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THE DIRECTORS: THE CROSSOVER
John Cameron Mitchell

Cannes
After Texas-born John Cameron Mitchell's rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch set off-Broadway on fire, the multihyphenate writer-director-bewigged star took his angry inch to the big screen in 2001. Mitchell reprised his role as the titular Hedwig, an East German "slip of a girly boy" who agrees to a sex change so she can marry an army man who will help her emigrate. Once there, he ditches her, and she finds herself in middle America with nothing but her wigs to keep her company. Finally she finds a soulmate in the pouty-lipped Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt, natch), who ups and steals her songs and becomes a world-famous rock star. But he outstripped even himself with Shortbus, a post 9/11 New York sex comedy, which shocked audiences with its opening auto-fellatio sequence, multiple fully erect/full-frontal scenes and the only performance of the national anthem into someone's ass that's ever been captured on film.

There is kind of a physical and emotional exposure in Shortbus that you don't get in an average film.
All the actors had a lot of nerves about [the exposure]. I did too. We are doing this because we come out of a culture where there is a tension about sex. There is guilt. It is natural fear because it is an irrational thing connected to our childhood, connected to our relationships, controlling many people... Other people do it through their therapy, their revulsion, whatever. For us, it is through our artistic work. And it is very important — it's not just therapy for us, it has to be useful to other people. That is paramount. Because it is useful for other people than it is useful to us too.

Shortbus also conveys this strong sense of a community and the people therein really try to take care of each other. How much of the film was based on real [underground sex] salons?
I wouldn't call it a salon, exactly, but I would call it a salon [rather than] a club. The difference is it's in someone's house. You don't pay to get in. You know what I mean? In Harlem in the '20s they had what was called "buffet flats" which was kind of like rent parties — but they would have music in one room and sex in another. There was this [salon] tradition in New York and Paris in different kinds of strata. And there are places in New York that inspired this — you know, one of the guys in the film had a salon called Ciné Salon and he would show 16mm films. He was very anti-digital: no video, no DVD. And sometimes later he would encourage group sex. I found it fascinating. People eating over here, someone having sex there, and a film showing there... it's kind of all the same thing. All those appetites that I have: art, food, sex, and sometimes love... And if you ignore one of the drives, it'll come back to haunt you. You get rickets, pedophiles.

Are you worried about any sort of conservative backlash from family, friends, audiences who just don't get it?
Speaking in a very spiritual way — Shortbus has good karma. It comes from good intentions. I'm trying in a little tiny way to remind people that there are good things still left in New York, in America. We have terrorists coming in [and] religious people are saying they are connected to homosexuals. There is this national fear going on all the time. And this film is about those people who reject that, who actually have faith trying to find out as much knowledge as possible, to meet as many people as possible. Sook-Yin [Lee]'s character, the orgasm missing from her life, which implies this weird lack of wholeness. But she is this hero. She sallies forth! Like the Holy Grail! Anything it takes to unify her, body, mind and spirit — she will try. And that is antithetical to Bush, to religious conservatism, to all of those things that purport to know the truth in advance.

MORE SEX ON FILM...
The Virgin: Daniel Waters
The Old Hand: Brian De Palma
The Dirty Dutchman: Paul Verhoeven
The Punk Rebel: Larry Clark
The Big Buffalo: Vincent Gallo
The Buttoned-Up Brit: Richard Eyre
The Sophisticate: David Cronenberg
The Motherfucker: Christophe Honoré
The Shocker: Gaspar Noé