Archive

Christine Vachon on queer cinema and her new lesbian-themed film with Ellen Page & Kate Mara

The black combat boots. The black T over dark pants. Simple. Everyday. It’s an outfit that disregards common desire to be a fashion snowflake. It’s the outfit of a cinema icon. It’s an outfit that gets shit done. And out producer Christine Vachon gets a lot of shit done.

Photo by Brent N. Clarke/FilmMagic

Vachon’s production of artistic and bold independent films pioneered New Queer cinema in the 1990s. After working with producer Pam Koffler on the set of the indelible film Kids, the two formed Killer Films and kept slaying. Killer has worked with directors Todd Haynes, Todd Solondz, Mary Harron and Rose Troche, and produced queer classics like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Boys Don’t Cry, and Far From Heaven. Their projects frequently provide gritty roles that earn acclaim for actresses like Julianne Moore and Cate Blanchett, who cross-dressed to play Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. Vachon recently struck gold again with Blanchett in Carol, a lesbian love story set in a post-World War II world that looks luscious but seethes with restrictions.

AfterEllen: What are you most proud of in Carol? What does the film mean to you?

Christine Vachon: [Director] Todd [Haynes] was really working at the top of his game. I think it’s visually simply extraordinary, the performances are amazing, and obviously the fact that it clearly touched so many people is a big deal. It’s great when you can make a movie that can do that.

AE: What was it like working with Carol’s [out screenwriter] Phyllis Nagy?

CV: We had worked with Phyllis on another movie that she directed as well, called Mrs. Harris, that we did for HBO about 10 years ago, so it wasn’t the first time we were working with her. I think she wrote a great script and then Todd and the actors brought their own voices to it as well.

Photo by Frazer Harrison/WireImage

AE: What did cinema originally mean to you as a young queer woman?

CV: Oh man, these questions are always so hard for me. I’m not very self-reflective. Look, I grew up in New York City, I could walk to the movie theater, it’s what we did for entertainment on the weekends. If we liked a movie, we’d go see it over and over again. I lived near theaters that cost a dollar, and when I was ten or eleven years old, me and my best friend were walking around Time Square, where there were a lot of movie theaters that weren’t pornography theaters, although terrible things happened in them as well, and we were looking for a horror film and saw a marquee for Cries and Whispers, the Bergman film, and it certainly was a horror film but not in the way we anticipated. By virtue of being in New York City and being able to have a tremendous amount of freedom, I got to see a lot of movies that I might not have been able to see otherwise.

Also, you can’t underestimate the Million Dollar Movie on Channel 11 every day when you came home from school. You really just never knew what you would see. Sometimes it would be a David Lean film; sometimes it would be Godzilla.

AE: What was the transition for you between growing up and loving films and saying, “OK, maybe I should do this”?

CV: At that time, I don’t think people had such definitive notions of exactly what they wanted to do when they got out of school, and I just came [back] to New York in the early 80s and it was a really interesting time. A lot of people like Jim Jarmusch, Bette Gordon and Spike Lee were making their first movies, and it was a very exciting period in terms of music, art, and fashion. It was also right when the AIDS crisis was starting to brew. When I first started working on movies like Parting Glances, there was a sense of urgency about those films, because no one knew how long anybody had.

Photo by J. Vespa/WireImage

AE: What did it take for you to step into that space: to start a production company and make films no one else was making? Did you feel that you were being bold?

CV: No, but I don’t think anybody does. You just start down whatever road is in front of you. I made Todd Haynes’s first feature film Poison and got a sense of not just how do you get a movie made, but then what do you do with it after it gets made. How do you get people to see it? And that was sort of a revelation that your job doesn’t end when you call “Cut” for the last time. That part of it, the business part of it-how do you get movies financed, how do you get them sold, how do you get them out into the world-became more and more interesting to me.

AE: What has changed between then and now? Are there more possibilities in the stories you can tell or in the audiences for them?

CV: There’s certainly more ways to reach your audience. Obviously, there’s many different kinds of platforms now and you can get very specific, both as somebody looking for content and as somebody making content. You might find a tiny audience for something extremely specific, but you still have a much better chance of reaching them than you would say twenty years ago. So that’s really interesting. People are hungry for great content more than ever before, and the bar’s been raised in a lot of ways. And it’s been raised really because television has such a renaissance and it’s become so good, and the streaming services-Netflix and Amazon-have followed suit. So I think people’s desire for that kind of knock-your-socks-off, blow-your-mind content is stronger than it’s ever been.

