Kinsey (2004)

Interview with Bill Condon

Bill Condon is not the first Oscar winner OutNow.CH had the pleasure to meet with. This honor was given to us by our very own Swiss father of the Alien creature H.R. Giger, whom we have met several times already. Nevertheless Condon, who won the Academy Award for his script for Gods and Monsters, a movie about another father of a film monster, the Frankenstein-Director James Whale, marks a debut for our little website since we've never talked to a person the Oscar went to from abroad. The occasion was the Berlin Film Festival where Condon's latest piece of work Kinsey had its European premiere. The biopic shows the life of Alfred Kinsey, a pioneer in the area of human sexuality research, who in his own regard is considered a monster himself by some conservative forces in the US as Condon told OutNow.CH at the Regent Hotel in Berlin.

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OutNow.CH (ON): Why Kinsey?

Bill Condon (BC): It's just how interesting and contradictory he was. And the connection between the public and the private with him. And the ideas which still seem so relevant.

ON: Some say Kinsey was for the US what Galileo and Freud were for Europe.

BC: Kinsey would identify himself with Galileo in moments of feelings of persecution. But I wouldn't consider these statements seriously because this is from the press notes. (He laughs). I think he is a very important figure. I think he did change the world. But I don't know about Galileo.

ON: In what way did he change the world?

BC: I know my life is extremely different because of it. You can't say he started sexual revolution but he certainly was one of the major stops along the way. When it comes to two of the big social earthquakes in the last fifty years - which are the gay movement and the women's movement - I think there is a direct line from Kinsey to those. Kinsey kick started a lot in shocking people with how much homosexual activity there is. Among the people that were shocked were the homosexuals themselves. So that there was a group of them who met soon after in Paris and said: "There are more of us. What are we going to do about it?" And then that Mattachine Society run by Harry Hay in LA had its first meeting in 1950 where they talked about the male volume. This was the first literal consciousness-raising group speaking of themselves as people having an identity.
And for the female sex organs - Kinsey said that he was more shocked to discover how little was know about female sex organs and specifically this idea of clitoral versus vaginal orgasm which was something that was really first popularized by Kinsey. An idea that lead to the feminist movement. The moving away from a phallus-centric idea of sexuality. And that the notion up to that point that a woman who had a clitoral orgasm was in some way neurotic and stunted was popular and well believed.

ON: Do you think that in today's oversexed society Kinsey is still relevant?

BC: I do. One of the people that became a major source was Clarence Tripp who worked with Kinsey. He died two years ago but his book on Abe Lincoln was just published and speculated that Lincoln was a homosexual. I asked him what Kinsey would have made of the gay movement. He said Kinsey would have been horrified. I asked why. Because first of all Kinsey didn't believe in such things as homosexual in the Gore Vidal kind of formulation. That there are heterosexual lists and homosexual lists that basically a homosexual describes an act and not a person. And Kinsey thought that anybody who defined themselves based on their sexual acts was limiting themselves. Because his basic idea that he got from the study of gall wasps is that everyone's sexuality is unique. The real question is the tension between everyone's specific sexuality and the desire to belong, to fit in, to feel like a part of the group. The urge of sacrificing your own needs and your own sense of self in order to fit in. I think that is something still with us and that's the basic idea. Even in what you call an oversexed society. What if you are the person within the one percent of the population called the asexual that was discussed in a recent study. People who have a sexuality that is based on one or no orgasm. Where would you fit into the oversexed society? It's hard. Kinsey thought that Freud in his own way was as dangerous as the Catholic Church. He thought that Freud had reinvented sin as neurosis. And that Freud had its own prescriptions against individual sexuality. So I do think that that respect and awareness of your own individual make-up is something that is worth talking about.

ON: Are Kinsey's ideas still controversial?

BC: Probably not. There are basic things that are still in use. I know a little more about Kinsey than I know about sex because that is his subject not mine. But I did get to know some of these (research) people. But I think it's important to remember that he was basically taking a snapshot of one country at one time. For the male volume for example it's really American men during the war. Because his interviewing technique was so exhaustive and so effective those 28'000 interviews are actually still used as a certain basis for something when specific issues in time are sorted out.

ON: We see him teaching the other interviewers how to do it. How did he learn to do it?

BC: It took him a few years. He was kind of a genius. He worked on it with a lot of very smart people. Little techniques, for example never asking anyone if they have done anything, just when, were used to take the burden of the confession off the subject. They never found a solution before to the problem that anybody who is willing to talk about their sex life is inevitably more sexually active. How do you get over that? They took groups from bowling lanes of ladies sewing circles. These are people that meet for any other reason than sex and then you would just chip away with them until you got every single one of them. Which is a great idea. This is something you couldn't do today because that involved techniques of pure harassment and you would be out of that sewing circle or you would need to call them in the middle of the night. But like this he would include people that were uncomfortable talking about sex in those surveys. At the same time he didn't think he could apply what were then new techniques of random statistical thought play. He thought you couldn't go door to door and ask people about sex. And I think everyone agrees, and he was criticised for it then, that he didn't get a very accurate sample of the population. That it was screwed in some way.

