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Lisa Cholodenko on “The Kids Are All Right,” “High Art” and working on “The L Word”

You likely have your own views on The Kids Are All Right, whether you’ve seen it or not. We’ve had several viewpoints shared by contributors of different opinions, but people in some parts of the country still haven’t been able to see the film. Today, The Kids Are All Right is released on DVD, which means anyone with access to the internet can purchase a copy and watch it for themselves.

Out writer/director Lisa Cholodenko is behind the film that got people talking about lesbian partnerships, gay parenthood and sexual fluidity. The release of The Kids Are All Right also coincided with a new study about children of gay parents being well-adjusted, prompting many reports on the film to signal it as proof that there’s a new “normal” when it comes to the nuclear family, and it’s not always about having one mom and one dad. But with power comes great responsibility. Cholodenko wasn’t asking to be an authority on lesbians and lesbian parenting – she was working with her own experiences as a lesbian, a mom and as someone who works to create entertaining scenarios for mainstream audiences – but she was inevitably thrust into the position. As few other women might be able to attest (Ilene Chaiken or Shonda Rhimes, for example), when you’re creating a lesbian-based experience for the world at large, there are a lot of expectations, the largest being authentic representation of lesbian characters.

I’m not aiming to rehash the argument about whether Lisa Cholodenko was right or wrong to create a storyline in which Jules, a woman in a lesbian relationship, cheats on her partner by sleeping with a man. (I think it’s fair to say that cheating is wrong, in general. We can probably all agree on that.) When given a chance to speak with Cholodenko a week before the DVD release, I wanted to know what she thinks about the strong reactions to her film, and if they will keep her from attempting to tell more stories about queer women in the future, though it is something she has already done for more than a decade.

“I feel like most people really got it and appreciated the way, that if they saw any political point to it, they appreciated that it was subverted and done the way it was done,” Cholodenko said. “[They thought] it was a relief to see a film like that, and not have the politics on its sleeve.”

Then she acknowledged the backlash she received from some lesbians who were unhappy with the aforementioned storyline. “I think the only static that I’ve gotten in the outer world has been from that right wing of the old lesbian contingent that got pissed at me for having Jules sleep with Paul,” she said. “That’s OK – there’s room for everyone.” Although Cholodenko is developing some new projects, she said “nothing is in stone” so she didn’t want to speak about them quite yet. But, nonetheless, she doesn’t see negativity from parts of the gay community as a caution sign.

“It doesn’t really affect what I want to do. I never really saw this as a lesbian film. I understand why people have their point of view and things bother people when it comes to representation and blah blah blah,” Cholodenko said. “I don’t think it’s going to get in my way of ideas when it comes to what’s next.”

Cholodenko’s first film, High Art, debuted in 1998, playing at Cannes and Sundance, and winning awards for its screenplay and star Ally Sheedy’s performance as lesbian photographer Lucy Berliner. While the storyline followed Lucy and her budding romance with her neighbor, Syd, the sexuality aspect was not the focus of the film. Instead, it was about the darkness Lucy felt until she met Syd, and how Syd’s life was moved and inspired by Lucy, despite her bad habits. “I think that was a very kind of rarefied world, a pretty dark film,” Cholodenko said. “I think even if I had made it on a broader canvas with bigger resources and commitment to advertising and stuff, I think inherently the way that story went it would have appealed to a smaller audience.” Which is what makes it different from Kids, which is, at its heart, a film about family dynamics and outside forces that can threaten to change them. High Art and The Kids Are All Right, as well as her 2000 film Laurel Canyon, are all so different in their central themes, and yet they all feature a subtle aspect of sexual exploration. And that might also be why Cholodenko has managed to escape the lesbian filmmaker ghetto. “Obviously it’s really hard to make a film,” Cholodenko said. “I think with this film I was really clear with Stuart [Bloomberg] who I wrote it with, I didn’t want to make an agenda film. I didn’t want it to be about gay rights issues or Prop. 8 or those sorts of things. I feel like I wanted just to start from the place of ‘this is normal and this is what it is,’ and get deeper and delve into a story that feels fresher and richer and more universal.”

“Maybe it’s the staying into the subject of being marginal or whatever that can be irritating sometimes,” she continued. “How many lesbians are making films, if you think about it really? Not many.”

Cholodenko said she’d enjoyed films like the 1995 Antonia’s Line from lesbian filmmaker Marleen Gorris and I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing from Patricia Rozema.

“I remember when I was in my twenties, really early twenties,” she said of the latter. “It was really inspiring to me. So those are two lesbian filmmakers that both happen to be Canadian.”

In 2006, Cholodenko directed an episode of The L Word (“Lynch Pin”). I asked about her experience, and if she liked being on a set with a lot of other gay women.

“Truthfully, in any filmmaking arena there’s going to be a lot of people that are not gay because it takes a lot of people to make a movie or a TV show,” she said. “So I didn’t feel like I was walking into an environment where the DP and the sound guy and the boom operator were lesbians. It was pretty guy-centric.” “It was fun. It was fun to do something I didn’t write and wasn’t really involved with in a big way and I could go in and work with these actors and try to do something with the script I was given; get to be up in Canada for a few weeks and walk away. I like those experiences of just getting into it and not carrying it around as if its my cross to bear. That’s sort of fun. And there’s some fun stuff in that episode. I got to work with Jane Lynch – that was fun.”

Obviously, working on The Kids Are All Right is much more involved for her, especially considering this could be her most personal film yet. And she’s been open about how her life has partly inspired the basic plot involving two women in a relationship who have utilized a sperm donor to conceive. I asked if Cholodenko had been faced with any awkward questions about that topic during her press rounds for the film.

“Sometimes, because it is kind of an intimate film, some people have asked personal questions about my thing or where certain things came from,” she said. “Over time, I just learned to be like ‘Yeah, next’ or ‘You know it’s a movie – I am not doing a documentary.’ it’s hard because I understand people feel like with this kind of film they’re entitled to ask these kinds of questions. You learn how to negotiate through them that’s fair to the journalist and keeps my integrity in tact.” But when it comes to facing your audience, particularly those “right wing lesbians” that might take issue with parts of the film, Cholodenko said she does what she can to answer the questions they have, but they are “not that interesting to her.”

“I’ve had a lot of Q&As and it’s kind of like how you talk to a kid: ‘I understand you’re frustrated.’ You know? What are you gonna say? That’s how I saw the film, that’s how I saw those characters, that’s how I see sexuality,” she said. “It was a personal film, but I wasn’t making a documentary on sexuality.”

So will The Kids Are All Right make way for future lesbian filmmakers and films to be available as widely as it was, with the attached funding, big names and Oscar buzz? Cholodenko said it’s all about the characters.

“The character comes first. If there’s an interesting character and that character has something going on that you want to watch in a narrative way, and they’re gay or black or whatever, then that gets integrated into the character,” she said. “But if it’s like ‘Oh look, there’s a lesbian – wow there’s lesbians!’ it becomes stunt casting and it’s obvious and a little bit embarrassing.”

It appears to be a matter of taste in these situations: Do you want the happy lesbian for the sake of having a happy lesbian, or do you want a flawed character that makes an interesting story? I guarantee neither are a portrait of every single gay woman’s reality.

Below is an exclusive clip from a featurette on The Kids Are All Right DVD:

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

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