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Perhaps it was this mythic element more than any other factor that captured the attention of writer-director Kimberly Peirce, interviewed just prior to the Golden Globe Awards, at which Hilary Swank won an award for her standout portrayal of Brandon. "I have always been fascinated with women who lived as men," she said, "but when I picked up the Village Voice in April 1994, the story totally blew me away. The fact that this girl from a trailer park, with no money and no role models, was able to transform herself is amazing. She was literally able to dream herself into her fantasy of being a guy; she put a sock in her pants, bound her tits, put a cowboy hat on. That she had the audacity and courage to make that imaginative leap, dress as a boy, then go out and date girls raised all sorts of wonderful dramatic questions." Out of those questions, and the controversy surrounding them, the film Boys Don't Cry was born. Peirce talks fast, thinks fast, and flashes between the topics of politics, sexuality, sociology, and filmmaking with the speed of a film cut. "My work is really anthropological in a way. I want to know everything about everybody and what their basic needs are. I want to figure out why they did what they did." This thirst for understanding and a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the sensationalistic coverage of the tragedy led her to search for a deeper truth inside the myth of Brandon Teena. "People weren't getting inside of it on an emotional level. The media were duplicating the violence in a way that was rather gratuitous and brutal, and I thought that this had the potential of anesthetizing the audience. That was the last thing that I wanted to do. You don't want to brutalize the audience, and you don't want to somehow turn them on so that they go and commit those kinds of crimes. Brandon was being turned into an icon because he represented so many different people in the culture. Yet the worst thing I could have done was to turn him into an icon or a myth, to dehumanize him. So what I had to do was keep him entirely human. So the thing was to keep Brandon really human but, in terms of the story, to shape it as a myth. In other words, the more classical the storytelling was, the less strange or different Brandon would be. He would be completely accessible and everyone could enter into the fantasy. So that meant that it was fundamentally a story of transformation; of a girl turning into a boy." She found Brandon's humanity through an intensive five-year study of his story, including hours of interviews with those who knew him, tens of thousands of pages of court documents, and her own incisive observations. "If you watch human beings and try to figure out why they are doing what they are doing, it is not tabloid. It is tabloid when you are kept at a distance. I went to the town of Falls City [Nebraska] and it wasn't sensational. It was reality. When I looked around and saw most of the coverage on this story nobody had any idea why a girl would dress as a boy. I knew and my queer friends knew, but in the minds of the mainstream it was destructive and crazy." While this mythic sense entranced publishers and producers, the inception of the Brandon Teena story is much darker. Seeking to find her true self, Teena left Lincoln, Nebraska, to become Brandon in the small town of Falls City. It was there that the complicated double life began, including Brandon's ill-fated love affair with Lana Tisdel and his friendship with the two men who would destroy him. "I believe that Brandon and Lana had to escape into their imagination as they held tight to loving one another. Gender became a complication after people started forcing them to define what it was. The way that Lana talked about their relationship was so poetic and beautiful that I wanted to make sure that I portrayed the relationship on an emotional and spiritual level. I felt that the entrance of fantasy onto reality was really important to bring the audience in on, on a really visceral level, so that they participate in the fabrication of the fantasy as a solution to not being able to be who you are. "The fundamental myth of the story is Romeo and Juliet, a tragic love story which is going to end tragically. Society is not equipped to allow this love affair to exist. Whereas with Romeo and Juliet it was warring families that brought the kids down, in this situation it was the fact that Lana and Brandon had a love affair that society wasn't ready to embrace, so they had to destroy it." After an arrest in December 1993 for a petty crime, Brandon's biological gender was discovered and, despite Lana's attempts to deflect the revelation, their slide towards destruction began. Christmas Eve of that year, John Lotter, 22, and Thomas Nissen, 21, savagely beat, then repeatedly raped Brandon. The Richardson County sheriffs refused to arrest his attackers. Seven days later John and Thomas tracked Brandon to the house of friends, where they shot Brandon, Lisa Lambert, and Phillip DeVine. Nissen was sentenced to life in prison and Lotter is awaiting execution. Though the story is grim, Peirce has woven in an underlying message of hope and healing. "I didn't want to categorize Brandon in any way he wouldn't have categorized himself. I don't believe in categorizing. Human desire is the purest thing we have, and if that makes you gay it makes you gay; if it makes you straight it makes you straight. But I don't stick by the labels because desire is pure. If that desire is to dress up like the opposite or same gender or sleep with the opposite or same gender, I think that is very fluid. This story is taking something confusing and scary and tapping into the most intense human connection possible, making a myth. Myths heal and teach people. When people come and see the movie, what they are really seeing is how I made a myth out of the story that is truthful. Hopefully by sharing this story, I bring the audience to the next place." * Read the PopcornQ review of Boys Don't Cry * Read PopcornQ's interview with Hilary Swank PQ MOVIE NEWS: PQ Video Hot List | Interviews | Advance Guide to Queer Film | Movie News Archive | PQ Video Hot Lists Galore MORE NEWS ON PLANETOUT: PlanetOut News & Politics | PlanetOutRadio | Entertainment
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