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Director Kimberly Peirce on the queerness of “Carrie”

Kimberly Peirce‘s first feature-length film was a huge success by anyone’s standards. Boys Don’t Cry, a movie based on the tragic murder of transman Brandon Teena, won 43 awards, including Oscars, Golden Globes and GLAAD’s “Outstanding Film – Limited Release.” While the critical acclaim can be somewhat evidenced in number of honors, grades and stats or money taken at the box office, the cultural impact of the film is unmeasurable. Never before or since has a film about a trans-identified person been so widely seen and discussed by those both inside the LGBT community and out, the latter arguably being educated on something they had either incorrect assumptions or no prior knowledge about.

Stop-Loss, Kim’s second film, came out in 2008 and was inspired by her brother’s return from Iraq and immediate stop-loss (aka his being sent back to war). The underrated drama starred Ryan Phillipe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Timothy Olyphant and Channing Tatum as soldiers struggling with their return to their normal lives in Texas. Coming out just before Obama became President, Stop-Loss was ahead of its time, making controversial statements about our country’s policy on enlistment and the war on Iraq. Again, something Americans might not have been aware of unless they were being directly affected by the involuntary extension of duty.

Five years later, Kim is taking on a very different kind of film. This weekendmarkes the release of Carrie, Kim’s redux of the 1974 Stephen King horror novel. Starring ChloĆ« Grace Moretz in the title role and Julianne Moore as her abusive religious zealot mother, Carrie is a modern retelling of a revenge story loved by everyone who has read the novel or seen the 1976 feature from Brian de Palma starring Sissy Spacek.

Although it might seem like Carrie is a far cry from her first two films, there are truly a lot of the same kinds of threads woven throughout. The protagonists in Kim’s work are the kinds of people who take chances despite knowing there are risks involved. They are interested in doing what is right for themselves despite being told they are wrong and are severely punished for having tried. But for those familiar with the story of Carrie White and her infamous prom night, it might just be the first Kim Peirce film in which the outcast comes out on top.

We spoke with Kim about the innate queerness of Carrie, the continued relevance of Boys Don’t Cry and how she embraced her gender identity on a recent red carpet.

AfterEllen.com: I read the New York Times interview where you mentioned Butch Academy and I just wanted to say that would be my dream movie so I hope it comes to fruition.

Kimberly Peirce: That would be my dream movie too. I think actually it was a little bit ahead of it’s time so hopefully we can get it made. It’s a real fun romantic sex comedy.

AE: I haven’t seen Carrie yet but everything I’ve read have been rave reviews. What have people been saying to you after seeing it?

KP: You know what’s great is people fall madly in love with Carrie White, this outcast, this misfit who desperately wants love and acceptance and comes up against a really hard time at school with these girls who don’t want to give it to her and at home with a mother who loves her and at the same time has really severe ways of raising her. So I think it’s something everybody can identify with. Everybody loves the Cinderella story aspect, the dressing up for the ball. She gets to go and be with her date and have a beautiful dance and it’s great that people get such pleasure out of everybody ruining it. Everybody wants her to go to the prom but you have a sneaking suspicion it’s not a good idea because she has super powers, and she’s got a girl out there that means her harm and everything gets turned around and it’s really fascinating watching everyone get so excited by a revenge tale. They want to see the person who is treated unjustly, the person who’s taking advantage of, basically, get even. They love a sense of right and wrong story, they love a story about justice. So that’s really interesting and of course there are various queer undertones to the story of Carrie. AE: The whole being different and being bullied-the story became popular what, 40 years ago? What was the first step you took to modernize it?

KP: Well you’re absolutely right. What King wrote was this amazing book that was timely in its day but it turned out it’s really timeless and even more relevant today than it was then. So the way I wanted to modernize it, first and foremost, was social media. Even in the last five years it’s like our world has revolutionized. We all carry cell phones, we take photos, we take videos. It’s almost not even enough to experience something-we feel we have to record it at the same time and that happens in the movie. The girls record what they do to Carrie. They record Carrie and they record themselves and they do what most of us do: They go home, they look at it and they upload it. Once you upload something, we all know it’s going to get downloaded, it’s going to get viewed, it’s going to get commented on and it’s going to get spread around. It’s phenomenal to me.

