Interview: Jonathan Lisecki on His Hilarious 'Gayby' Debut

Jenn Harris & Matthew Wilkas switch roles at the GAYBY premiere 

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS

SPECIAL "GAYBY" EDITION OF THE MOVIE COLUMN

Some months ago in this column I asked “where are the new gay classics?”. I didn’t expect to get an answer so quickly. The question was prompted by the inevitable move of gay cinema away from the arthouse experimental fringes to dumbed down romantic comedies. Assimilation has its price; straight people suffer through endless Kate Hudson / Katharine Heigl “comedies” and we get those Eating Out movies. But here comes GAYBY to save us. The miracle of birth movies! Here’s a gay comedy that’s genuinely hilarious and well acted. Go see it with a ton of friends.

Gayby is the story of best friends Jenn (Jenn Harris) and Matt (Matthew Wilkas) who are both single and stuck. Jenn’s career as a yoga instructor is on auto-pilot and Matt’s life is blocked because he can’t get over his ex-boyfriend. They decide to make good on an old college conversation and have a baby together… the old-fashioned way. The decision rocks their mutual complacency and sends comic ripples through their extended family of (very funny) friends.

I spoke with writer/director/co-star Jonathan Lisecki by phone last week. He was walking alongside the road on his way to a panel at The Hamptons Film Festival. With audible traffic on the other end of the line, I worried that he’d walk right into it and we’d lose this fresh new comic voice. But the only car that came close was a friend offering him a ride who was quickly rebuffed. “I’m walking and talking. I’m doing an interview!”

Jonathan Lisecki

TOWLEROAD: First things first. The movie is very funny.

JONATHAN LISECKI: Thank you. It's true. I agree [Laughter]

You’ve been doing a ton of Q&A’s!

I love talking to audiences. Part of your job as a filmmaker in this day and age is you have to really be out there and promote it. A question I get that I’m starting to get a little “really?” about is “Did they make it up as they went along?”

SEX SCENES, SHOWGIRLS JOKES, AND MORE AFTER THE JUMP...

Movies: Jeffrey Schwarz on 'Vito', Premiering Monday on HBO

Vito Russo and his lover Jeffrey Sevick, from the collection of Arnie Kantrowitz/HBO

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS

INTERVIEW

Given the horrific tragedy in Colorado that's currently dominating movie news it's a good time to step up away from current releases for a moment and take a deep breath. Moviegoing has always been and will always be one of the great communal activities. We sit in the dark together and hear stories about our lives, whether they're dressed up in genre metaphors, superhero costumes, or fashioned to look as realistic as our own. If you've ever viewed the movie theater as a sanctuary or cherished the community that entertainment can create, you must tune in to VITO Monday night on HBO.  

Influential gay activist Vito Russo (July 11th, 1946- November 7th, 1990) was born into an Italian family in East Harlem and in an early scene in Vito he recounts his desire to be at the movies all the time. It was his escape from sports and not fitting in. He channeled this love of Hollywood and moviegoing and his own growing awareness of injustices towards gays and lesbians into a pioneering role as a film historian and gay activist. Vito wrote the hugely influential bestseller "The Celluloid Closet", which took on Hollywood's troubled relationship with gay representation and opened up a conversation that still rages to this day. He spent the final years of his life as an AIDS activist.

I sat down with Jeffrey Schwarz (pictured left), the director of this new HBO documentary, to talk about gay history, documentary portraits of iconic figures, and Vito's remarkable accomplishments.

Nathaniel Rogers: As a young gay film fanatic, I assume you felt a kinship with Vito?

Jeffrey Schwarz: He's always been a beacon for me. I was reading "The Celluloid Closet" as part of my own coming out process. Like a lot of people who read that book it really changed my life and set me on a path in a sense. When I found out that Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman were making a documentary based on Vito's book in San Francisco, I jumped at the chance to try and work on it. I ended up interning for them. My first job in this business was working on The Celluloid Closet (1995) as apprentice editor!

"Vito" the man and movie, Gay Icons, and Documentary Filmmaking AFTER THE JUMP...

Movies: "J Edgar" Interview, Dustin Lance Black's Cautionary Tale

Leonardo, Clint and "Historian" Dustin Lance Black on the J EDGAR set

NATHANIEL ROGERS
...would live in the movie theater but for the poor internet reception. He blogs daily at the Film Experience. Follow him on Twitter @nathanielr.

 
INTERVIEW
Last week we had a very brief chat with Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar winning screenwriter of Milk fame. After that historic success he had the opportunity to direct a picture (What's Wrong With Virginia?) and now he's back with a biographical screenplay for another famous director, Clint Eastwood. After brief introductions, we jumped right into the movie at hand and our conversation in full follows. Lance's sprawling screenplay for J EDGAR leaps back and forth across the decades to chart the entire professional life of the infamous FBI man J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) while perpetually glancing sideways at his notoriously intimate relationship with his right hand man Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). The movie is proving divisive but Oscar buzz, particularly for DiCaprio's baity lead performance in Best Actor, continues.

