Kimberly Peirce: I AM Boys Don't Cry
Boys Don’t Cry (1999) feat. Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena, Peter Sarsgaard as John Lotter, and Brendon Sexton III as Tom Nissen - Courtesy of Fox Searchlight
Written by Editor-In-Chief, Liberté Grace
Academy Award-winning film Boys Don’t Cry directed by a then first-time writer and director Kimberly Peirce, was the ground-breaking independent film made for only two million dollars; that became the unlikely favourite at the 72nd Academy Awards, launching the careers of Hilary Swank and Chloë Sevigny.
In 2000, Peirce, who was a film graduate of the Sundance Lab and Columbia University, watched her lead actor, Hilary Swank, win the Best Actress Oscar for her critically acclaimed performance as Brandon Teena—a transgender youth who dared to live and love as a boy in Nebraska, but was tragically raped and murdered after his original birth identity as a girl was discovered.
Boys Don’t Cry (1999) highlights - Courtesy of Fox Searchlight
On the 20th anniversary of her break-out directorial debut, Peirce gave I AM FILM a candid interview detailing how Boys Don’t Cry became the indie-phenomenon that changed the landscape for independent filmmaking—and her truth about being a female director in Hollywood today, at the WUTI Goes IdyllWild Film Festival, where the film was celebrated with a special anniversary screening.
Boys Don’t Cry paved the way for independent filmmakers to dream about the possibility of winning an Oscar, democratising a playing field that was - at that time - reserved for mainstream, higher-budget films. But, more significantly, it brought visibility and dignity to transgender and gender-diverse communities around the world.
Peirce says that she “literally couldn’t believe it,” when Swank stood on the Oscars stage, telling the world that she had once lived in a trailer park, while she accepted her Best Actress Award in a category amongst acting royalty; Meryl Streep, Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. From that moment onward, A-list actors became open to making smaller, independent films, with riskier and more diverse narratives.
Hilary Swank wins the Best Actress Oscar at the 72nd Academy Awards - Courtesy of Oscars.go.com
When I attempt to explore with Peirce how a film about a transgender youth captured the zeitgeist in a predominately heteronormative world, she seems to enjoy the fact that, as a film school graduate, she never set out to capture it at all. Instead, prior to her discovery of Brandon’s story, she was noticing that her world and learning, didn’t have a language for her burgeoning female masculinity.
Without any adequate way to accurately express who she was, Peirce poignantly describes how Boy’s Don’t Cry grew out of her own personal need to carve out her own place and voice in the world: “I just knew that who I was, and the real deep interest that I had in terms of storytelling, were going beyond the boundaries of what I was having access to in my Upper West-side New York community.”
At the time, Peirce was a film student writing a script about a woman who lived as a man during the American Civil War. As she began to realise herself as gender-queer, she sought to find a way to capture her truth on film. She explains, “I was moving into my own and having to break ground in order to be the person that I wanted to be, yet not surrender who I already was.”
“So my question was, ‘How do I tell the story of somebody who wants to live as a boy because it’s who they are? That was who I was.’”
Little did Peirce know that two months later, her question would be answered in the form of an article in the Village Voice, given to her by a friend. She recalls, “He said to me, ‘This is the story you want to tell.’ It was the middle of the night and I read about this person, Brandon Teena, born Teena Brandon; who was a female-bodied person who lived as a boy. Brandon was everything that I was aspiring to be.”
Peirce who credits the movie gods for that life-changing moment in 1994, changed her thesis project, and over the course of five years, she committed to bringing Brandon Teena’s story to the screen. She enthuses, “I think the amazing thing about the movie was that I had no roadmap at all. In my institutional place, they couldn't grasp what I was doing.”
In her quest to define her protagonist’s need, she asked legendary screenwriter Frank Pierson who wrote Dog Day Afternoon and Cool Hand Luke, and was a mentor to her at the Sundance Lab. “I said, ‘Frank, I got a problem. My teachers say that Brandon has to either want to be a boy or want to make love to women, and I had to pick.’“
And he's like, ‘Brandon's need is what Sonny's need is in Dog Day Afternoon - to get loved.’ Frank is a straight, white man. So, it was beautiful that he didn't even have to think about the specifics of transgender or being queer. If you want to understand why it hit a cultural zeitgeist and why it was so powerful; it's because I managed to find the universal in a very specific story.”
In the end, it was Peirce’s desire to find a way to express who she authentically was; mirroring that of her protagonist’s desire, that became the thread between their two worlds, which lead to the film’s historic success, and the humanisation of the transgender experience, broadcast to a global mainstream audience.
“That’s the beauty of great storytelling. For me, it was creating a compassion piece in the world of the way that I lived and loved because that didn’t exist. For people who were queer, it was so powerful because it gave us that. For people who were not queer, it had its humanity. So it transcended.”
When I ask how her career changed at that time, she said, “For any young, independent filmmaker; to make that first feature is a big deal. To make a feature that makes money is very important. But, to make a feature that's well-made, that's critically applauded, that wins an Oscar—it hadn't really been done in that way because independent little movies didn't really win Oscars.”
Peirce recalled the pivotal moment when she was on the Oscars red carpet being interviewed by Joan Rivers. “Joan said, ‘So, tell me about your movie.’ And I said, ‘I made a movie about Brandon Teena who lives as a man and loves women, and was killed for how he lived and loved.’ That ended up on the chyron over the entire red carpet.
My queer buddies from New York called me on the red carpet and I picked up—which you're not supposed to do. And they're like, ‘Dude! you’re talking to Joan Rivers and you just said butch, lesbian and transsexual and 80 million people just heard you!’