ON: Was there a need of rediscovering that man in the USA? Was he a little forgotten?

BC: Yes. He is forgotten by everybody but the religious right who kept him alive as a demon. But mostly he is forgotten.

ON: How long did it take to make Kinsey?B

BC: I read about him in early 1999 and then decided to watch into it. Then it was a long process for well over a year of research and creating a first draft until it started to seem that I could make some sense of it. But still it wasn't into the second draft that it really went into place. It was the longest I've ever spent on something trying to figure it out.

ON: Was it hard collecting all the facts?

BC: Yes. There are great biographies written about Kinsey. Two really exhausted ones in the last ten years. But they deal with the same facts and come to different conclusions. Kinsey himself collected absolutely everything. You could go to the Kinsey Institute and spend a day just reading scrap books of reactions to one book or something like that. There was so much to go through. I think if Kinsey had been alive in the age of internet he would have killed himself. You go there and it is an exhausting collection of pornography up to a certain point. What would he have done with internet pornography? No one can collect all of that. There is such a pile of stuff to go through and you don't want to impose anything on it and you just taking all away and then things start to become clear. And then you start all over again because you then know what you are looking for.

ON: The casting of the movie is very good. Did that take a long time to accomplish?

BC: Yeah pretty much. I made it in New York for that reason. The easier place to do it would have been California but you really can't find that there. So we knew we were going for the East Coast. In America that means let's go to Canada where we can make it more cheaply. It seemed like such an American story in the diversity that even with a smaller budget it's got to be represented by the diversity of faces. And because it was such actor's movies - it's over 100 speaking parts - that all this people have to come on in a single scene and had to have that impact that I just wanted to have access to our really best actors that are in New York. So it is actually a parade. If you would be a frequent theatre goer you would notice all the great New York stage actors who are coming in for a do a day or half a day. Casting it there was the most exiting part for me.

ON: Did you always think of Liam Neeson for the part of Kinsey?

BC: Not always. But he was definitively always in consideration. I had that initial concern about him playing such a quintessential American actor. And he had never done that before. But that was long three bottle of wine dinner that would help me over that.

ON: What did William Sadler say when you approached him for his role?

BC: You know, a lot of people came to read for that part. Sadler was different from all the rest and he didn't comment on it all. What he found was the ordinary in that guy. He was a guy who was a forest ranger and was really exited about extracurricular work and sex and thought it was going to be exiting to share this. I was really struck by the way he read it and it was very close to the way he performed it in the movie. He's a great actor, not commenting on his character, not saying I am different from this person. He is just embodying the part and finding the humanity in that part. The way that he would separate himself is that after doing one of several takes where he masturbates in ten seconds, it would finish and I would yell "cut" and that little boy giggle would come out of him every time, just to remind everybody around that he was not that person. He's really really good.

ON: I liked how the script was structured. It sort of reflected the way its subject was working. Where did that idea come from? Do you dislike traditionally structured biopics?

BC: I do yeah. This falls into that inevitably. Whenever I pick up a biography I'm like: "Oh my god let me start at page 200." I don't want to know about the childhood before. Especially flashbacks in movies. They were brilliant in Citizen Kane and well motivated. But often I think they are just lazy in some way. It took me a long way to figure out how do I structure this. This was really like a second draft revelation. That it should be in the form of a sex history. It took me almost two years. And I felt so stupid when I figured it out because it felt so obvious.

ON: What was your budget in Kinsey?

BC: Eleven (Million Dollars). It was limited given the scope of the movie. Gods and Monsters was only three (Millions) and 24 days. But that's only a three-hander with only three locations. But this had more of a spiral to it. It was very tight. But with any of these things, what you get in return is complete creative freedom. You never have anybody suggesting you to do this and solving it in this way. They just tell you to hurry up.

ON: It doesn't look all that small.

BC: Oh thank you. I had a great team of designers who really worked hard. It was hard in New York. It's an odd thing to go to New York to shoot a movie that is set in Indiana. Which basically meant we were shooting in New Jersey all the time. Again for the actors. And then there is this one scene in Grand Central Station but basically we didn't use New York which is a strange thing to do. But it was worth it. But it is hard in New York. It's hard to get around. You loose hours every day just to get in and out of New Jersey. That kind of thing. And it is a very heavy union town. So you don't get any breaks that way. Every extra in the class room is that expensive. All those kind of things. Eleven Million didn't go that far. Surprisingly NYC is not the same centre that it used to be. It's really just a regional film town now. For example if you want to have a period desk or the costumes you send them to California for them because they don't exist there. There were things like that that really surprised me.

ON: So the only reason were the actors.

BC: And it was worth it.

ON: How much did all the affairs Kinsey had with his assistants and their wives disturb the work during his time?

