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AE: Joe, did you have any hesitation about playing a gay character, such as Augusten?
JC: No, I didn't, because it's done in such a tasteful and smart way. A lot of films that you see, the fact that the character is gay is the defining aspect of the character. That's very much not the case with Augusten. I think it's one of the first films that's like that. Somebody used the word heteronormative for the world we live in and we expect a gay character to be shopping with his girlfriends (laughs) and that's all we want to see him doing. I think that our movie is really great in breaking that stigma and making sexuality not that important; certainly not defining, because it shouldn't be.

RM: That's one of my favorite scenes in the film. Where Joe (Augusten) is walking with Evan (Natalie) and he tells her he's gay, and she says, “Big deal!” I think we never really bring it up again and it's never addressed. I didn't want to do a movie about a really feminized gay person. Augusten is not that and I don't think I'm that. I never think of this as a gay movie. I don't even think of this character as gay. It's just not what I was interested in doing. But I do think he's a hero for the gay audience because so many gay people feel marginalized and feel stuck and victims of their choices. His life is a triumph. I think he shows a lot of people that you can beat overwhelming odds and make it. I like that idea of it.

AE: Joe, what about the idea of playing a living person?
JC: That was a lot more daunting than playing a gay character. That was frightening for me because I wanted to do him justice and do his memoir justice. Also, Augusten's fan-base is so loyal and so dedicated to him. They'd step in front of a train for him. People would come up to me before we had even started shooting, ask me if this or that wasn't going to be it, and recite entire passages to me, and give me looks like, “I hope you guys aren't going to screw this up, because (laughs) that would be very disappointing.” For me, that was scary. I also wasn't sure of how close Ryan and Augusten had become. I didn't know how involved Augusten was in the whole process. Before I met him, it was a scary thing. Then when I met him, he was so encouraging. Not for a moment did he challenge anything that I said I was going to do. That was what set me free to do that part.

AE: It was like getting his blessing.
JC: Yeah.

AE: Running With Scissors, based on Burroughs's memoir, is coming out near the end of a year that began with the Oprah/James Frey scandal involving his A Million Little Pieces memoir. Do you think people look at memoir-based work differently now because of that?
RM: Perhaps. I wasn't making a documentary. I was doing my version of his life. None of us in the movie, although I had access to journals and photos, met the real people because we were playing people seen through the eyes of a child. All I can tell you is that when I turned in the script and the Sony lawyers took over, I was not allowed to shoot a single scene unless it was validated. They had lawyers and private investigators research all that stuff. They came back to me with one or two things that I had put in there, taking a little dramatic license, and they said, “Let's take that out,” and I said “Great.” They wouldn't have let me shoot a single scene unless they had gone through and talked to witnesses. They didn't just trust the book. They hired people and went through it line by line. I really stand behind his story. More than anything it really proved to me – and I always thought it was true – now I know it's true.

JC: Also, Augusten was telling me that since the James Frey thing, people have been so into the idea of exposing these memoirs that they just want to invalidate everything. People have gone after Augusten and there's nothing in it that they can pin him down with because it's all true and it's on public record with what Finch had said.

RM: People in Augusten's life are always going to say this never happened. His mother recently gave an interview to NPR in which she said it never happened and then read her beautiful poetry (rolls his eyes). My response to that was, “If I was a mother and my son wrote that story about me I would, of course, want to deny it because it's too painful to admit any culpability. I think you're always going to get that with this book. The people, his mother, the (Finch's) daughters. His father stood by the memoir. His brother who observed it stood by it. His father's wife, who had access to all that stuff and met those people, said his childhood was much worse than that book. I think it's a he said/she said thing. My favorite thing about the daughters is that they don't dispute the Christmas tree up for two years or Hope talking telepathically to the cat or things like that. But they insist that their mother was a brilliant housekeeper.

AE: You are scheduled to work again with a number of your Scissors cast members on your film Dirty Tricks, including Annette Bening, Jill Clayburgh and Gwyneth Paltrow.
RM: Brian (Cox) is doing it too.

AE: How did that come about?
RM: I don't know. I think that my vision and what I want to do is so particular that the great actors want to follow someone who has a vision and a particular point of view. I have a point of view that they like.

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