John Cameron Mitchell: My dad's a general, he was commander there in the 1980s, which is pretty interesting.

C: How old were you?

JCM: I was at college. I'd go visit, cross over the Wall - if you had a uniform you could just walk across. At home we had guards and butlers and a French chef, and then at night I'd go to the Kreuzberg bars, and punk gay bars, and the Berlin film festival.

C: What did your dad make of that?

JCM: One thing about our family is that everyone's encouraged to do their own thing. I would bring some of the people I met there back to the mansion to have dinner, and they might've been students who threw eggs at him earlier in the day - the US military was bad. If you moved to Berlin you didn't have to do conscription, so you got all the misfits in Germany, and in a way the East was similar. I knew a couple of people from the East who'd come over; I found out a lot more after doing Hedwig. Hedwig was actually based on this German army wife who was our babysitter in Washington. The bases were often half these divorced wives who were trying to get away - Korea, or wherever the soldiers happened to be - and they didn't marry for love.

C: Did you want to be an actor back then?

JCM: We didn't have much theatre - I went to Catholic schools wherever I was, which in the places we were, were often the catch-all schools: there'd be a public school and the Catholic school, and if you got kicked out of the public, you had to go to the Catholic.

C: You got kicked out?

JCM: No, I was a very good student, I was a good boy. I was kind of a nerd, but I moved around a lot, so I kept having to learn different accents to fit in - from Scotland to Germany to Kansas - it was like I became an actor from doing that. But I was reading comic books and science fiction and then later doing theatre. I was a pretty weird kid.

C: How about films?

JCM: Growing up in the 1970s, the popular films were also the good films - it was that rare time when MASH and Dog Day Afternoon and Nashville were the hits, and that seemed like that's how film should be. Then in the 1980s, it all really changed, for music and film for me. As soon as Reagan came in, everything changed, art-wise, and it was crap. There was a couple of great bands - the Violent Femmes and Husker Du and REM. They weren't popular, but at least they were there. And I came out in the early 1980s, being gay, which changed everything as well. It allowed me to discover the world - if you think you're not going to be able to be with the person you love, all kinds of your life shut down too - artistically, personally, you tend not to reach out, because everything seems too impossible. So that opened me up to music, and being my own person.

C: It's great to see that Iggy/Bowie/Lou Reed aesthetic in the film:

JCM: Iggy, Bowie and Lou Reed are still my gods. Also, being in boarding school here in the 1970s, it was the glam period, which didn't quite hit the States commercially, it wasn't like it was here. Todd Haynes who did Velvet Goldmine, who's a friend of mine, he's the only other American I know who knows everything about British glam. But it was my music of release at that time. I kind of missed punk when it happened, because we were in Kansas, there was no punk going on, I only discovered that in the mid-1980s. For me it was about gender bending, which was funny, because in the 1970s glam was mostly about a bunch of straight guys dressing up as women to get girls - Brian Eno, Ferry, Bowie, Reed - it was more of a pose, and it was fun to bring glam back to a real sexual ambiguity - because after all Little Richard started it all.

C: I guess it's about identity, and reinventing your identity:

JCM: It's the beauty of the pose. I'm always surprised when rock bands are anti-poser or whatever - it's always some kind of pose, because you're on the stage. You may be wearing a giant wig and make up, but if the impulse is from the heart and is honest, that's what's important. It's fun to see the Strokes, it feels like Iggy in the Lust For Life period.

C: That's what you're into at the moment?

JCM: I've been listening to a lot of different things lately. I'm actually working on a children's story for film. It's almost like Dr Seuss music if he had been in the Beach Boys and Pere Ubu; it's really extreme but very - a kid is going to really understand that. It's going to be fun. I'm writing it, and will probably direct it.

C: And act?

JCM: No, I've sort of had it with acting for a while. I've been acting for 20 years professionally, supporting myself on it, and doing a lot of fulfilling things, but I've just kinda lost the craving for it. I think a lot of acting comes from not feeling fully integrated and comfortable with yourself, so you explore other people.

C: Isn't it like that with writing as well?

JCM: What's different is you do have a great emotional release in a performance, and sometimes writers don't have that, certain directors don't have that. Directing a film and acting in it I thought was going to be too much, and I didn't want to act in it, but the other people who've played Hedwig don't look as good close up as a woman, so I thought I should probably do it. One good thing about it is that the great stress that's on you as a director, you can release it as an actor. Certain songs were very therapeutic in the middle of shooting, we did a lot of the songs with live vocals. But there's few writers who I've really enjoyed saying the words - the parts that I want to do are old people, like Beckett and stuff, they're the only ones.

C: How about singing?

JCM: I'd like to do an album. I haven't written songs. The songs in Hedwig are Steven Trask's. I'd like to see what happens if I do my own.

C: They must've come out of the story, though.

