After enduring years of cavalier rejections, catastrophic battles, and capricious terminations, it’s only natural for writers to crave the autonomy that comes with the director’s chair or the producer’s corner office. As far back as the studio era, legendary screenwriters from Preston Sturges to Billy Wilder took up directing to ensure that their stories were not butchered on the way to the big screen. But the transition from one job to the other is more easily imagined than accomplished, and the responsibilities that accompany directing and producing can sometimes outweigh the rewards.
As John August explains, the earliest challenge writers face in trying to raise their profile is establishing a profile in the first place. August is one of the industry’s most proactive screenwriters in terms of ensuring that his contributions to movies aren’t lost in the shuffle, and he’s just one of the many accomplished scribes who has leveraged his success behind the keyboard for broader opportunities.
For writer-directors such as Mike Binder and writer-producers such as Ronald Shusett, the transition to hyphenate status is graceful and permanent. But for others, such as Bruce Joel Rubin, the experience of taking the helm led to the realization that being in control is a lot less fun than it sounds. And for some screenwriters, notably William Goldman, the idea of being in control doesn’t sound like any fun at all.
Anonymity Is a Choice
JOHN AUGUST: I don’t think there are any famous screenwriters. There are some screenwriters who film students have heard of, but your mom probably doesn’t know any screenwriters other than you. That’s because screenwriting is kind of invisible. If screenwriting is done really well, it seems like the actors made up their lines, and that the director knew to put the camera there, and that the movie sort of came together all by itself. So a lot of times it feels like the screenwriter is anonymous.
It’s tough to be known for anything as a writer if there’s not a consistent body of work that people can associate you with. The writers you tend to hear of are writer-directors. They’re consistent, and they have a brand identity: A Kevin Smith movie feels like a Kevin Smith movie. Increasingly, I think there’s an opportunity for writers who are interested in writing one kind of movie to do that. Charlie Kaufman is sort of a brand. No matter who’s directed them, his movies feel like they’re one body of work. It’s an opportunity for certain kinds of writers to be consistent in the type of work they’re gonna do and the presentation of who they are. The degree to which that might protect you from rejection is that if someone doesn’t like a certain one of your movies, at least it fits into an overall body of work, so you can say “I wasn’t a fan of Jersey Girl, but I can see how it’s a Kevin Smith movie,” and it becomes part of your overall canon.
I actively try to associate myself with the movies that I’ve written, so that more people out there might actually have an understanding that the director directed the movie, and this person wrote the movie, and that there is someone behind the curtain who helps get the movie up on its feet.
John August
JUSTIN ZACKHAM: You write a film called The Bucket List, and Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman are in your film. How nice. Suddenly you’re a genius to all the people who barely could spell your first name, let alone know your last name. So I partnered up with a guy I’ve known since I was ten years old—one of my best friends on earth, trust him completely in a way that I would never trust anyone in this town. We’re using the fact that I have a writer’s credit on the movie, and the fact that I had something to do with the production of it, to say, “We have these other projects now that we wanna get done.” We’re producing our first film with this writer named Jessica Goldberg. It’s this great little script that she wrote, and we were able to find $3 million for it. I think she’s doing it with us because I’m a writer, so she knows that she’s got a producer who’s gonna approach it from an empathetic standpoint. Writers very, very rarely get those little points in time when we can leverage something, so I spent the last year building on the perception of The Bucket List to get other projects going.
RICHARD RUSH: Here’s the biggest trick I learned and pulled off throughout my entire career. In order to make a movie, the studio’s position is “We take a screenplay, we find a bankable director, and if a top director says yes, he will attract the actors.” I learned early in the game not to put my name on the screenplays. I worked with a collaborator named Robert Kaufman. He would turn in the screenplay, and the studio would give it to me. I would walk into the studio a few days later and say, “I got bad news, guys—I think we’re gonna have to make a picture. I like it.” And they would say, “Hurray!” We got away with that a few times. I would have been suspect if I liked it because I had written it, but if somebody else’s name was on the script and I said yes, that made a “go” picture.