What I love in the movie is it’s not only spread around to the kids, and they’re like “Ooooh, it’s out there,” the teacher finds out about it. The teacher wants to find out who did it to stop it from happening again and then of course I did some interviews with teachers and principals and found out in the last five year snow, the schools are aware of what can happen with these kinds of videos. So the school, the teacher, the father and the girl are all called in to deal with it and, of course, the things we record don’t disappear, and it comes back in the movie. So I just thought it was an amazing thing that Stephen King foresaw what we were going to do to one another but now with social media it’s all become escalated. And, look, social media can be used for good or bad, it’s just what people do with it. That was a really exciting thing.

I think the other big exciting thing for modernizing it really was special effects and visual effects. Carrie White has superpowers-it’s a superhero origin story so I added a moment and scene of her discovering those powers, seeing if she can control them, losing control. Again the powers are definitely a metaphor for sexuality and queerness. It’s like if you’re a queer person and you want to be in the mainstream and you’re not-again, there’s a debate whether people can be in or not-and you discover you have a talent or a special skill, that’s kind of what her powers are-the thing that makes her right in the world, and feel normal. Her powers are a metaphor for sexuality-it’s who she is, it’s how she moves in the world, trying to convince herself and her mother that she’s OK and she’s normal. That’s obviously what queer people want to feel about themselves. At the end of the day, we’re normal; it’s just that we may not be like everybody else.

AE: What was the most challenging part of making Carrie?

KP: Probably the most challenging and the best part was getting the right cast, because the movie that preceded us is fantastic and I had to go out there and find a Carrie White that you would fall madly in love with. I needed you to identify with the mistress and no matter what she is different from everybody else in the beginning, and that required an actress who is charismatic, who the camera loves, who is inherently vulnerable, even if Chloe Moretz is very confident and very successful, somebody who can draw you into her story so you can walk in her footsteps.

The other thing I needed was an amazing Margaret White. This story, at its core, is a mother/daughter story. This mother loves her daughter, this mother is terrified of the world. She has invented her own religion. She has repressed herself and repressed her daughter, and everything she does is to protect her daughter but she uses corporal punishment-she locks her in the closet. She doesn’t want her to go to prom. How can you find an actress who can bring you inside that character? Well I looked and it was obvious that Julianne Moore was the first choice. She’s one of our greatest living actresses, she’s beautiful, she’s charismatic, she’s sexy, she’s warm, and she’s a great actress. So she came to the role, again, a fictitious character, with so much authenticity and clarity and she made this woman real. She made her own religion, she loves her daughter, she punishes her daughter, she hurts herself-you’ll see there’s a beautiful scene in the movie where she digs into her own leg and hits herself in the head. She’s doing that because she has so much pent up pain and fear and she’d rather take it out on herself than her daughter.

So it was amazing to me that between these two brilliant actresses I I have a great love story and yet a great feud. The mother is constantly trying to figure out what to do with this child she thinks is evil and thinks reveals her own sin, so I added in a scene at the beginning that starts the relationship off right in the beginning in this feud and this love story so it escalates, and at the high point, they have a fight like you’ve never seen before.

The other really interesting and queer thing about it, outside of the powers and it being very queer, is the relationship among all the girls. It’s a very homo-social environment. Carrie really wants to be accepted by these other girls because the girls have a lot of social privilege and they’re beautiful and they’re charismatic and they’re part of a cool club. After they torment Carrie there’s a split among the girls: One girl feels really guilty and wants to do something about it, and the other girl is angry every time somebody tries to help Carrie out. And that girl, Chris Hargensen, escalates her attacks-pretty much like Boys Don’t Cry-because she thinks Carrie has gotten the attention of the teacher, the attention of Kris’s best friend Sue, and even the support of the principal and even her own father. So it’s interesting to see what the girls did to Carrie sets in motion the entire movie because one girl tries to correct what she did wrong, that’s Sue Snell and she donates her boyfriend to Carrie. The other girl gets madder and madder and madder and she’s constantly escalating her attacks against Carrie. What I find interesting is the two straight girls, when they’re with their boyfriends, they’re always talking about Carrie. The things these two girls have together is to talk about Carrie. If they’re with their boyfriends, they’re talking about Carrie. We even have two scenes where heterosexual sex is interrupted to talk about Carrie.