TOWLEROAD: This is your second feature film biopic of a famous gay American. Will we get a trilogy?

DUSTIN LANCE BLACK: No, You know... no plans in the near future. I'm doing the 'Barefoot Bandit' story on Colton Harris-Moore and then Under the Banner of Heaven after that. So nope. But these two, for me, Milk and J. Edgar were sort of bookends in a way. One is a mirror of the other.

J Edgar being the more cautionary tale?

Yes. I think so [Laughs]. One of them had extraordinary political power. The other one was just trying to get a small piece of it. One came out of the closet and by doing so spread hope. The other one stayed in the closet and spread fear and insecurity.

There is some poetic justic here. J. Edgar Hoover was known for prying into people's personal lives and here you are investigating his. Were you nervous about doing so, given that some people get angry when others speculate about the sexuality of the famous and the deceased.  

Well people have been speculating about J. Edgar's sexuality for generations now. People have been saying 'Oh, he ran around in cocktail dresses!' That, to me, didn't ring true and in my research proved not to be true. But also in looking into his record as a heterosexual he failed miserably. And so it becomes quite clear when you look at what he did and didn't do that whether or not he ever consummated it, this was a guy who was not straight. 

CONTINUED, AFTER THE JUMP...

Movies: Interview With Out 'Anonymous' Director Roland Emmerich

 Jamie Campbell Bower as the Young Earl of Oxford in "Anonymous" 

NATHANIEL ROGERS
...would live in the movie theater but for the poor internet reception. He blogs daily at the Film Experience. Follow him on Twitter @nathanielr.

 
INTERVIEW
German born filmmaker Roland Emmerich makes movies that only come in one size: XXL. Same goes for their box office grosses (Independence Day). Sometimes it's the title characters that are super-sized (Godzilla), but usually it's the setting. Take the disaster movie genre, for example, which usually involves one city, one building, one ship; that's not enough for an Emmerich picture. He'll destroy the whole world (The Day After Tomorrow, 2012). Initially it comes as a shock to realize that he's directed a period piece and political thriller called ANONYMOUS... until you realize that it's William Shakespeare (the world's most famous writer) and Queen Elizabeth I (easily one of the most storied royals) at the center of all the intrigue. I sat down with him recently to discuss his movies (will he ever make a gay film?) and "Anonymous" in particular, which wonders loudly whether it wasn't the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans) who really wrote the Bard's immortal plays.

This is such a departure for you. I bet you're hearing that a lot.

A lot. [Laughter] It's a passion project. It was great to reconnect, in a way, with the art of filmmaking. And I went back to my homeland to do the film which was also cool for me. It was nice to not be responsible for tons of money, to have a really small budget but still do a very opulent kind of film. 

Did you miss the green screens a lot? Your movies generally have so many effects shots.

Well, there were a lot of green screens. Yeah, there were more than I'd ever used in a film. The theater was built but most of the street scenes and the wide shots and the courtyard [where a bloody confrontation takes place] did not exist. It was built in the computer. They've been saying for ten to twenty years that one day visual effects will make movies cheaper. For me this was the first time visual effects helped make the movie cheaper… and even possible at all!

I mean, you could have found this courtyard in England. You would have had to go there, change things (they wouldn't have had the green lawn. Then you have to put up the crew in a hotel. It's very expensive! We just had the same green screen and the same floor for different scenes.

But how do you do that with the actors? It must be hard for them with no environment to act in.

That's my job and they're good actors. You just tell them what will be behind them and they trust you. It doesn't affect acting at all. It's actually really good for sound, the stage. No waiting for airplanes. 

[On Shakespeare theories and his "gayest movie" AFTER THE JUMP...]

Roland with his Queen (Vanessa Redgrave and her daughter Joely Richardson share the role)

Movie: 'Weekend' Interview, Andrew Haigh's Buzzy Gay Romance

 Glen (Chris New) and Russell's (Tom Cullen) memorable "Weekend"

NATHANIEL ROGERS
...would live in the movie theater but for the poor internet reception. He blogs daily at the Film Experience. Follow him on Twitter @nathanielr.

 
INTERVIEW
Earlier this week I sat down with the writer/director Andrew Haigh, at a West Village coffee shop to discuss his glowingly reviewed debut WEEKEND which opens in limited release tomorrow.  I'd been privileged to see the film early while serving as a jury member at the Nashville International Film Festival this spring, shortly after it had surprised at the SXSW Festival where it won the Audience Award. We followed suit in Nashville and handed it our Best Film prize.

Cut to: Months and months later where I made the enjoyable mistake of putting the screener in for a quick refresher before talking to the director. My intention was to just watch two or three scenes but the compulsively watchable romantic drama sucks you right in and I was nearly late for the interview. Weekend clocks a one night stand between nearly-closeted lifeguard Russell (Tom Cullen, above right) and artist Glen (Chris New, above left) who meet at a nightclub. To their mutual surprise, the one night stand spills over into the next day...and the day after that? It's an unusually honest, beautifully acted little gem, easily one of the best films of 2011 and one of the best gay films in many years.