MIKE BINDER: I’m in a unique business. I run a very small boutique firm that makes my movies. I’m never lookin’ for development deals, and in fact, you can’t buy one of my screenplays. There’s no money except for the entire movie. I write a script and I package the actors, my brother budgets the movie, and we take around the complete package. I’m not lookin’ to make $100 million. I’m just lookin’ to make movies that people really like. I’m an entertainer. Even in Reign Over Me, people are cryin’ several times durin’ the movie, they’re laughin’—but they leave with hope, and they feel good about the ability to handle loss. You gotta know the spot on the horizon you’re going for in so many ways. You gotta know where you wanna go, ’cause you can’t hit the spot on the horizon if you don’t know where it is. You’ve got to ask, “What kind of movies do I want to make? What kind of movies do I want to see?”
RONALD SHUSETT: Especially after Total Recall and Alien, I was getting big fees, so I had money to option material. I couldn’t compete with the studios, but I could come up with $25,000, even $50,000, in front money. And there were plenty of properties that could be had. So I would option it myself, if I didn’t have an original I had faith in at the time. And then I would shape it up with my partner. I would always do it on spec until I had it in a form that I felt I wanted to sell, and then I would go to the studios. I put in my contract that I must be either producer or executive producer, and I must be on the set. It’s not in my contract that I can overrule most people, but I have the power of persuasion because I’m in a position of a functional producer—not just a name-only producer. I’m there helping make the movie. And if things I’m saying are coming out right in dailies two or three days in a row, they’re like, “I think Ron’s right about that.” So I have an unfair advantage since I would never sell any script, no matter how much they offered me, without being either producer or executive producer.
PAUL SCHRADER: I was a screenwriter for maybe two years, and I realized that I really wasn’t a writer—I was a screenwriter. I had to decide. If I wanted to be a writer, I should write things that people actually read. It could be articles, it could be nonfiction, it could be fiction. But people don’t actually read your screenwriting—they watch a film adaptation of your screenwriting. So I said, “I’m really not comfortable being half of a creator. I think I want to be a whole creator. I want to be a filmmaker.”
I’ve never been very good at taking orders. Even as a kid, I must have had ten jobs during high school and college. I got fired from every one, because sooner or later, somebody always says to you, “You should do this,” and you say, “I think I have a better idea,” and they say, “You’re fired. We don’t want your better idea. We want you to follow orders.” The only jobs I never really got fired from were the ones I created. The films I’ve put together, I can’t get fired.
To Direct or Not to Direct
LARRY COHEN: Why did I direct twenty-one pictures? Because I wanted to control every aspect of my own movies, and have a great time making them. So of the forty-six produced pictures that I’ve gotten made, twenty-one of ’em I made myself. I had a good time making ’em, but I still had to deal with all kinds of vagaries of weather and sound and crew and actors. It doesn’t have the purity of simply painting a picture, composing a song, or sculpting, or writing. That’s something you do all by yourself.
NORA EPHRON: There were several things that clearly made me want to direct. The most important were that it was a way to make sure my scripts were made the way I wanted them made, and to make sure they got made at all—something to think about at all times, but especially after turning fifty—and to put some muscle behind scripts that interested me and probably weren’t going to interest other directors, most of whom were men.
RON SHELTON: Under Fire was my first produced script. Roger Spottiswoode directed that. It was Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman, Jean-Louis Trintignant. I directed second unit on Under Fire and The Best of Times, and there was a lot of action in Under Fire, and I got to work with actors a little bit, so I had a fairly impressive reel for only two movies. The great John Alcott, who did all of Kubrick’s movies, shot Under Fire, and working for John was really a baptism of fire. He was a brilliant guy and very demanding, so I had to learn very quickly what lenses I wanted at five in the morning, and where I was gonna use ’em, and defend my positions. So after those two pictures I felt I was ready to direct.
The only way I could ever get a job was if I wrote about a subject that I knew better than anybody in the movie business. Whatever arguments they made against me, it can’t be “He doesn’t know this world.” So I wrote Bull Durham.
JOHN AUGUST: We were very lucky that Doug Liman signed on to direct Go. He’s a person who tries to do fifteen things at once, and of those fifteen things, some of those aren’t going to get done fully. That gave me an opportunity to help out a lot more in making that movie than I would have otherwise been able to do. So the first day I showed up on Go, I was surprised by all these trucks, and I couldn’t believe they were actually making my movie. By the fifth day, I was directing second unit, ’cause we had already fallen a day behind. It showed me I can actually tell somebody where to put the camera, and get stuff to happen the way it should happen to make a movie.
