'Shortbus' feature

'Shortbus' director John Cameron Mitchell tells Time Out how he 'ate pussy' for his explicit new film.

Nov 24 2006

'Excuse me,' John Cameron Mitchell asks the hotel waitress in something slightly above a whisper. 'Could I order some of your delicious crumpets?'

For a man who has made one of the most sexually explicit films ever to hit the mainstream – and who, a day earlier, was on stage at a party for that film, captivating the crowd with a song – Mitchell cuts a demure figure in conversation. But then one of the premises of 'Shortbus' is not to judge a book by its cover.

Structured around six New Yorkers orbiting the salon-cum-club of the title – a pansexual orgy with elements of performance art and group therapy thrown in – the film is a richly painted paean to tolerance and permeability. Like Mitchell's 2001 debut, 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch', it constitutes a sharp-tongued, warm-hearted defence of multifaceted queerness, studded with bold, rough-edged animation and aching songs. What 'Shortbus' adds to the mix is real sex, and lots of it.

'The sexual content is like our star,' says Mitchell. 'It's our Jennifer Aniston, you know? It's the angle. I wasn't thinking of it as a marketing angle, it just seemed like an interesting cinematic language, but I'm realising now that the film probably wouldn't have been distributed without the explicit sex, even with the same cast and story.' Starting with a bang – multiple, simultaneous bangs, in fact – 'Shortbus' achieves the holy grail of cinema sex: it genuinely reveals character and drives the plot, soon quelling any shock value.

'By the end,' notes Mitchell, 'sex is the last thing you're thinking about, which I always say is the way you feel at the end of a long, deep relationship. The later sex scenes are almost the way you experience sex when love is involved: you're looking into faces, eyes are looking into eyes. 'Cause this film isn't a one-night stand: it's a relationship. But I did feel I needed to break the audience's hymen at the beginning, to push through it and say,"Okay, here we are, I'm not a virgin any more. I know what sex is, I know that it's going to be part of this film, and I'm not going to be as afraid of it – maybe even in my life."'

The intertwinement of life and art was crucial to the development of 'Shortbus'. Mitchell put out an online call inviting would-be participants to send in application videos and received around 500. 'We encouraged them to talk about important sexual experiences, but other people made little films. That's how I met Jonathan Caouette, who made 'Tarnation'. He sent in an audition tape that had parts of what became his film.' (Mitchell became an executive producer for 'Tarnation' and Caouette's auto-archiving tendencies influenced one of the 'Shortbus' characters.)

Mitchell's ambition was 'to make a Hollywood film but from another dimension' – his cast had to have star quality, yet he placed a high premium on social compatibility. ''Shortbus' was almost like an experiment to create the perfect working environment. Choosing the actors took a long time. I made sure it was people I liked. People who were smart. Funny. I could have cast someone who was dumb but could act, but I would have had to have hung out with them for three or four years.'

A lengthy improvisation and rehearsal period allowed Mitchell and the cast to develop characters often grounded in the performers themselves: singer-songwriter Jay Brannan strums a tune, real-life item PJ DeBoy and Paul Dawson play a couple. Even though he doesn't act in the film, Mitchell found the process therapeutic. ''Shortbus' has helped me relax a bit about sex. I wouldn't have made this film if I hadn't come from a conservative background. My mom is a painter and she's always been encouraging artistically, but at the same time we were in a very Catholic, military milieu, so it was pretty sexphobic. Also, growing up gay in the '70s and '80s was not very cool. The year I came out was when AIDS hit, so right away it was like, "Great, it's associated with death and disease. What do I do now?" But I was young, optimistic, I was spreading safe sex…'

The explicitly post-9/11 New York of 'Shortbus' has its own anxieties. 'It is a strange time to be young. There's this miasma of fear floating around. Younger people are more sceptical, more… Some would say pessimistic, I would say realistic. And they're old before they're young.'

The film's salon has a citadel feel to it that's related to the current reactionary US political climate. ''Shortbus' in some ways is like getting all my friends in a perfect, safe place and playing around and making something hopeful, but it's important that people who aren't in safe places feel a bit of comfort. We want to spread the 'Shortbus' attitude, which is one of mercy and forgiveness and permeability.'

Accordingly, Mitchell expanded his own horizons when he joined the throng for a group sex scene. 'One of the actors said, "If we have to go there, you should try something." So I ate pussy for one shot. It didn't get me hard, but it was delicious. It was better than the catering that we had.' He polishes off his crumpets. 'Sometimes you have to dine out at a different restaurant, you know?'

'Shortbus' opens on December 1 and is reviewed next week.

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