There’s pure joy in work if you just do it.

REVIEW BOYS DON’T CRY   by Maria Makredes