JOSE RIVERA: The Oscar nomination for The Motorcycle Diaries gave me some momentum, and I immediately started working on trying to get a project made that I could direct myself—a project called Celestina, which my wife is part of as well. With all my experience in the theater, I know how to direct actors, and having produced Eerie, Indiana, I know what it feels like to be in production and to be in post. But the fear that people have of a first-time director—that follows you. That’s real. And people have not financed the film, based largely on that. People just don’t want to take chances with their money, with their time, with everything. And so regardless of having a great script and a great cast, it’s a real challenge to become a director. For instance with Celestina, I’ve had to rework the script to make it far less expensive to produce, hoping that with a lower price tag, then they will say, “Okay, we’ll write you a check and take a chance on you.”
GUINEVERE TURNER: I honestly feel like if I wanted to direct a feature right now, I could probably raise a scrappy little $500,000 and do it. I’m not ready. I didn’t go to film school. I didn’t go to screenwriting school. I just continue to make short films because it’s school. It’s incredibly important to me to understand what I’m good at and what I’m bad at, because I don’t wanna fuck it up. When I direct, I’m gonna rock it. I don’t want it to be like, “Hmm, well, that was a nice effort.” When you hear the word effort, you know you’re in trouble. That was me on the track team—which I joined as a high schooler because I was in love with someone on the team—crying, trying to finish the relay. “Good effort! Come on, Guin, you can do it!” I don’t ever want to feel that again.
Guinevere Turner
PAUL SCHRADER: You have to enjoy your own company, and the solitude that’s necessary to hatch an idea and dwell on it and go back and forth in your mind, sometimes for months—and then you also have to enjoy stepping out on stage, which is what happens when you walk out onto a set, and a hundred people are there, and they’re saying, “What shall we do today?” You have to entertain them, in a way. You have to motivate them. You have to try to make them creative as a group. You can’t just look at your shoes. So you have to like both things. Usually if you’ve been writing for a while, you’re really lonely, and you hunger for the social aspect of directing. And if you’ve been directing too much, you’re really getting sick of people, and you’re anxious to spend some time alone writing.
WILLIAM GOLDMAN: I never had any interest in directing, from the very, very beginning. First of all, I don’t like being on the soundstage. I find it very boring. I’ve done my work, for the most part. I also tend to fuck up scenes. I’ll find a spot out of the way and stand there and watch a take, and just before the shot, the director will say, “Bill, that’s where the shot finishes. Please move.”
There’s a scene in The Princess Bride where the hero is taking the heroine in the fire swamp, and there’s smoke and there’s fire, and her dress is on fire. The hero, Westley, puts it out, and Buttercup’s okay, and they continue on. And though I wrote the book and I wrote the movie, I’m watching as this thing started—wonderful Cary Elwes brings in wonderful Robin Wright, there’s the puff of smoke, her dress is on fire—and I scream, “Her dress is on fire,” totally destroying the shot. And Rob Reiner turns to me and says, “Bill, it’s supposed to be on fire.”
I don’t like being around actors. I don’t know what actors want; I don’t know what they mean. That doesn’t mean that I dislike them all. It’s just in a work situation, I have no idea how to please them.
I don’t know why directors want to be directors. I don’t think it’s a good job. I never did. And I think most of them are not very happy people—not that writers are, because we know writers aren’t happy—but I think directors go through a lot of shit.
When we worked on Butch Cassidy, I came out in the middle of shooting to watch several hours of dailies. It was before they went to the South American part of the movie, which was shot in Mexico. I’m walking with George Roy Hill, and a guy comes by and says, “Hat okay?” Hill nods, and then suddenly George, who was a Marine pilot—very tough—almost went to his knees, because he realized the guy had said, “Is this hat that I am holding in my hand all right, because we’re going to Mexico in the morning?” And if it had been the wrong hat, which it was, it would have delayed shooting for at least a day while they came up and got the right hat.
I’ve always thought about that little thing, because when you go off and shoot somewhere on location, if you don’t have the right hat, baby, you’re fucked.
Life Behind the Lens
JANE ANDERSON: What I learned is that film really is a director’s medium. The script is essential as the beginning of a great story, but there’s a whole other element to a film, which involves the visual—and even more importantly, there’s what the actors bring to the script. I learned that as a writer, I have to release my script to my fellow collaborators. When I direct my own material, I’m ruthless about cutting what I think is nonessential. Directing has made me a very spare writer.