BC: I can't say they really disturbed the work that much. Except that it made everybody very aware that he maybe was more of a risk taker than he thought. Cause he expanded that circle pretty widely. For example there was a famous couple of men in New York who became his lovers too. But they were famous gossips too. And so suddenly you had this extended family. It was thirty or forty people all interested in each other and filming each other. I was talking to Gore Vidal about it. This was the last time that there were open secrets among the elite in the important cities that just simply no one ever though of writing about. Like Kennedy's affairs in the White House. It seems unthinkable today, all the risk he took. He was a well know figure in the Astro-Bar, the gay bars in New York. It's incredible. Tom Cruise can't do that. (He laughs).

ON: Did you have any problems with the rating of the film?

BC: Surprisingly not. We sent it to them and we waited one day and they called: "We are giving you an R. Thank you very much and we learned a lot." Which was a relieve. I don't know what we would have done. Because the discussion of sex is so pervasive and there is some explicit imagery. They gave George Clooney's but an NC-17 just a year earlier. I suspect it had to do with them recognizing themselves in the movie and just deciding to take it on in some way.

ON: Were there still uproars in America when the film was released?

BC: There was a lot of noise made. I started to think, after having this first hand experience now, that the internet is like a vast hall of mirrors. It's six people screaming at 600 people and they seem to represent a movement. Starting from where we were shooting they were threatening to protest. When we showed up there were half a dozen and we got them coffee. When the movie was released there were a few people outside a theatre in Philadelphia. When I went to a book signing in St. Louis there were maybe a dozen people. That was it basically. Even though on the Internet you would think there are more.
With the internet it's interesting to me to talk to journalists about. I don't know if it is the same here as it is in the states. But strange activists can really manipulate those basic journalistic notions of balanced reporting. An example is someone who is called Judith Reisman. She is the self-proclaimed expert on Kinsey with this bogus degree. Because she is the first person you get when you google Kinsey. Because she's written four self-published books about him and created that incendiary so called documentary that she sent to every journalist. She makes her way into articles in the New York Times as an expert. Because she is easy to find. That is an extreme example but certainly on television in those so called "He said - She said"-Shows she is very easy to use. It was one of the things that gave me the most pause of the movie because you knew you would give a new platform to somebody like that. Who just gets to go and often just make up flat out lies and repeat them over and over. In our political campaigns there is a real manipulation of that, what is meant to be an open dialogue.

ON: What do you think of the present America?

BC: (He starts laughing and looks at his watch). One of his biographers Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy put it so well, America is the most laicistic culture since Rome and the most puritanical culture ever invented. When it comes to sex that is a good example of how it is in general. It is a very schizophrenic culture. It has this strong puritanical stream and in response that sort of oversexed reaction. Both of which represent a lack of comfort with the ordinariness and naturalness of sex. In general I think the lines are hardening. There is an open kind of portrayal of sex and diversity and all of that on the pop cultural side. It's the power structure, the government, the education system that in response to that became more conservative that it ever was. But even more interesting is that both sides think that we can actually change the other side. The recent election showed this aswell. You have more filmmakers this year that are making films that convince the other side and change the course of the country. You also have more people on the right that are actively getting involved in trying to control content in pop culture and trying to change pop culture. It is an interesting moment. What normally is split, is turning into a battle I think. There are a little scarier things for us than the protesters. The public television station in New York wouldn't take little mini-ads between the programmes for Kinsey because they were afraid of what some subscribers might say. More than that, they are also nervous about the FCC that until recently was lead by Michael Powell who was very conservative and the person replacing him is even more conservative. It is that sense of being under siege a little bit that is a more alarming.

ON: You started as a film journalist.

BC: That's overstated too. I did a lot of interviews and them some think pieces for "Millimeter" which is supposed to be a technical magazine.

ON: Do you want to go back to it sometime?

BC: I want to go forward to it actually. I do feel like there is a point where I would love to write about movies in some sort or another. Absolutely.

ON: How does a philosophy degree help at filmmaking?

BC: For me in that sort of analytical nature of screen writing. There is something that very analytical about structuring and things like that. And a lot of that was classical philosophy: Aristotles' poetics and things like that. That is what I probably gained more than anything. I think it would be fun to write about movies again. There are so many things that are not written. I think people tried this. I do find that it's interesting from the inside now to write about how things work. Of course nobody is allowed to do that because you are thrown out if you do that. When I am already thrown out than it will be interesting to try and write about it.

ON: Any projects in mind already that might throw you out?

BC: I am actually going to start on something new. I am going to direct this time. It's called "Dream Girls" and it is based on a show the played in New York in the 80ies. A story on the rise of the Supremes. I just have to find a new Jennifer Holliday.

ON: Have you already got anybody in mind?

BC: No. It's going to be like her. She was found in a gospel choir, you know. I think we are going to go and search and find this girl.

18.02.2005 / rm