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AE: Would you not admit what happened is extraordinary given that Brokeback Mountain had won everything else?
RE: But there is a precedent for that. The Color Purple, which went into the Academy awards with eleven nominations and it got no Oscars.
AE: But leading up to that it had won barely anything else.
RE: You remember what movie won that year? Because it was really a slap in the face of black people. Out of Africa which is a movie about a great white huntress. Color Purple was nominated in eleven categories, won a Golden Globe award [Whoopi Goldberg won Best Actress, Out of Africa won Best Picture], won a DGA award, won National Board of Review--
AE: But again it didn't have the same scope of awards or critical as Brokeback Mountain. The only thing The Color Purple had was the most nominations. Brokeback's awards and acclaim, combined with the general homophobia in society, that strikes gay people as, “Wow! This is really suspicious that it lost.”
RE: To some people, it seemed for The Color Purple to have eleven nominations and win nothing was odd. Especially when a great white huntress, as I call her, wins. So when you ask me how Brokeback Mountain falls into historical patterns, The Color Purple was wiped out like that right before we had the explosion of great African-American films and directors--Spike Lee, John Singleton, Boys in the Hood, Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X.
I believe if it did nothing else--and I believe it did a lot of things--Brokeback Mountain opened up an enormous area for dramatic material that has been approached tentatively by Hollywood . So now a studio executive looking at a movie with a gay theme is no longer going to have to ask if it can gross sixty or seventy million dollars. You know, by the time Brokeback is done—domestic, foreign, DVD—it will have grossed 300 hundred million, so it will have been a big, big hit. So it has historical importance that way. It is the picture that opened the door.
AE: So you think like The Color Purple, this heralds a new era for gay films.
RE: Quite possibly. There are a lot of gay directors working in Hollywood, but not on gay themes, or frequently on gay themes. Now maybe that's because they can't get them financed, but now maybe they have some scripts they've been trying to get bought for years, now they'll find a market for them.
AE: Stepping back from the Brokeback controversy for a moment, as a gay man it seems Hollywood makes films that tend to have a homophobic undertone with a lot of stereotypical performances—
RE: I perceive that a lot.
AE: You would say that is an accurate perception that Hollywood doesn't treat gays and lesbians particularly fair?
RE: Well, it does and it doesn't. One of the things that every group wants is for their group to turn up on the screen. For years and years, Asians said “How come nobody is ever Asian? How come the cop, the pharmacist, or the telephone operator isn't an Asian or black?” So the first step is acceptance in supporting roles, the second step is the acceptance of the group in leading roles. It used to be thought that an action picture should have a black co-star, but a white star. You don't need that anymore. Now you get action movies where the two leads are an Asian and a black. That's all happening and for gay people that is going to be happening too.
AE: That is happening with movies like Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.
RE: What you're going to see in years to come, and Brokeback Mountain is going to be important in its development, is a broadening out and deepening of characters that are gay. The next step, I think, is more acceptance of homosexuality among actors, because I do think it is true that many actors are afraid to reveal they are gay.