ADAM RIFKIN: I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve been able to have kind of a dual career. I get to write big studio family movies, which I love to do, and to a lot of people in town, I am the go-to big family-comedy writer. But luckily I’m also able to write and direct movies that are more personal to me, that aren’t necessarily comedies and aren’t necessarily family fare. The studio movies—Underdog and Mouse Hunt and stuff like that—those jobs afford me the freedom to be able to spend the time on the projects like Look, which are small passion projects.
RON SHELTON: I’ve written a number of movies that I didn’t direct. Some came out better than others. But you have to understand that when you write for another director, or you write it on an assignment and somebody else is gonna interpret the material, you just have to let go of it. It’s not yours anymore. Because when you hand it off to a director—even if you’re the director—it’s now time to interpret the music. The screenplay is the sheet music, and the problem is that unfortunately it only gets played one time in its life. Whereas, you know, a Duke Ellington suite that was performed sixty times on the road and never recorded properly can be reinterpreted endlessly.
The old cliché is true—you write one movie, you direct another movie, and you edit a third movie. You have to embrace the process that in the beginning was the word, but is gonna end up pictures.
I care about the words on the page as much as any writer who ever lived, and I try to get ’em right. But when we’re shooting it, if there’s a better way to say it or do it, I’m the first guy to say, “Let’s try it that way.” Preston Sturges used to tell the actors they couldn’t change a comma. I go in prepared to not change a comma, but like jazz music, if you know the chord changes—the musical text that I call the screenplay—you have to let the discoveries and inventions happen. I think a good director does that. You have to also know when to say, “No, get back to the text.” It’s a dynamic process.
I want to have discoveries. I want something to happen that I don’t anticipate—hopefully something that I can build on, not something that causes me to go to my trailer with an actor and have a serious talk. But that’s the excitement when I’m directing—looking forward to something I didn’t know was gonna happen.
Ron Shelton
ZAK PENN: I’ve directed two very independent movies, where I’ve had total freedom. They’re actually improv movies, so not only was there freedom, there’s no script, so it was totally up to me and the actors. And I think that’s made it a little bit easier for me to return to the kind of heavily structured world of rewriting, because I remind myself, “Okay, this is a different thing now. I want this scene to be in The Incredible Hulk, but maybe they don’t want it to be in The Incredible Hulk—or maybe they do but they wanna change it—and I’m just gonna have to accept that.”
BILLY RAY: I’m a dinosaur. The things that I’m trying to achieve are not things that are terribly valued in my business. The window of opportunity for the movies that interest me is literally getting narrower and narrower by the day. If I could be happy making comic book movies, my life would be a lot easier. If I could roll out of bed and come up with an idea as singular as “There’s a bus, and if it goes less than fifty miles an hour, it blows up,” my life would be a lot easier. But I don’t think up ideas as good as Speed, and I’m not turned on by movies that are just sort of glorified comic books.
The movies that made me become a writer are Ordinary People, Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie, The World According to Garp, Network, Rocky, Fiddler on the Roof, Jaws, The Godfather, All the President’s Men…. Those movies are almost impossible to make now, and yet those are the movies that I gravitate toward.
I made a teeny movie called Shattered Glass, which was that kind of movie, and I just made a slightly larger movie called Breach, which is that kind of movie. Grown-up drama. Those are very tough to get made. You make it easier on yourself if you are also the director, because it’s one more element that you bring to the party. The flip side is you’ve gotta make it for a price. If you wanna make Breach, you can’t go out and spend a jillion dollars. That’s fine. You don’t need a lot of money to make a movie like Breach.
However, there’s also the pure screenwriting part of my career, where the range of opportunities is a little bit wider. I can write a movie like Flightplan, and now I’m writing the remake of Westworld. Those are ideas that totally turn me on. They’re big popcorn ideas. They’re not ideas that I think I’d be any good at directing, so they give me freedom—when I’m writing them, I don’t have to worry about how much they cost, and I don’t have to worry about how difficult they’re gonna be to shoot. Someone out there, in about a year, is gonna be standing on top of a moving train shooting a fistfight between two characters. It’s not gonna be me, but I will have been very happy writing that scene for them.
Once you’ve directed, people always assume that all you want to do is direct, and that is part of the hierarchical nature of our business. I don’t consider it to be a step back at all, having directed, to write for someone else. I got into writing with the idea that I wanted to work with great directors. I am not a great director, so it would be stupid to limit myself to only working with me. I want to write for Ang Lee. I want to write for Peter Weir. I want to write for Scorsese and Spielberg and Stephen Frears and Ron Howard. I could learn something from writing for them.
