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AE: Transamerica is kind of a road movie. Do you have a favorite in that genre?
DT: Oh, gosh. That's a hard one: “a favorite.” Let me digress a little bit and just say I really wanted so much to put these characters, who some people might be pre-disposed to see as outsiders or invisibles in the context of the traditional American movie form, to ground them and anchor them. They're just two more Americans; they're just two more people on this planet, just like you, me, our moms and dads. And the journey is such a perfect metaphor for people's minds and hearts opening up; that's a journey, too. You know what's an amazing road movie is, and you won't think of it as a road movie: Finding Nemo. They go on the road through the ocean.

AE: The reason I was thinking about road movies was because, within the same year, another road movie is Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers. Not only is it a road movie, but it has a very similar concept of men who fathered children that they were completely unaware of. What is interesting to you about that subject?
DT: I never made a conscious decision that that was like, wow, this is the subject that interests me. Sometimes when I feel lonely I dream of family and connection and how we all used to live in tribal communities with people we were all basically related to, and sleeping in a tangle of arms and legs. There's this kind of need, hard-wired into us, to belong. What could be more poignant and dramatic and funny than somebody who's the ultimate loner finding that they have the deepest connection possible with somebody they didn't even know existed.

When it starts out, they are like a couple of kids and she's not grown up emotionally, which is why her therapist makes her go on this journey, because she's not ready yet. She's very smart academically, but she never really learned how to relate to people. Her emotional intelligence is down there at zero level. They start off as a couple of kids, but she grows up and learns how to become a parent. She really is a different person at the end of the movie.

AE: You really see the kid in her in the scenes with her parents and her sister. She is a hair short of a tantrum at all moments with those people, because they bring that out in her.
DT: What did you think of Fionnula Flanagan as the grandmother?

AE: She was way better than in the Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood.
DT: In Ya Ya Sisterhood, for me, she just almost stole the show.

AE: She was much better in Transamerica. I know that Transamerica has played and won awards at mainstream film fests. Did it also play at any LGBT festivals?
DT: It has and it will. We won the audience award at Frameline in San Francisco. This
was a movie that, again, nobody wanted to finance. We had to finance it ourselves
with money begged, borrowed and stolen. It was in Berlin and we couldn't drag anybody from the Hollywood establishment to come and see it. They thought it was going to
be some lightweight, campy, tranny movie – as they put it. Then, we got an award
for Best Film at Berlin and we got a fantastic review in Variety, and then people
suddenly wanted to see it.

And at Tribeca, Felicity just won best actress, we just won best film at Woodstock, and she won best actress at Mill Valley in San Diego, I won best screenplay at Deauville, best film in San Francisco. It's been an amazing fairy-tale journey. I'm still reeling. I know we're doing Portland and Seattle Gay and Lesbian (film fests), and a showing in Miami.
I definitely want to support that part of the community. I was very adamant; there was one transgendered film festival that I knew about in the world. It was in the Netherlands and we played there in the summer, and that was really great.

AE: Have you started work on your next film?
DT: I am trying to find time. I am basically at a different festival every three days. The way this movie is going to survive is through word of mouth and through people; it's not like a blockbuster, star-studded movie. So, it has to have a groundswell.

AE: Having the Weinstein Brothers distribution certainly helps.
DT: It helps! That's what they're good at. That's why I'm being sent around to all these festivals, which is my pleasure to do. And the word of mouth has been really, really good. But, that's who we depend on. We depend on the kindness of strangers around here, because we don't have the big bucks to have major television ads and primetime.

AE: And where's home for you?
DT: The West Village in New York. But, I'm from Arizona. The Arizona scenes: that's my mother's house. This was a real independent movie, (using) my family's' and friends' cars and houses and backyards. (laughs)

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