Shortbus Watch a scene from John Cameron Mitchell's movie (CONTAINS ADULT THEMES).

Critics are calling John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus the most sexually explicit movie ever to be released in the UK. Whilst the America writer/director's follow-up to 2001 musical Hedwig And The Angry Inch does feature far more than a mere 2.5cm this time round, it's also a warm and witty celebration of New York's alternative scene. Here we get the naked truth from the director himself...

You played the title role in Hedwig And The Angry Inch, so how come we don't see you in Shortbus?
John Cameron Mitchell: I really didn't enjoy acting in Hedwig because I had been doing it on stage for years and the acting part was over for me. Writing and directing for film was the new challenge and the exciting part, so I reluctantly starred in my own thing. And it's not fun to direct yourself, there's just far too many things to think about. I haven't really acted since then, I was burned out after doing it for 20 years. I do love working with actors though, so I thought I'd take a page from Mike Leigh and John Cassavetes and create through improv. Having the luxury of thinking about a script for many years and forging a working relationship with the actors was a kind of paradise.

Did you have a preference for professional actors or non-professionals for Shortbus?
I didn't, because of the way we were working - which is a highly structured improv where they would improvise, I would write a set script, and then they would use that as a very structured blueprint for the scene. And I would always tell them that I'd fire them if they ever did a line as written! For that kind of acting you can really find naturals, which is the way Cassavetes worked - he would combine novices with someone like Gena Rowlands, and you couldn't tell who was the trained actor. Not everyone can do it, but our actors could. Some were trained, some weren't, but we had enough time to create a process where we were all acting in the same reality.

How did the story emerge through all of the workshops and improvs you held?
It started with people's audition tapes. Some of the people we ended up working with would talk about important emotional experiences - in their audition tapes and in the actual auditions. Sook-Yin Lee [who plays the female lead, Sofia] talked about coming from a very sex-phobic Chinese culture where the body is actually a bad thing and no one touches, and emotions are hidden. That was fascinating to me... we took that and then the idea of a woman who's never had an orgasm was an interesting amplification of it.

What did you gain from videoing all of the workshops?
It was really for the script. It was 'OK, so what happened today? Oh, that was interesting...' But I ended up not watching the videos much, I just wrote a lot of notes. I found it less useful to recreate a rehearsal from the workshop videos; the things that you would remember most readily were the things that ended up in the script. It's nice to have for the 'making of' documentary though.

Tell us about the logistics of filming the sex scenes. Did you seek advice from anyone about how to keep the actors fresh, as it were?
It's kind of common sense. I didn't do any research into porn films or anything like that because I don't necessarily like the results, which tend to be very unspontaneous. I wanted the cameras to be out of the way of the actors so they'd never think about it, or they'd think about it less. Each actor had different needs though. Some actors were comfortable rehearsing the sexual scenes - although we only did three or four sexual rehearsals over three or four years - and some people thought it best to rehearse the nudity beforehand: at one rehearsal an actress suggested that everyone be nude, including me and the cameraman, which did level the playing field. With male actors sometimes Viagra was a help - a psychological placebo.

We had a small crew and just kept the cameras as far away from the actors as possible.

The shoot wasn't easy, though, there was nothing particularly comfortable about it. The guys were pretty "Whatever!" about it all before we shot and the women were really nervous; but on the day the women were pretty 'Zen' and the men were more nervous. I just let everyone know that they didn't have to do anything, there was leeway. There were certain dramatic things that had to happen but sexually there were only a few things that were vital. We had a small crew and just kept the cameras as far away from the actors as possible.

Tell us about your approach with the actors then, and how you got honest performances from them...
You can always see when an actor is acting well and you can see when there's an obstacle to an emotional truth, and my job was to remove those obstacles. We worked long enough that we knew the scenes inside and out, and there's all kinds of tricks you do as a director to relax an actor. "Let go of the lines"; "Let's try something completely improvisational". One trick is to tell them you already have the take that you need but suggest one more for variation. You really don't have what you need, but that loosens them up.

Are you surprised that the film has been received without any controversy?
I was pleasantly surprised, but my distributors were slightly disappointed because they were hoping for more 'ink' on it. But that's fine, I really don't relish irrational fear or debates with people who will never see the film. I like to reduce the amount of press that I do, although controversy always helps raise awareness. It's a small film with a small audience. More people will see it on DVD probably, because it's a word of mouth thing. For all of our explicitness, we're rather a cuddly film. The world that I live in - the world we show in Shortbus - is a gentle one, and living under George Bush after 9/11 here, you need as much mercy as possible.

Shortbus is released in UK cinemas on Friday 1st December 2006.

Adrian Hennigan | Published 30 November 06

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