PAUL SCHRADER: I began as a kind of a Hollywood hustler and a Hollywood whore, and the first four films were studio films. Then I went off to Japan and made Mishima, and when I came back the industry had changed. The kind of films I was making were now independent films. I did not fight this phenomenon. I just bent with the wind, lowered my profile, lowered my price, and made smaller films, made independent films. I had no desire to keep playing a game that I felt no longer included me.
I’ve probably pursued too lonely a course as a director. I think maybe I should have concentrated more on doing projects that appealed to a wider audience, rather than just doing things that I cared about, and assuming that a wider audience would find them. You know, it’s made my whole course as a filmmaker kind of difficult, and it’s always been a struggle to get films made. Affliction took six years. The Walker took six years. Looking back on it now, I wish it had been an easier path.
But I’m glad I took the journey I did. If it hadn’t been for the arts, I’d probably be very rich, because I have capitalism in my bones. But the arts came along, and now I’m a more modest writer and director. I don’t regret it for a second.
BRUCE JOEL RUBIN: I was very proud of My Life as a screenplay. When I directed it, I realized that I was what I would call a mediocre director. Okay director. Good enough director. I got it on the screen. It’s a movie.
Directing a film is fascinating because you put all of your scenes on celluloid, and then you put them all together just as you wrote them, scene by scene by scene. Then you sit down to watch what’s called the assembly, and you go, “This is the worst thing I have ever watched in my entire life. How did I ever think I was a director? How did I ever think I knew what I was doing? The script doesn’t work at all—it worked in all the little pieces, but now it’s just awful. There’s no emotional thrust.” It was the most depressing day of my life, watching the assembly of My Life.
Then my DP, Peter James, looked over at me and said, “Now you get to make your movie.” And that was a wonderful piece of information. Whatever was on paper didn’t mean anything.
I sat with Richard Chew, who is a wonderful editor, literally every day. I made him a little crazy, but it taught me a lot. We rewrote the movie on film. We found the rhythm. We found the tone. I watched My Life come alive, and it was a great learning process. A lot was lost from the literary element of the material, but a lot was gained from the truth of the performances.
I realized that the script for me is still truly the creative birthright of the movie. It is the writer who gives birth to a movie, not the director. I don’t care what anybody says. A director is an interpreter. They come in and refashion the script, but it wouldn’t exist without the writer.
The Maverick’s Perspective: Duncan Tucker
Duncan Tucker
Screenwriters who finance the production of their own scripts get to purchase the autonomy that eludes peers who toil in the Hollywood vineyards. The catch is that most people who bankroll themselves are neophytes prone to overestimating their ability to generate professional-quality films. Furthermore, the likelihood of landing significant distribution is infinitesimal, because outsiders, by definition, lack the necessary industry connections. Every so often, however, someone gets it right. Consider Duncan Tucker, who made the crowd-pleasing dramedy Transamerica (2005) with $1 million that he cobbled together from various sources. Released by the Weinstein Company, the picture earned a solid $15 million during its theatrical run, and netted Oscar nominations for leading lady Felicity Huffman and theme-song composer Dolly Parton. Tucker won numerous prizes for the film’s screenplay, including an Independent Spirit Award.
Countering Clichés
Gay people used to be represented in movies solely as queens or serial killers. And then, in movies I greatly admire, Boys Don’t Cry and Brokeback Mountain, the noble hero is murdered by a society that misunderstands him. I wanted to move beyond that really fast, and make a story about a person who happens to be trans, but the subject matter is not trans-sexuality. It’s about growing up and coming to terms with one’s self. In the end, my character lives and is perhaps on the road to finding some kind of happiness, which is the best any of us can ask for.
When I did the initial research for Transamerica, I interviewed trans women and street boys. I was putting together the outline, and I realized, “I’m not sure I know how to direct.” I wrote a little twenty-minute movie based on some of the street boys’ stories, and made The Mountain King with g a crew of, like, three people. I had some success with it, and it turned out well enough to give me confidence to proceed with Transamerica.
It was pretty much impossible to find financial backers. For a year and a half, we were trying to choose actresses who could mean money for us, but Felicity was somebody I always envisioned as being a wonderful choice. The money finally came from me. I saved, mortgaged the house, borrowed from my mother, borrowed from both my brothers, borrowed from family and friends, maxed out credit cards. I was ready to be in debt for the next ten years. When we finally made that decision, I was free to offer it to Felicity. Thank God she read it and immediately responded to it.
