John Cameron Mitchell
The things that interest me are less to do with perhaps finding myself and more to do with surviving and mercy and forgiveness.Collection: Forgiveness
Anger is so constructive.Collection: Anger
Isn't it funny - why is it called a tennis bracelet? It doesn't seem very tennis, does it?Collection: Funny
Our feet are planted in the real world, but we dance with angels and ghosts.
The best things happen in the dark.
We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.
There's something cool about being a stealth classic.
I think as far as themes, 'Hedwig' is about what music meant to you as a kid and how rock n' roll can save you; that is definitely part of it.
I actually came out the year that AIDS hit the front pages. So there was this mixed feeling about it - excitement that life's finally begun, but it was completely tied up with mortality and danger and politics.
You get all these French directors who have all these pretty, vacuous stars of their movies - from Jean Seberg on - who have become iconic but were never really good actors.
Some people go off to an ashram or they, you know, have a midlife crisis and buy a sports car. For me, I do 'Hedwig,' and I see it's a midlife crisis maybe, and I see what's next. And it's a good trampoline, maybe, into the next part of my life.
We're all weirdly single, middle-aged women with too much money who look to fill the void with too much shopping.
Chaos is the natural state, and theater tries to make sense of it, but it's got to be a little messy to be believable.
I like making art that's useful to people who have a harder road. Art is a tool to get through it; it's a tool to prepare for the worst. By envisioning it in an artistic context, you can make sense of it before and after it happens.
As you get older, you treasure the beautiful things of the past but also see things more clearly.
Bob Fosse, even though he wasn't gay. He was certainly queer and had a huge effect on the 'Hedwig' film, as did Hal Ashby and Robert Altman, who had a weird butch queer feeling about him. His films almost flirted with camp but in an extremely realistic acting way.
I always think that in some way, art is the best tool we have to prepare for death. It's like a sculpture that you can interpret differently every time you look at it.
I was brought up very Catholic, and the character of Tommy Gnosis got his name from there.
'Hedwig' isn't particularly based on me, but I think that it is autobiographical in terms of emotion.
The think that we hung the film version all on was 'Hedwig' on tour. On stage, it's one theatre, one show. It just seemed natural to change it. In the film, we were able to go to flashback rather than have her talk to the audience. And we had the play to practice and to see where we had made mistakes.
I am just touched at how strongly the real Hed-heads feel. It feels different from other kinds of devotees; maybe it's the way I felt with certain bands when I was a kid. It feels like a band more than a play.
I never even had a MySpace.
User-comments culture is not useful for creating original work, I think.
I'm all for information diets, which are helpful for the mood and for the art.
People know what 'Hedwig' is now, and that's wonderful. It's not the same as being swamped for being on 'The Big Bang Theory,' but it's much more comfortable.
After the first 'Hedwig,' interestingly, I was offered to play Hamlet a couple of times.
My favorite playwright is probably Samuel Beckett, and he was always laughing at the abyss.
'Hedwig' was pretty much all the things I wanted to do that other people said I probably shouldn't do: drag, punk rock, stand-up comedy... You know, combine them all in a thing that's supremely uncommercial from the objective point of view.
Neil Patrick Harris is a superman of entertainment.
Coming out as a gay man, it was very much about finding my own identity and dealing with labeling.
I quickly found that I didn't really fit into 'gay culture,' as identified by many gay people, and that it can be just as confining as straight culture, not least in the way that bisexual people are told that 'they can't make up their mind.'
I remember seeing a stage version of Plato's 'Symposium' and being really moved because it was written by a man rather than a culture.
I certainly wanted Hedwig's world to be one where identification and categories are fluid, changing, and confusing, as they are, really, in life.
There's nothing more Broadway than 'Hedwig.' It's very family-friendly. There's innuendo and stuff, but not more than you'd see on TV.
The first rock stars were incredibly theatrical. Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley - they were theater artists.
I've seen things change and people forget: the history of Berlin, the history of queer struggle, the history of AIDS, the history of New York changing from an artistic powerhouse to more of a financial one now.
I went to theater school at Northwestern, and I was quite conservative. Reagan at the time seemed quite revolutionary, or at least a rock star: He was radical and kind of punk rock.
Growing up, it was uncool to admit that your family had any money. And then, instantly, money was cool. In Reagan's parlance, it was about freedom of the individual, which was freedom to be greedy... individual versus society. There was a weird seduction in that, which I still feel.
I realized that theater was the perfect thing for me, in short bursts of intense community building.
'Hedwig' was born in '94. I was thinking of a theater piece; Hedwig was one of the characters.
I walk out of my apartment, and St. Vincent's is standing there like a ghost ship. That was the ground zero of AIDS in New York: a conservative institution that quickly adapted to its unconventional patients and made heroic efforts to try and save them.
Hedwig is on a quest; she's on a quest as much as Jason and the Argonauts, as much as the boy in 'A.I.' She's looking for something. She's looking for her other half, and she's on tour. Monsters, Cyclops - maybe they're her mom? - appear on various islands.
Oftentimes, experiencing tragedy very young can strangely give you a kind of equilibrium.
I guess historically, drag queens were imitating movie stars and luminaries. It's kind of nice to have a movie star imitating a drag queen.
I went to a very small Catholic school. It wasn't an easy place to be growing up gay.
I remember my girlfriend dropped me for the guy I thought was really cute.
I think I was scared of the drag thing, as a lot of gay boys are. It's sort of knocked out of you in junior high. I wouldn't find guys who were very feminine attractive. Then, doing 'Hedwig,' I got to be man and woman, really butch and really femme at the same time, and I realized, this is kind of the ideal.
My favorite model of success is when people say, 'Nobody bought that first Velvet Underground album, but everyone who did started a band.'
If you go for the money first and try to think of what other people want to see, you change your original inspiration and perhaps put out something that's less original and less personal and maybe less satisfying.
In rock and roll, homosexuality was accepted, but it was less cool to say it.