On finding the right context for your creativity

You work in a lot of realms: acting, directing, podcasting; most recently, you released your debut feature film, Stress Positions. Could you tell me a bit about your creative path? Has your goal always been to end up in feature filmmaking?

The short answer is “no”—it was a delightful surprise and a stroke of luck. I think the unifying thing is a feeling that things should be done one way and not another. That’s the only way I can yoke together all these fields that I find myself in: because of a cranky wish for things to be one way and not another; not necessarily out of a talent, or a gift, or any self-confidence.

What kinds of things have you identified as wanting to be different?

I think it’s the essence of a directorial personality. But the idea that I would ever be in a position to direct a movie seemed very far-fetched, because there are all these other things that you have to do—you have to hustle in the film industry, or you have to be among film people, or you have to go study. And I didn’t really do any of those things.

I wanted to be a musician, or I wanted to direct theater. I was very excited by both, but couldn’t really pick one or the other. I think that I told everybody I was moving to New York to study theater, but then I immediately abandoned that [laughs]. And I started to try to perform music. But there was nowhere that I could perform that really made any sense, so I ended up getting distracted and doing drag for most of my 20s. And in the course of doing drag, I stopped being so musical, and started being more of a talking person. But you end up on stage because you watch other performers, and you go: “No, not that way; this way.”

You said there was no place that made sense to perform your music. Why was that?

It wasn’t making sense. It’s not a fault of the venues; it’s a fault of my presentation, and the kind of music that I wanted to play. I would always want to dress up in a feminine way—because this was before transition—and it was very hard to perform without all of that outfit and presentation. And that’s not always a good fit in a music venue, or an open mic, or wherever people were supposed to go to play music. And the kind of music that I was making was a little theatrical, but it was also very sincere, and melodic—it just didn’t make any sense. The way I was able to make sense of it, only recently, was by putting it in the movie [Stress Positions]. By creating a context, a non-musical context, that could serve that music well—and vice-versa—I felt like I finally found a home for it.

But presentation is a problem; context is a problem. It’s almost like, if you take a band as an analogy, the front person of the band is supported by the context of their band. Even a better example is Marlene Dietrich doing her Vegas shows. She had a full orchestra arranged by Burt Bacharach that would soar and sweep in the background, so that Dietrich—who was never a big performer as a singer; she wasn’t like Patty Lupone—could just stand still in place; tilt her head up this way, or lift a hand that way, roll an R, or or do these small things. Dietrich could be Dietrich, because this whole band had been arranged behind her to allow her to be Dietrich.

I feel like the big problem when you’re working alone is that you have to be Dietrich and Bacharach at the same time. So the movie, in a weird way, was like the band, and the music was like Dietrich: the movie created a big context that the music could fit perfectly in, in a way that I’ve never experienced before.

You have a background in sound engineering, and I feel like you have a really interesting approach to sound. For example, your podcast, NYMPHOWARS, is so sonically dense; it has this almost avant-garde relationship to storytelling. Can you just tell me about how you approach sound for the show?

The podcast is definitely the biggest, most consistent creative venture that I’ve ever been part of, and it’s the most fruitful collaboration that I’ve ever had. I do it with my friend of a long time, who I met doing drag in the 2010s, Macy Rodman.

Our first two seasons were this beautiful thing where we would start basically from scratch every week. Occasionally those episodes would become very baroque radio dramas where Macy would play a million characters, which she can do with an uncanny ability; I play the Abbott to her Costello. Those episodes call for basically full cinematic sound design that is always made after the fact, usually in a state of desperation. Because there’ll be something that happens—like, there is a scene in one episode where there’s a group of people standing on a boat, and they look to shore with binoculars and see a soldier giving mouth to mouth to my character, and they think that they were having sex. And that is totally a visual gag, right? And it somehow had to be staged with voices and with sound design. I managed to do it—there was no plan, but I learned to work with the sound library, learned to work in Pro Tools, and have found a workflow for bringing those two things together.

Now we do a slightly different format of the show, where I will do a dialogue timing edit for the majority of the episodes, and if there is additional narrative sound—like doors opening and closing, or a wall breaking, or some of the extremely vulgar stuff that we occasionally have to do [laughs]—I will do that, and then I’ll pass along to Macy, who will do a drop pass. Macy builds the opening and closing parts of the show, and then builds them out with punctuating sound effects. It takes a crazy amount of time! But it seems to work.

The show really works for me as a lab—like, a low-stakes place to experiment with different ideas. There are many stories that are not worthy of being filmed, but are totally worthy of being acted out on that show.

How did working with sound in that way impact the way you thought about working in a visual medium, like when you started making films?

The big thing is that in sound—or in anything, really—there’s the time domain and the frequency domain. And I…

Actually, can you explain what those terms mean?

So, if I said a sentence like, “I’m going to the grocery store,” and then I wanted to cut out the word “grocery”—just make it say, “I’m going to the store”—that would be a time-domain problem: You’d subtract the word grocery, and you would close that gap, and you would smooth it over, and you would try and make sure that the cadence sounded good. I do that kind of thing all the time in podcast editing.