Kimberly Peirce on the Oscars red carpet - Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images Entertainment / Getty Images
They were crying because it was such a moment of a corrective history; in terms of the power to make this story accessible, loveable, and normalise it. Not in the generic sense, but to give access to the correct language in front of a mainstream audience.
And, for me, not only was I now seen as a really good filmmaker; I was meeting executives and producers. Francis Ford Coppola and Scorsese came up to me and wanted to meet me. And that mattered because I'd been studying their work for so long, and now, to be in a conversation with people who love movies as I do—it was amazing.”
Today, Peirce is a governor at The Academy alongside Steven Spielberg and Susanne Bier, helping to bring in new members for diversity, as well as serving as a board member of the Director’s Guild of America. Aware first-hand of the systemic obstacles to women working behind and in front of the lens, she was one of the first voices to call for the ousting of Harvey Weinstein from the Academy’s membership.
BTS Carrie (2013) feat. Kimberly Peirce and Chloë Grace Moretz - Photo by Michael Gibson | © 2012 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. and Screen Gems, Inc., - Courtesy of Sony Pictures
When I ask about the reality behind the scenes for female directors in Hollywood, she’s blunt: “When I look back, what ended up happening is women don't get the same resources that men get. Yes, you'll be offered a lot of projects. But, what happens as you get into Hollywood; to make a great movie, generally, you need that great writer or re-writer.
And so, any of the top women who got in, if you look at their history, you might ask, ‘Why were they so successful, and then, somehow they didn't work? A - they'd already proven they could make money. B - they'd proven that they were talented. They certainly were committed. It wasn’t a hobby. What happened was that the women were being undermined from the inside.
Sure, you can get in the room. But, openly, there's a lot of undermining of your creative controls. What the women were finding is that their ability to engineer the story was being interfered with. You weren't getting the right writer or you were getting notes that didn't make sense.”
“The boys were considered geniuses, so therefore, they would let them do what they needed to do. But they would interfere and destroy the women’s work over, and over, and over. And it’s partly because the industry has been formed around a male construction of narrative.”
According to Martha Lauzen, the executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, their research shows that women accounted for only eight percent of directors working on the 250 top-grossing movies of 2018, and four percent in the top 100. In the last 20 years, there’s been no meaningful increase in the percentage of women film directors being hired.
I ask if there’s a sense of threat from the older guard, now that women and minority groups are being invited to the table. Peirce agreed: “Definitely. Being in the rooms, on the boards of different important institutions that make cultural change, like The Academy, I can definitely say that in that room, there didn't used to be women or people of colour, and now there are. And it has changed the discussion.
There are a number of men who are great, but there are some men who are threatened and say that because a way of privilege is going away. If you were getting 95% of the jobs as a person from a certain group and now you're going to get 87%, there's going to be less available to you.”
Boys Don’t Cry (1999) feat. Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena and Chloë Sevigny as Lana Tisdel - Courtesy of Fox Searchlight
What fascinates Peirce more is the fear of depictions of female desire on-screen. Boys Don’t Cry initially received an X-rating and required an R-rating, in order for the film to be distributed widely. Determined to protect the film’s authenticity, she argued against the MPAA’s requests that she remove a shot of Brandon wiping cum off his face, shorten Lana’s orgasm, and cut the anal rape scene—to receive an R-rating.
Peirce describes how, “it was the worst thing to say to me because I wanted those things to be the most powerful. They said, ‘It's too potent’. I said, ‘We don't ever get to see women come. We see men ejaculate everywhere in movies and we have to watch it, which is fine. Everybody has a right. But let's see the women come. Who has ever been hurt by an orgasm that lasted too long?’”
“So, yes, I do believe that female desire, is something that we haven’t seen on-screen. And I think it makes people who are not focused on female desire, maybe uncomfortable. Maybe it makes some people realise how potent female desire is. And that’s scary.”
While Peirce admits that the making of Boys Don’t Cry was harder because of the heterosexual-masculine culture of the industry and because she was/is also queer; she doesn’t believe in allowing internal politics to hold her or anyone back. She offered this sage advice to filmmakers seeking a directing career:
“I follow what I have to do. So, it wasn't really a choice with Brandon. If you embrace and follow what you really love and need to do, you will find unimagined resources that empower you and enable you to be able to do it. If it's taken a hold of me, then I should follow that because that means it will take a hold of other people too.
So, I would just say—stop at nothing. Don't hurt anybody. And any chance you get, always do that interview. Always get up early. Always go meet that actor. Always do that revision. Somebody gives you a note, don't get defensive—that's time out of their life. Generally, I've found that I've learned so much in almost every note I've ever gotten. And I've gotten thousands. When I teach, I tell my students,'You've got to be on it.’”
You can learn more from Kimberly Peirce about filmmaking on Sundance Collab and follow Women Under The Influence, a community celebrating groundbreaking cinema, directed by women, for everyone, on Instagram @wutigoesidyllwild and @womenundertheinfluence.
For more news and interviews with the Masters Of Film, follow I AM FILM on Instagram @iamfilmofficial #IAMFILM #MastersOfFilm.
About the filmmaker
Kimberly Peirce
Writer, Director
Kimberly Peirce was born on September 8, 1967 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA. She is a director and writer, known for Boys Don't Cry (1999), Stop-Loss (2008) and Carrie (2013). She has directed two actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Hilary Swank and Chloë Sevigny. Swank won the Best Actress Award for Boys Don't Cry (1999). Her next feature film project, This is Jane, stars Michelle Williams. [Source: IMDb]