AE: You’ve worked on a wide range of content. What grabs you about the ones that you ultimately choose to work on?

CV: I sort of know it when I see it. It’s kind of a mix of, do I feel that this is original, do I feel like it’s something I want to see? For a movie to truly be theatrical-and not all movies are-but for a movie to feel like it has a place theatrically, it has to feel very original and unlike anything else out there. It has to feel like what it’s about is big. Still Alice is a good example, because obviously that wasn’t a big movie, but the topic was something that so many people had in their lives. So it had a universality to it that belied its small budget.

I have to feel like it’s something I can market commercially, successfully, so I can convince financiers that they will get their money back, which means I have to believe that. And sometimes that’s a fantastic hit-it-out-of-the-park lead role, sometimes it’s a topic that is very zeitgeisty for whatever reason, sometimes it’s just an audacious director who’s telling stories like no one has, and sometimes it’s for an underserved audience that’s really hungry to see themselves represented.

AE: Does your queer identity affect the projects you choose? The way you develop them? Who you collaborate with?

CV: I really don’t know the answer to that. I am who I am. I’ve never really been anybody else. So I don’t know. Obviously, we are often drawn to stories that deal with gender, but we’re also drawn to a lot of true crime. We had four movies in [the] Sundance [Film Festival] and they’re all very very different. And none of them are “queer,” but are they because I produced them? I’m never quite sure where the label begins and ends, which I why I kind of shy away from it. Not in terms of myself at all-I’ve been out for a very long time and pretty vocal about it- but in my early days when I was making films like Poison, Swoon, and Safe, we came under attack all the time from the gay/queer community. So I’m sort of used to dodging those bullets.

AE: Where do you see queer cinema going next?

CV: I don’t know. I feel like I get asked that question a lot, and I don’t know where it’s going to go next. I think that queer filmmakers are going to continue to make content, and some of it will be good and some of it won’t be. Like any other subdivision of filmmakers. And when I see stuff that’s good, I go after it, and I try and figure out ways to work with that filmmaker, that content maker.

AE: Have you noticed anything particular in the young, rising generation of female filmmakers and queer filmmakers?

CV: I think that young filmmakers are much more open to different kinds of storytelling, and they’ll often come in and talk to us and say, “This is my episodic idea, this is my miniseries idea, this is my web series, this is my movie.” So they’re already thinking a little bit more globally about all the different kinds of content that attracts them, whereas I feel like older filmmakers tend to be a little stuck, like “Well this is who I am, this is the box I’m in, and I can’t really get out of it.” So that’s interesting. And they tend to think a little bit more entrepreneurially, because I think that’s another thing that the times dictates. That there are all these different opportunities, but you have to figure out how to make them work for you.

image via Getty

AE: What’s next for you?

CV: Well, we just wrapped Todd Haynes’s new film Wonderstruck, which we made for Amazon, that stars three children and Julianne Moore, based on the book by Brian Selznick, who also wrote the script. We’re in the middle of shooting a television series for Amazon called Z, also based on a fictionalized novel about Zelda Fitzgerald‘s life. That stars Christina Ricci and we’re up to episode four or five right now. And we are starting production on Miguel Arteta‘s film in a few weeks; we’re executive producing Janicza Bravo‘s feature film debut.

We’re doing a movie this fall [titled Mercy] with Ellen Page and Kate Mara that a young Israeli director named Tali Shalom Ezer, who did that film Princess, is directing.

[According to Killer, Mercy is a love story between the characters of Page and Mara, in which the daughter of a man on death row falls in love with a woman on the opposing side of her family’s political cause. As a result, her value for truth is tested as her world begins to unravel.]

So we’ve got a lot going on.

AE: There is a Kickstarter campaign going on right now to restore some of your first films.

CV: Yes, some of the films that Todd and I actually produced-some short films. And then a couple films that I directed.

AE: Is there any chance you’ll get the directing itch again?

CV: I don’t see why I would.

AE: What are you excited about right now?

CV: We’re super busy, so I haven’t had as much of a chance to see everything I want to see. I’m catching up more on television. I’ve been watching UnREAL and really enjoying that. I love Happy Valley, Broadchurch. The twist that the British bring to a standard procedural. So television has been where I’ve been finding it lately.

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

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button