But if I were to try and make “I’m going to the grocery store” sound like it was coming from the other room, that would involve juggling the higher frequencies, the mid frequencies, the low frequencies—trying to find a balance vertically, basically, instead of along the horizontal axis of of timing.

So, I feel much stronger in timing. In film, an analogy to [the frequency domain] is not just the mixing of the audio for the film, but the framing and pictorial quality and lighting. I feel very weak in all of these areas and very, very strong on timing. So the imagery in the film, I’m generally pleased with. But I’m much more proud of the timing that we brought in the performances and in the edit, and the pace and rhythm of the movie.

What was the happy accident that led you to filmmaking, or what was the feeling that made you excited about the medium?

I guess that if you were on a raft in the ocean, you would look longingly to a big ship. And if you could hoist yourself up onto that ship, you would stand a better chance of surviving. A movie really is like a ship: It’s a big thing that sits in the archive and stands a good chance of being revisited later; it can be a refuge for all sorts of other things that are more “on the raft” in our lives and in our culture. There are so many things that require imagination and creativity, but they end up just being sent downstream or forgotten. There’s no place for them.

People have come up to me and said that [Stress Positions] could have been a play. I just don’t think that it would have ever worked as a play. I think that it has theatricality in it—it’s very verbal; it has things that are play-like about it—but there’s no way that a story this diffuse would ever survive on stage. The stage would be like another raft to be swallowed up by the ocean. But like those play-like tendencies can be smuggled into a movie, and they can be safe there.

You have a lot of very close collaborators. There’s Macy on the podcast; I’m also thinking of John Early, who was in your short film [My Trip To Spain] and then was in Stress Positions. What’s the benefit of a continued collaborative relationship like that for you?

Collaboration with performers is so pleasant and wonderful. Because when you know someone and love them, it inspires you to create a context for the part about them that you love. I felt with John—who I’ve known for a long time—that all of the problem of writing the character was taken care of by things that were coming directly out of John. It was just, like—you look at him and you see how it could work.

Do different types of collaborations—like when you’re writing a film, you’re writing it; whereas with the podcast, you’re in it together—exercise a different creative muscle for you?

I wish I knew. I don’t remember what it was like to write the movie! Right now, I’m trying to write something else, and the problem that I’m having with it is that I don’t know who will act in it. It’s sort of drawn from life, but of people that I don’t know, that I’ll never meet, and it’s not drawing anything out. Whereas the feeling that I had when I sat down to write the first version of Stress Positions, it was like I could see John right in front of me, and I could type the words that I wanted him to say almost before I could imagine him saying them—it happened that directly. And with Macy as well, the idea seems to be just inches away when we’re working together, and we just reach forward and then pull the next little bit of it out, and then pull the next little bit of it out. It’s a little bit similar with a person as it is with a space—if you know where you’re going to shoot, it feels like it’s right out in front of you. You can start to rotate it in your mind and find how people are going to move, and you can start to put things down on paper. But in the void, it feels galaxies away.

It seems like you have a really clear awareness of, “Here are the things that I know how to do and feel strong at, versus, here are the things that I don’t really know … and I’m just just gonna go for it.” What drives you to that challenge of trying to do the thing where you don’t know all the pieces, but you can see that the thing should not be this way; it should be this way?

I think it’s just, like: It feels bad not to do it. It’s that simple. I’m not an idealist in terms of, like, “the imagination” or “the creative process.” And maybe I default too much to this negative view of things where you go: No, not that way, some other way. The motivating factor is the feeling that this will haunt you if it goes unaccomplished, or this will bother you if it’s not better.

So, the podcast has to come out every week. And I have to do everything in my power to make it as good as possible, because I know it’s coming out, and it’s going to sit on a server on the permanent record forever. And in order to not be haunted or bothered by that, I feel like I have to put the hours in to fix it. And that’s all a deadline is: It means that something is going out into the world, and it’s going on to the permanent record, and that if you don’t fix it now, you’ll hate yourself for it. It’s about the avoidance of that horrible outcome. [laughs]

One time I told a colleague that I felt bad because I wasn’t good at coming up with ideas, and he told me that actually all his good ideas actually just came from seeing someone else write something and thinking, “That’s wrong.” It was so motivating—like, I don’t have to be an endless fount of ideas, I just have to see other people doing a bad job and be like, “No, you should have done it this other way!”

Yes! This is one piece of advice that can be written in a stone tablet: For every two brilliant things you watch, you need to watch one bad thing. Or for every two brilliant things you read, you need to read one bad thing. It shouldn’t be half and half, because that’s a waste of your life. But when you watch one masterpiece after another, one amazing film after another, you just want to give up. All you need to do is go find the worst short film you could ever imagine, or go watch one of these horrible streaming movies, and you’ll feel so elated; you’ll feel like there is a place for you in the world. Because you are watching something, and instead of going, “Oh, my god! How is this even possible?!” You’re going, “No, don’t do that! Don’t have them say that! Don’t move the camera that way!” I think that’s the perfect balance: two to one.