The first time he filmed a sex scene for the 2006 movie “Shortbus,” director John Cameron Mitchell said Wednesday night, he was nervous. That changed quickly.
“I started to get bored,” said the Rainbow Alliance fall keynote speaker, who studied theater at Northwestern in the early 1980s. “And then I realized, ‘Of course!’ They need to have goals that continue through the sex; they need to have conflict. It’s not that interesting to watch people have good sex.”
Speaking to nearly 70 students in McCormick Auditorium, Mitchell discussed filmmaking, politics, sex and the intersection of all three in modern society.
In addition to directing “Shortbus,” Mitchell wrote, directed and starred in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” He has acted in dozens of other movies and TV shows.
For “Shortbus,” Mitchell chose his stars from 500 audition tapes from people around the country. Once the actors and actresses met each other, he asked them to imagine their potential sexual chemistry with one another, and he used the responses to create “couples.”
Using the stories he heard in the audition tapes as inspiration, he created a story line. The actors got to know each other through improvisation exercises and once they were ready, they started shooting real sex scenes.
Mitchell was careful, though, to distinguish between the movie and pornography. Pornography portrays eroticism, he said, which is only one aspect of sex.
“It’s a complicated terrain, and a very rich one,” he said. “Just like anything else, sex has various layers, various levels of emotion, metaphor. Anything else that is going on in any other type of scene happens in a sexual scene.”
Mitchell, who grew up in a conservative Catholic community, discussed how being gay has affected his life and his filmmaking.
“Being gay, in and of itself, to me is incredibly boring,” he said. “It’s what you do with it, what you do with how people see you and deal with you, is what’s interesting. That’s why to me it’s a privilege, rather than a burden.”
Rainbow Alliance co-president Patrick Dawson called Mitchell a “great role model” for the LGBT community and said his speech covered important topics.
“He definitely did a great job of opening the discussion to gender identity and sexuality, something that is not talked about that much or kind of pushed aside,” said Dawson, a Weinberg junior. “He definitely brought those issues to light and offered a lot of great insight into them.”
Discussing the impact of his work, Mitchell said one of his most satisfying moments as a filmmaker came on a subway. A stranger came up to him, gave him a piece of paper, and quickly left the train.
The piece of paper, which Mitchell carries in his wallet to this day, had a short message: “‘Shortbus’ saved my life.”