AE: So it’s like an obsession they have with her.

KP: It’s an obsession they have with her, they triangulate with her, they’re focused on her. I mean, Carrie White is an amazing character because she’s in a relationship with these two girls, these two girls’ boyfriends, and a relationship with her own mother and she has a mother figure at school. So it’s pretty knee-deep in queerness.

AE: I was watching Valentine Road the other night-are you familiar with this documentary?

KP: No, no, no-tell me.

AE: It was on HBO this week about Larry King, the boy who was murdered after asking a straight classmate to be his valentine. There was a young butch girl in it who said she’d recently watched Boys Don’t Cry and it had scared her but also inspired her to be who she was and not lie about it. I just thought, it’s so great to watch people even younger than me, a new generation, watching that movie and getting something out of it, it’s still so relevant to them. Do you still feel that? Do you have people who tell you how much that movie means to them?

KP: I do. I mean, I’m very humbled by it. I constantly have people coming up to me and either they are the person who saw Boys for the first time and it gave them permission, just as you say, to be who they are and kind of entered out in the world because they didn’t know people like this existed and were like them. And I’ve certainly met a lot of parents who thank me and say “I saw Boys Don’t Cry and got a better understanding of my child and who they are and what they’re dealing with.” And there’s a whole other extreme-I was amazed when we took the movie out, and it’s still happening, there were straight people who had no experience of somebody who was struggling with their gender identity or their sexual preference or to find that space where they’re considered normal. It opens up their world, they said, because they love Brandon. It’s really how I make films: Let somebody fall in love with the main character and they will then understand that person, whether they’re a different gender identity, a different sexual preference, a different race, a different religion-we really, through stories, end up loving these characters, we can help kind of heal the world.

I actually just did a Matthew Shepard documentary. What was amazing to me-the sad part of all this is that it happened again while we were shooting [Boys Don’t Cry]. And you know I really hoped that through the story we can change that, certainly making it better for the people who will be affected and hopefully the people giving them a hard time would stop giving them a hard time. But it’s really the power of story.

Look I was lucky to make Boys Don’t Cry, it was a passion project. I read that story and felt responsible. I jumped on a plane and met the wonderful friends of mine now who are a part of the Transexual Menace, a number of transexuals who were in in different stages of transition. We went to the murder trial. It was a great experience of my life. The fact that Boys Don’t Cry lives on is very humbling. In a lot of ways Carrie is very similar. I fell in love with the main character, she’s also a misfit. She also struggled to be loved and accepted, and she also takes the risk that Brandon took of venturing out, going to that prom to have that special night, even though there are risks. And of course, you know, those risks come to bear fruit, they’re true. I mean she ends up getting hurt but in this case, what’s interesting, is she retaliates. I feel strongly and carefully about revenge and retaliation. I think it’s OK in a fictional setting, I think it’s OK if there’s a level of justice to it and I think it’s OK if she’s going after the people who did her wrong and I think it’s OK if she doesn’t have full control over her powers.

AE: From what I can tell, you’ve never been closeted in Hollywood. You were out at the time you made Boys Don’t Cry, correct?

KP: Yeah, I was definitely out in my life and made the decision to be out in my press and publicity.

AE: Can you talk about that decision? At the time-and even now, people say in Hollywood you can lose jobs or opportunities for being out. Has that ever been an issue for you?