She said that she had to reshoot a TV pilot twelve weeks from when I hired her. I was like, “Holy shit.” I called my producers and said, “Can we possibly get this thing done in twelve weeks?” They did some quick calculations and said, “We can if we start working this afternoon.” I called Felicity back and said, “You’re on.” That afternoon, we started hiring location scouts, talking about budgets, talking about DPs and costume people, and getting everything together. It was this amazing race against time. We finished shooting on July 3. Felicity went home, spent her holiday looking at firecrackers, and then on July 5, she went into production with the reshoot of the pilot for Desperate Housewives.
We were editing when Desperate Housewives became a big hit, and we still couldn’t get the movie out there. She was becoming more famous, but distributors still weren’t knock-ing on our doors. Finally, we got it done in time to submit to Sundance. Felicity’s husband, William H. Macy, called the people he knew there. They looked at it and they said, “No way.” I thought, “Oh my God, I made a crappy movie!” A week later, we heard we were in the Berlin Film Festival.
The Momentum Builds
At Berlin, we had four screenings in huge theaters that were sold out to the point where there were people standing like sardines in the back of the theater. And we still couldn’t drag disltributors to see our movie. Then we won a jury prize at Berlin, which was a shock to me, and a few days later, Variety.com ran an amazingly good review. Suddenly everybody wanted to see the movie.
We were the first acquisition by the newly formed Weinstein Company, so that was newsworthy. We weren’t eligible for Cannes because we’d already premiered in Berlin, but we were in the Cannes market to sell the film internationally. The first day of Cannes, the headline in Variety was “The Weinstein Company’s First Acquisition is Transamerica.” We sold to, I’d say, three-quarters of the international territories, and we kept raising our price. That was amazing.
Just before the film was going to be released, I signed with some new agents, and I said, “It would be so great to have an original song over the end credits.” They said, “Who would you like?” I said, “I think Dolly Parton would be amazing—she’s this symbol of life energy and self-transformation.” They got it to her desk, and she wrote a song for me.
The distributor sent me on tour. I was in a different city every two days. Over nine or ten months, I think I was home maybe a total of two weeks. Talking in front of audiences was something that I hadn’t done before. My first time was at Berlin, and there was an audience of six to seven hundred people. I had a double scotch just before having to go up there, because I was feeling jittery. Luckily people were really respectful and they seemed to be delighted with the movie, so it wasn’t too painful.
I must have done it a few hundred times. Some of the same questions get asked over and over, so you learn what gets a laugh. You come up with something extemporaneously that works, and then you use it again and make it sound extemporaneous. You have to be a bit of an actor. Some people can do it, some people can’t. There are probably wonderful directors, far more talented than I, who distributors might not want to send on tour because they can’t speak in public.
Reaping Rewards
Spending a few months out in Los Angeles for award season was completely surreal. I was living in a little sublet studio apartment in West Hollywood that my producer found for me, and every day I’d have to do a radio interview or a print interview, I’d have to work on the DVD bonus features, I’d have a party for Felicity, a party for Dolly, a party for Transamerica. I can’t remember very many things about that time, because it was a blur—but it was a fun blur. I went as Dolly’s date to the Oscars. She was a vision in pink, and she sent me a pink handkerchief made by her dressmaker to match her outfit.
I remember going to the Spirit Awards and sitting between Felicity and Fionnula Flanagan at our table. I think my award was announced first. Fionnula and Felicity jumped up and hugged and kissed me. It was so great, and I was shocked and delighted.
I don’t fool myself. The thing about Transamerica is that the characters are unconventional, but the story itself is…I don’t like the word conventional. How about the word classic? It’s a road movie. The hero goes on a quest, and comes back home changed after having met friends and enemies. Transamerica sets out to entertain, because you can’t be subversive if they don’t see your movie.
My task was to make audiences love the characters immediately. I wanted to give audiences permission to laugh, and permission to feel for these characters. The first time you see Felicity in Transamerica, she is an odd-looking character, but I hope that by the end of the movie, people aren’t aware of the way she looks. They just see her as a human being, and they’ve completely brought her into their hearts.
Because I was paying for it myself, I got to make exactly the movie I wanted to make. I got to choose every last song, every last cut, every last bit of casting. Everything was mine. I know there are a lot of mistakes in the movie, but they’re my mistakes.