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AE: Is Dana based on anybody from your own personal life?
AF: No, we really kind of engineered him. It’s like this idea of a teacher who is really, has this romantic idea of himself. He thinks he is an inspirational teacher like he has seen in the movies, but he’s really just kind of a boob.
AE: He’s a pretty grandiose boob, at least. I read that you said you cut a threesome scene from early in the movie. Did you film that or was that just in the script?
AF: It’s kind of a threesome. It’s this scene with Dana and Brie and Gary at home and it gets very sexual. It’s not really a three-way. It’s kind of like two of them are doing it and one is watching. But it ended up being a little dark for the movie. It didn’t feel like the rest of the movie, but it’s a really interesting scene and it’ll be in the DVD.
AE: I read that you didn’t want it in the movie because you didn’t want people confused about Dana’s sexuality at all?
AF: No, no, no, no. Because he’s sort of the one watching. It was just that it was too dark. It doesn’t even fly that he’s gay or anything.
AE: I loved that he was this very off-the-chart, bizarre, flamboyant character, but there’s never any sort of gay-panic humor associated with him. Nobody seems to attach his weirdness to the fact that he might be gay. A lot of people would have gone there with this character.
AF: At one point we thought he might be an effeminate heterosexual or something, but the whole thing just felt cliché. It felt kind of camp. In the theater there is certainly a big percentage of gay men, but there are also just a lot of straight men and I know a lot of straight men in the theater who have that kind of flamboyance and that’s what [co-writer Pam Brady] and I hadn’t seen and we were more interested in.
AE: He didn’t seem very concerned about it either. He was very confident in how he put himself across. He operates in this universe where in his mind hiring the gay men’s chorus of Tucson seems perfectly normal.
AF: We had this little line in the script, but we dropped it, but it was sort of like that they were supporting him just because he was challenging the status quo. So it wasn’t like it was his first choice for them, but they saw what he saw. I don’t know where that came from, but it was always in the script, it was always going to be there, the gay men’s chorus.
AE: So you used the real gay men’s chorus from Tucson?
AF: We used the real ones from Albuquerque. And we shot in Albuquerque.
AE: I noticed Rand had a line in the preview about the hand job and it wasn’t in the film, it didn’t make the final cut. Was there anything of Rand’s that didn’t make the movie?
AF: No and that was just for pacing, just to sort of move the movie along.
AE: But there weren’t any other scenes or any other character development cut for Rand?
AF: No, no. He was very protected. Like there was a scene cut that was just the principal and the angry parents. The stuff that we cut was really the ‘in between.’ There wasn’t anything that we cut because it was too much or too crazy or anything. It was just like the stuff, like the air between the interesting parts.
AE: From the time since you did Threesome until now, do you think there’s any difference in how easy or difficult it is to incorporate gay humor or gay jokes into a mainstream film?
AF: Oh, it’s entirely different. I think it would still be hard to make a movie that’s all gay characters at a studio, but studios aren’t making any movies that are all about character. Gay humor in general, I mean it’s a completely different world than it was then. I mean, just Will & Grace turned it in the opposite direction. But it’s like, you see beer commercials that are engineered for straight men that have an element of homoeroticism to them, like a funny joke or . . . but just in general male eroticism is so much more common now. There are entire networks devoted to material for gay men. It’s a different world. It really is. It’s amazing how different it is.
AE: Have you felt compelled in recent years to make another movie with a central gay theme or gay storyline to it?
AF: It’s just this idea that it’s like, is your movie part of “gay cinema” or is it part of “straight cinema?” I just thought that idea, it’s like if you’re gay, you should live in the gay neighborhood. I’ve never bought into that. But in terms of gay characters, yeah, I wrote this albatross script that I’ve been trying to make forever and one of the three leads is gay, but I don’t know. It’s a very small, crazy movie and I don’t know if I’ll ever do it.
But I’m writing something else right now which is actually about two gay men. But just this idea like I’m going to write about this stuff because that’s my agenda, that’s what I never bought into. You know what I mean? I think you have to write about what interests you and to say I’m going to write about gay people or gay sex every time - It’s just, I don’t know. I mean, “Men should only write about men and women should only write about women…”
AE: Right, and white people shouldn’t write black characters and vice versa. You’ve been out since very early on in your career, but if you hadn’t made Threesome early on which had a lot of gay things in the story, do you know if you would have been an out director at that point?
AF: Well, I was never in. I was brought up in LA and New York and my parents always had gay friends who were very open and I never pretended to be anything otherwise. It’s just that when I did Threesome, somebody from the New York Times literally called and said, “Are you gay?” and I said yes because they were going to review it or something and they wanted to say openly gay film director, or not. And at that point it was unusual. I mean very few people were out. I think Gregg Araki was and Gus Van Sant, but in Hollywood everybody was still kind of in a panic about it.
AE: I was in college when I came out and I remember seeing the ad for Threesome in the paper and just picking up from the tagline the implication that there was a gay character in it and my jaw just dropped.
AF: Well it was Tri-Star and they released Philadelphia within a few months of Threesome. Those two movies were, those were the only movies since . . . The Birdcage was later, so it was basically Making Love.
AE: And we all know how well that one went. You have had a very varied career. You’ve worked in studios, family films, genre films and it doesn’t seem like it’s hindered your career at all to be an out director in Hollywood.
AF: No, no. The truth is, even at that time there were so many gay people working in all studios, running some of them. It was never in any way limiting for me.