JCM: Well, we developed it starting 7 years ago; they're all songs we did specifically for it. I'd say, we need a song that does this, maybe in this style, to get from point A to C, and the song is B. We were working often in this rock'n'roll drag club, where drag queens would sing cover songs, so we would use cover songs in place of the originals as temporary, and I'd rewrite the lyrics to be about Hedwig, and slowly we would replace them with the originals.

C: So tell me how the whole Hedwig character developed.

JCM: It's based on the babysitter. The idea of the operation came out of all these divided - Plato, the divided self, the divided city of Berlin; and in the club we were developing it in, there was all this divided gender going on - so it just came out of the themes and the setting.

C: Yeah, but Berlin is something millions of people know about, but only you -

JCM: (interrupts) - had a sex change to get out! I was a nomad as a kid. It's an emotional autobiography of finding your other half. You know Strozek, that Herzog movie, about people coming over from Germany to a trailer park in the Midwest? And I was just watching the drag queens at the club, and just marvelling at their life, which was so much more punk than the kids in the mall.

C: How about the Angry Inch?

JCM: I had a friend who used to use that term to describe a certain short person. And the name Hedwig came from Ibsen's The Wild Duck, there's a character who's destroyed by too much honesty. We had years to think about it - it's not like it was all there at once. The operation came quickly, but it was for fun - we'd add a joke, add a theme, add a plot point.

C: So what was the very first thing it started with?

JCM: Monologues, cover songs, in this club with real drag queens, and I was being a fake drag queen, I was really developing a part. I'd never done drag, I'd never done rock - I did Broadway musicals and TV, and it was just trying to stretch it, see what would happen.

C: And it just took off from there?

JCM: We did it for about 4 years in clubs; there was nothing overnight about Hedwig. We did it in cabarets as a longer piece, and eventually we were heading towards a theatre setting, and gathering support and money along the way. Then we built a theatre in this hotel ballroom where the Titanic surviving crew stayed in this flophouse junkie hotel on the river, which adapted itself into Bilgewaters. In a way the film is an accretion of all of those old jokes, wigs, songs, packed in there. Some people don't like it, but it has a density.

C: Tell me about those amazing animations.

JCM: In the play, for The Origin of Love song, I wanted to have drawings because you couldn't always hear the lyrics, I wanted to make sure that was very clear. That's always been the centre - we had that before we had a story. It was the stone in the stone soup. So there was a myth, a 2,500 year old myth, that was always the centre of it. I'd seen a stage adaptation of the entire Symposium in LA, and that myth just stayed with me. It's interesting that it's a myth written by a man and didn't develop as a historical tradition, so it's very personal.

C: I find that idea of being divided from an original something incredibly powerful.

JCM: Everyone's got it - and that being the centre of it has made our audience a lot more diverse than we expected.

C: Why do we have it, though?

JCM: I don't know, because it doesn't seem biologically determined. I knew it was impossible that you were divided from someone, and that you want to reunite with someone. When you're with someone and you feel that strongly, people feel, why can't I be you, why can't I hold you and become you and you become me, why do we feel that way? People would call it co-dependent - even to think of one person being everything, being your best friend, your lover, your mother, your god, it's arrogant, destructive often - but why do we feel that way? I don't know. I think in Hedwig's case there's this damage that was done by his parents, by the society he grew up in - he spends his time with his head in an oven. All the people that came before him were troubled, so something was taken away, leaving the feeling that it's not all there.

C: And in your case?

JCM: I moved so much as a kid that I don't really have that kind of - nothing seemed permanent, and nothing seemed true - it was all relative, it was truly a post-modern upbringing where everything was valid, and our family was confident but not really close and warm.

C: Have you found your other half?

JCM: Well, I have a boyfriend now for a number of years. I guess I don't think of this idea of one person doing everything any more. In a way Hedwig at the end - and I feel the same way - realises that she's the sum of everyone she knows, and inadvertently has gained a wholeness and doesn't think of herself as a fraction any more, so she can meet other whole people. And even if Tommy was in some way her other half, no-one said you had to live with your other half; maybe there was something important, some information that he had, and vice versa. Tommy's name comes from the Gnostic gospels, and they had a lot of doppelgangers and twins, Jesus even had a twin, Thomas, he was the human side of Jesus.

C: Tell me more about Tommy.

JCM: When we started developing it, he was more the central character, and he was more me. He's very religious; I was as a kid very Catholic, until puberty.

C: And now?

JCM: Well, it's still with me, but I had to do picking and choosing of the stuff that worked. I wouldn't go to a church, but you still can't help but cheer when the Pope's saying 'There's a lot of poor people, give them more money!' When he talks about other things - 'You're not a person if you're homosexual' - you walk away. Tommy was the central character before Hedwig; Hedwig was a small character. But because Stephen was working in a drag club, he said, 'I can get you a gig, but only as the woman.' I thought about her much more, and she became much more interesting, and Tommy became much less like me.

C: He's like those new punks and new goths you see around.

JCM: We always thought of him as a Goth Backstreet Boy, which is - any moment now.

C: What would you feel if Hedwig became huge?

