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It's all in the family for Tucker Editor's Note: "Transamerica" was the opening night film at this year's very successful Out On Film Festival, which ran from November 11-17 at Landmark Midtown Art Cinema. The line up showcased more than 50 films and drew record numbers. Steve Warren had a chance to sit down with director Duncan Tucker for an interview... Talk about walking the walk! You'd expect Duncan Tucker to try to draw crossover business to his first feature, Transamerica by calling it "an old-fashioned movie about family." After all, there's a rather limited niche audience for movies about transsexuals and hustlers, even if they adhere to the road movie formula.
Transamerica had a much longer gestation, Tucker says. He was researching the script by talking to transsexuals and street hustlers when it occurred to him he should find out if he could make a movie. So in 2000 he shot The Mountain King, a short that was well received on the festival circuit. One of the two characters in The Mountain King, a hustler who meets a supposedly straight man on a beach, was inspired by someone Tucker met in his research. He describes him as "Toby (Kevin Zegers' character in Transamerica) maybe ten years down the line, if he hasn't been rescued." Arrested, strip-searched and frightened by a scary cellmate (all in scenes that were later cut to streamline the film and get it on the road faster), Toby reaches out to the natural father he's never met. What he doesn't know is that Stanley has become Bree (Felicity Huffman) and is days away from gender reassignment surgery. Bree bails Toby out without telling him who she is and they become a family while driving across the country. When Tucker conceived the film he didn't know who the central characters would be. "I was thinking about family," he says, "my own process of growing up, feeling different and learning to accept myself." Around that time, he says, "a woman I knew told me what was under her skirt. She was a stealth transsexual living as a woman and I'd never suspected. That's when a light bulb went off." Years later the script was done, he had made a successful short and Tucker began the difficult process of raising money to shoot his feature. There was a period, he says, when it was relatively easy to secure financing for independent films. But that time had passed. "Nobody wanted to finance this film. Nobody believed in it, with that subject matter. They thought it was uncastable... "Financiers, after you send them a script, will take a couple of months to get back to you; and here we are waiting. Two years can pass quickly that way." Eventually Transamerica was made in the time-honored independent way. Tucker maxed out his credit cards, his mother mortgaged her Phoenix home (which was used as the set for Bree's family's home), his brother kicked in, and "everybody worked for peanuts." When he was casting, Tucker says, "the producers told me, ‘Anybody you've ever heard of, anybody anyone has ever heard of, you can't afford."
"I had seen her 12-13 years ago in a play," Tucker says, "and she captured my attention. She had the kind of intelligence and compassion an actress needed to play Bree." Not wanting to trust her instincts in such a sensitive area she knew little about, Huffman did her own intense research to learn how a man becoming a woman behaves. After speaking and moving like a woman all her life she had to learn to do it as if it was all new to her. Tucker's research changed his way of looking at things. "I know it's politically incorrect," he offers, "but I learned how fluid our definitions are: gay-straight, male-female, red state-blue state—we force this duality on everything." After getting to know a number of transsexuals, Tucker says, "I felt it was important to have transpresence in the movie." He wrote in a scene where Bree and Toby drop in on a transsexual support group in Dallas. The group isn't real and neither is Dallas—it was filmed at the New Jersey home of an NYU friend of Tucker's—but the transsexuals are real. They include Calpurnia Adams ("She's the one who plays the fiddle"), whose story was dramatized in the Showtime movie A Soldier's Girl, and others who had acted as consultants to the filmmaker and his star. Tucker wishes he could have done more with the scene—"We only had one afternoon and there are so many characters"—but he's pleased with what he got. He has special praise for Bianca Leigh, who plays Mary Ellen, the hostess, and says Huffman was so impressed with her she's introducing her to people in the industry to help her get an acting career going. The woman who triggered Tucker's interest in transsexuals is, he reveals, "happily married and living a stealth life in the Deep South." But the news isn't all good. "One of the women I interviewed in my research committed suicide." Not unexpectedly Tucker found working with Huffman a delight. "She went beyond my wildest imagination," he says. "I want to work with people who love their work, who are professional." When she disagreed with the filmmaker she told him so, but even when she didn't like his idea she'd say, "Let's try it!" Tucker had a similar, but much briefer working relationship with one of his favorites, Dolly Parton. It was decided to commission a new song to play behind the end credits, rounding out a soundtrack that includes David Mansfield's original score and recordings of bluegrass, Native American and Latin songs. Tucker was pleasantly surprised when his first choice agreed to write and record a song.
Working with Huffman proved to have a fringe benefit when her husband, actor William H. Macy, saw the completed film and asked if there was anything he could do to help. "The producers immediately told me, ‘Make him executive producer,'" Tucker says. Macy's name was useful in marketing and in getting Transamerica shown in festivals, including Tribeca, where it generated every independent filmmaker's dream: a bidding war. It was won by what would come to be known as The Weinstein Company, run by Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the brothers formerly known as Miramax. Because of the demand Tucker was able to hold out for a contract that guaranteed the film wouldn't be tampered with. He says the man known in the industry as "Harvey Scissorhands" for his habit of recutting films he picks up for distribution "is The New Harvey and The New Harvey has been really great." Touring to promote Transamerica hasn't given Tucker time to write "the script I want to write" for his next project. He's also considering directing other people's scripts and says he receives a half-dozen a week. What he wants to do, he adds, is another small, character-driven story—no larger than American Beauty. He cites Jean Renoir as his favorite filmmaker, "because of the humanity in his films." The father-to-be expresses concern about child abuse in its many forms. Transamerica's Toby was sexually abused by his stepfather and, says Tucker, "like many abused kids he confuses sex with love. "But Bree was abused too because she wasn't allowed to be herself. Any child who realizes around the age of four that they're different from other kids but isn't allowed to be who he is, who she is—with joy—is an abused child." A final, frivolous question. If Tucker could get any star he chose on the casting couch, who would he pick? "The entire cast of Lord of the Rings," he replies; "including the Elven women." Steve Warren is a local actor and film reviewer. His reviews can also be seen weekly in the Sunday Paper. |
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