KP: I was living in the East Village and me and all my buddies, we were just out. It’s just what we did. We weren’t part of the mainstream and we kind of fell off the map and kind of entered a queer time and a queer space. We were going to the Dyke March, we were making art. My friends were straight and gay and queer-there were no boundaries really in New York then. All of a sudden Boys-I thought it was going to be a small movie but it started moving to the mainstream and everybody said “Oh you’re going to have to do a lot of interviews.” It was really interesting because it was the first time someone said “Well they’re going to ask you if you’re queer.” At that point they said “They’re going to ask if you’re a lesbian,” because that was more the terminology, and I just thought “How strange? Why would someone while they are interviewing a director and I’m clearly queer, why would they ask me that question?” But then I had to make a decision because suddenly that was going to be written about. And I could only be honest.

I was never interested in going back in the closet. I was never really in the closet but I was certainly, at an age when I realized I was queer, self-conscious and realized I was making a life choice. But it was unthinkable that I was going to go in the closet so actually it was the first journalist who interviewed me, and she said straight out, “Are you a lesbian?” And I said “Well that’s a strange question to ask me, given I made a movie and I think we should talk about me being a director. But if you’re asking me to be honest about who I am, of course. I’m a queer person. This is who I am and this is who I love. But the only thing I”ll ask you, you can put it in the article, but don’t make it that at the exclusion of me being a qualified director.” I’m Jewish, I’m Italian, fine put that in the article but don’t make it that I’m only an Italian director and I can only make Italian films. Same thing with queer. I want to make queer films, I want to make straight films. She was great, she included it in the article and honestly, that day forward, everybody knew and nobody cared unless they had an interest. If you look up Outfest, I give a whole speech on that period … that whole speech on my queerness and how I dress at the Oscars. It’s a fun speech, it was important to me that-not only sexual preference and be out, but my gender identity. There weren’t enough kind of butch outfits to wear that I felt comfortable in dressed up so that’s been this challenge to figure out-I know people say “Does dressing matter?” But for queer people-particularly if gender identity is a concern of one’s-how you dress is huge. So if you notice, I dressed a little effeminately when I went to the Oscars for Boys. It’s kind of mixed up because I tell a funny story about it but I was so happy at my recent premiere, if you look at the pictures, I finally found a tux that works.

AE: It’s a great tux! I was going to ask who made it.

KP: Prada made it. Prada has been a great supporter of mine. And what love in particular is if you look at the evolution of how I dressed 10 years ago and how I was able to dress for that premiere, I feel entirely in my gender. I feel entirely in my queerness. I feel confident, I feel appropriate. And what’s amazing was, so much of the press-something in Britain picked it up and said my fiance and I looked smashing. Whether we did or didn’t, I think it was a queer embodiment of myself and I’m able to do that and I’m able to be accepted and I am on the red carpet with my fiancee. And I think five years ago, that might have ruffled a lot more feathers-the ruffled feathers are not-there’s a wonderful acceptance of the culture, at least some of the culture, for me to be in my sexual preference, in my gender identity, and a director. I’m able to be myself, and I think that’s hugely important for all of us. So I’m very proud of that.

AE: Lastly, all your films seem to have an element of social change. Is that something, going forward in new projects, you want to make sure is included?

KP: Well I’m compelled by social dilemmas and social problems, and very strong characters I love and want to see get what they want. So it turns out most of the characters are stuck in a social problem that requires social change. So yes, that’s always going to be a part of what I do. What’s fun about Carrie is it has all that depth in it but it’s a fantastically entertaining and fun movie. You’re meant to go to Carrie and a good time, while also being aware of social issues. There’s a great revenge story, there’s a great superhero-origin story, there’s a fantastic relationship with the mother, it’s very modern. So I think if you can have both: You can have issues of social consequence but also be wildly entertaining, I think as a filmmaker, you are satisfying yourself and you’re satisfying a responsibility. If you look at Boys Don’t Cry, it’s a serious movie but it affected change and it’s really entertaining.

Carrie opens October 18 in theaters nationwide.

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