How did you cast this? No matter how strong your screenplay is, romantic dramas they fall apart without the right pairing of actors. 

Andrew Haigh: [Pictured left] Absolutely. I was so terrified about it. We didn't have time or money to do a massive casting. I'd seen quite a lot, something like fifty people, and I was starting to get depressed. There were some great people but I just knew they weren't going to be right. And then Tom came in.

Tom's performance surprised me. Sometimes when people are playing introverted characters, it's a bit dull. That's not the case here.

He's got such an expressive face, I think.  He goes from looking quite tough to looking really vulnerable, from really young and sweet to quite old with the weight of life crushing him. Tom thinks he gave an awful audition!

I have to know which scene.

[The director indicates a lengthy conversation on a sofa where Tom tells Glen about the unusual circumstances of his childhood before they have sex a second time.] 

That was the scene I gave them but then I took the script away. Do a version of that. Sometimes actors prepare so well that it's hard to see what they're really like. I wanted to get a sense of the real person. Tom was great. Then I put him and Chris together. Chris is not like Glen but he's got an aggressiveness to him. It's sweet but he likes to push people continually to open up. I put them together and there was a chemistry between them, a spark of something. You could just tell they seemed to like each other and worked off each other's style.

The movie is bit explicit. Did the actors know to what extent before auditioning?

They knew from their agents that there was going to be sexually explicit material. You can't ask them if they're gay or straight, you know, in the audition. I just asked them how they felt about gay material. During rehearsals I talked a lot about it. I didn't want them to do anything they didn't want to do - that would have come across.  It was just about developing the trust, I suppose. 

Since you can't ask actors about that...

It's all been outed now anyway.

Are they both gay then?

No, Tom isn't. He plays Russell. Chris is. It was hard because Tom didn't want to talk about it. It's not an issue to him. He thought that people would think differently about him if they found out he wasn't gay. And people do think differently. Everyone is always very interested. Is he gay? And then when they find out he's not it's like wow, it's amazing he managed to play gay! [Pause] Welllll, it's not really that difficult to play gay.

That makes me crazy that whole 'They're so brave!' thing. But you as the writer/director... surely you had some preconceived notions. Did you want gay actors?

MORE AFTER THE JUMP...

Towleroad Interview: Jared Max

This past May, ESPN radio sportscaster Jared Max came out during a live broadcast the same week the sports world saw former Villanova basketball player Will Sheridan and Phoenix Suns President Rick Welts do the same. CNN's Don Lemon also came out that week.

Max has since become pals with Sheridan as well as Lemon, who he had just had breakfast with the morning I spoke to him on the telephone.

Fresh off the euphoric high he is experiencing from his coming out, Max and I had a lengthy discussion about what the process has been like for him so far. Appropriately enough, Max describes the day he came out as "kind of like a new birthday."

SP: What's the fan reaction been so far?

JM: 98.9 percent positive.

SP: And the remaining 1.1 percent?

JM: "I've read some stupid comments that people have written underneath news stories. People go off on their comments. You know, I've heard from enough straight guys tell me, 'it took unbelievable balls to do what you did.' That only underlines the fact that people who write little comments on a page who don't have a profile up there and just have some screen handle. That's the total opposite, so what do I care about the peanut gallery? I read some great, great quote in some book which said, and I don't have the book in front of me so I'm going to paraphrase it, but it's along the lines of, 'Does the moon stop shining because some dogs bark at?' It's kind of been like that. As far as negative, nothing negative. It opened up a fantastic conversation between my father and I that was a little breakthrough in our relationship. My dad's known about me for 15 years or so. We're definitely in a better place now as a result of this all coming through. Me having a long conversation with my dad. He and I are in a real good spot. We didn't really talk about it. We kind of really had some real good breakthrough as a result of this."

SP: How does he feel about all of the press you've been had recently?

JM: "I think he was probably concerned. He's from a different generation. My dad is 64, I'm 37. Let's say for years my dad gets a call from a friend who would say to him, "Hey I heard your son on the radio", this and that and I'm sure it makes my dad happy, a father would be proud of his son. But I don't know how he would feel if all of a sudden he would get a phone call that was 'hey, I didn't even know your son was gay' or 'did you know?' I imagine those type of phone calls would probably be more difficult. So I was compassionate toward the situation and he never said to me that there was anything wrong with it. He wasn't proud of me or anything like that but I now feel like he's proud of me not only for having been successful with what I've done in my career to this point but proud of me for who I am. I've shared a lot of emails with him from things that people have sent me on Facebook where's gotten to see first-hand just the importance of this and the effect that this is having on people and I think it makes him very proud. His son is effecting people's lives in a very positive way."

The rest of the interview, AFTER THE JUMP.