Photo: matthew placek
It’s been over 15 years sinceShortbus,John Cameron Mitchell’s sweet and sexually explicit ensemble film, shocked and charmed audiences.
The cult classic, which premiered to much fanfare at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival due to its inclusion of non-simulated sex, is back to make headlines as it returns to theaters this month in a stunning new 4K restoration.
Mitchell’s follow-up film to his award-winning 2001 rock musicalHedwig and the Angry Inchcenters on several emotionally challenged characters in New York City as they navigate their love and sex lives in a post 9/11 world.
Mitchell, who’s soon set to star asTiger King’sJoseph “Joe Exotic” Maldonado-Passagein Peacock’s upcomingJoe Exoticlimited series, spoke with PEOPLE about bringingShortbusback.
How didHedwigchange things for you before you conceived ofShortbus?
AfterHedwig, I had that golden Hollywood moment of, like, you can do whatever you want, you know? So I was offered to directRentandMemoirs of a Geishaand all these huge films. And I was old enough to know that if it wasn’t something that I cared deeply about, that I would be unhappy as money was being thrown at me. So I always kept my overhead low. My rent-stabilized apartment allowed me to have my career.
How do you thinkShortbuswill play with a new generation of moviegoers?
It’s definitely a bit of a time capsule. I didn’t expect it to be time capsule-y. I was hoping there’d be more movies like it now. We used sex the way a musical uses music and it can be used in many ways.
And sex, of course, has been removed from Hollywood and television and plopped into the internet, undigested and aggregated and separated and sliced and diced into your proclivities and affinities, which was the absolute opposite of what we were hoping to do, which was kind of integrate it more into life and remind ourselves that we all know this language, why be afraid of it in other forms of narrative?
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Oscilloscope Laboratories
So you’re saying the film couldn’t be made nowadays?
I wonder if it could. Financing is a different issue, and distribution. The small film is no longer in vogue, unfortunately. It was in the late… in the ’90s and early 2000s. It was a kind of third Golden Age of cinema in America.
It’s also a little bit of a love letter to a New York that doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. So I do miss the surprising and kind of scary New York that I came up in, you know?
You surprised your fans with your follow-up filmRabbit Hole(2010) starringNicole Kidman. What attracted you to that project?
WithRabbit Hole, I lost a brother at the age of the character who dies inRabbit Hole. It was a film for my family. I understood it, and just as I understood someone who I had nothing in common with except in an emotional bond, which isHedwig, andShortbusis about a lot of people and all those main characters are bits of me. I faked an orgasm too, to get things over with. But I really… My favorite directors were the ones who would try new things all the time. Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet,Dog Day AfternoontoMurder on the Orient Express. It’s like, I love it. Shake it up. Some people do the same film over and over with skill like [Quentin] Tarantino, but I can’t do that.
Oscilloscope Laboratories will be re-releasingShortbusin theaters with a new 4K restoration for its 15th anniversary. The film opens at the IFC Center in New York on Jan. 26, with a larger theatrical release to follow. Special screenings are occurring in Los Angeles at the Nuart on Jan. 18 and 19.
source: people.com