JCM: You know, I don't think it will. In the many years we’ve been doing it, it's always been word of mouth, you can't market it, you can't compare it to anything.

C: Some people compare it to Rocky Horror.

JCM: I know, but it really isn't. Maybe that'll get people to check it out, and see something different, but it's just been tough the whole time. In the States, it's not a huge hit. It's happened that we did it in the West End in London, it played in too big a place; it's very delicate in that way - the theatre was too big, we needed months of word of mouth to kick in, didn't have the money to wait for that. In certain theatres, it's a disaster in the States. I guess that's how you define a cult thing - a few people feel really really strongly about it and will tell their friends. Brian Eno talks about the Velvet Underground - very few people bought their first album, but each one started a band.

C: Same with the Sex Pistols - but in both cases, they ended up doing these bloated reunion things. Could you see yourself doing that in 20 years?

JCM: Actually, yeah, but I would probably do something weird, like have all the Hedwigs who've ever played it sing Origin Of Love together, all looking identical.

C: How many are there?

JCM: There's been probably 20 by now. It's popped up here and there. It finds its way.

C: Would you do Hollywood stuff?

JCM: Well, I have.

C: As a writer/director, I mean.

JCM: It'd have to be a really special situation. I admire people's careers, like Todd Haynes, Spike Jonze, PT Anderson; it might be a whole other film, but they'd rather not if it wasn't going to be in a situation where they don't have the final say.

C: How was working with your producer, Christine Vachon?

JCM: She's really protective. But at a certain point, even if you have final cut in your contract, you don't really, because they won't distribute it if they don't like it. That happened even with Cassavetes, he had final cut in a couple of his Hollywood films, he actually made Minnie and Moskovitz, and Love Streams, within the system. He had final cut, but they were, 'If you don't make the cuts, we won't distribute it' - and they have that right.

C: Ten years ago there was a bunch of great American indie films, but it not so much now. What's happened?

JCM? There's this unnatural but powerful control of the theatres by the multinationals, so you don't get one person saying, 'In my theatre, I'm going to keep whatever, Safe, Happiness, and I'm going to slowly build it until it catches on.' It's like, 'OhmyGod, Planet Of The Apes coming next week!' What's going to sell more? And you get one person in charge of 200 theatres deciding that. The small film is fucked.

C: How about the musical - are people ready for musicals again?

JCM: I think so. It's funny that Moulin Rouge has done so well, and certainly Dancer In The Dark did well in its way. The idea of song and narrative, which is all a musical is, can be anything, and I think people just have to get over the conventions of the decades of musicals to start thinking about it in a different way.

C: So what would you compare Hedwig to?

JCM: The one thing I can think of that it's kind of close to is All That Jazz. It's more like Moulin Rouge in that the songs pre-existed, but in All That Jazz, they're motivated sometimes in the scene, sometimes they're a fantasy. In some ways Cabaret, but I can't think of any rock musicals that really - The Great Rock'N'Roll Swindle, maybe, but not really; Tommy not really, because it's more of a narrative. Nashville - the songs aren't really narrative in Nashville, more character driven stuff.

C: Tell me about these legendary fans of yours, the Hedheads.

JCM: They were really just a handful at the beginning - it was really 12 people who kept coming back, because in the theatre you couldn't afford to come back that much. So it tended to be people with jobs as secretaries in DA's offices in Jersey, rather normal women and teenage boys who were coming out, and a couple of rock'n'rollers - it was like a sweeter group of people than Rocky Horror. People who liked theatre too - there was a real cameraderie. But definitely Goth, kids that might've been Goth if they'd been someone else. And fag-hags. It was very nice, but very normal people too, who made cookies for us. Then people would start working in the theatre as ushers, or front of house.

C: What do your parents think of Hedwig?

JCM: They're really proud - they were kind of shocked the first time they saw it - my mom thought it was gratuitously vulgar. I said, no, it's actually necessarily vulgar, it's not the same thing. I don’t like gratuitous vulgarity, but if it's necessary...

C: And your dad?

JCM: He actually got it more emotionally than my mom, but they just can't discuss it - they can't talk about it in detail, it just is. What I'm most famous for now is Hedwig; they were much happier when I was in The Secret Garden on Broadway. But then it took over, and they came to Sundance and were wearing the foam wigs, and they're really proud.

C: Have you found you, now?

JCM: Yeah, I think I have. By doing this, there's a certain wholeness that I've gained in some ways, and I've certainly got freedom to do things now - I was always chafing at the bullshit things I had to do as an actor. Doing drag really is very therapeutic for anybody, because the drag queen you choose to be is very interesting, because it's fully your creation, it's not an adaptation, so it's fascinating what you choose to show. Mine just happened to be very detailed. It's in some ways saved me from outside pressures - I was always pissed off at not having much power as an actor. There's a certain fuck you in doing Hedwig and creating my own space to counteract all that stuff.

C: So you can always get what you want?

JCM: I guess I can get what I need.

SF Said