The secret behind "Boys Don't Cry"

Director Kimberly Peirce says it's fun -- until the bitter end.

By Michael Sragow

Mar 9, 2000 | Few small-scale films have the staying power of "Boys Don't Cry," a swift, compelling rendering of the Teena Brandon murder case. The movie scored a critical knockout when it premiered last fall, kept accumulating admirers all winter and now has garnered Academy Award nominations for Hilary Swank as Teena, the Nebraska girl who passed as a boy (and was killed for it in 1993), and Chlok Sevigny as Lana, her lover. Its multiple end-of-year awards and Oscar push for Swank as best actress and Sevigny as best supporting actress fueled a revival of interest in the movie and the real-life case. As a result, this low-budget independent film has stayed in the top 25 at the box office and grossed roughly $5 million.

The film's audience might broaden even further if potential viewers realized that it's not just about a brutal murder spurred by sexual rage, but also about a leap of imagination, albeit one that lands the hero/heroine in an abyss. When I interviewed Kimberly Peirce, who co-wrote the film as well as directed it, before the film's limited rollout in October '99, what impressed me was her fix on the "fun" of the Teena Brandon/Brandon Teena character.

She admired Teena's audacity in carrying out her wish to be a boy and Brandon's ensuing naughty boyhood. (Peirce referred to the character mostly as "he.") During our conversation, the director cited not only true-crime classics like "The Executioner's Song" as key inspirations, but also Disney's "Pinocchio." Afterward, I felt that with her obvious interest in cross-dressing and her not-so-obvious interest in poetic fable, she should consider directing Swank as "Peter Pan."

In an era when first-time feature directors often turn their debut films into little more than celluloid portfolios (see what I can do?), "Boys Don't Cry" is the rare bird that took flight from a fledgling auteur's fascination with its subject. Six years ago, Peirce had been working at Columbia University Film School on a screenplay about a female Civil War spy who masqueraded as a man. Peirce gave it up because the spy posed as a male for survival and she wanted to explore a woman who'd masquerade as a man in order to work out a new identity. That's when, Peirce says, "I found Brandon, or Brandon found me." She picked up an issue of the Village Voice and there was the tale of this person "from a trailer park, with limited economic means," who makes an extraordinary effort to "reconstruct herself as a man, and then runs with it."

Part of what Peirce found seductive about Brandon was that he always picked "simple solutions to complicated problems like reversing his name from Teena Brandon to Brandon Teena, as if no one would notice. Or he'd charge an engagement ring on his girlfriend's credit card, and when she'd question him about it, he'd say, 'I did it for you.' I understand girls who dress like boys, but I also know inept criminals and feel I understand them. And Brandon was an inept criminal: He makes you think of Woody Allen in 'Take the Money and Run.'"

She also connected to Brandon as a spinner of fantasy: "As a filmmaker, you're constantly trying to reconfigure your fantasy in order to seduce people into your fantasy, and that's what Brandon would do. He went back to the drawing board until he found something that worked."

To Peirce, the most amazing moment was Brandon looking in a bedroom mirror, putting himself together as a man. The director is a believer in "trying on different identities and letting them shatter, and discovering something new -- the deeper, truer self -- in the wake of the unknown." Brandon's life was a series of crises, solutions and revised resolutions, and Brandon himself, according to Peirce, had as much to do with the destruction of his male identity as with its original creation. "He chose the life that ended the way it ended. He didn't want to be gay, he wanted to be straight, because straight was what was normal in his mind. The problem was, he desired women. So once again, a simple solution to a complicated problem: He could seem to be a boy."

When he lived in Lincoln he even stayed in a trailer park, close to his family; when he ran off to the hardscrabble hamlet of Falls City, he tried to reproduce family dynamics. "He wanted the affirmation of other people, and he wanted family. He was so happy to feel accepted and loved as a man that he let people into his confidence who had the power to destroy him."

Peirce says the drama's small-town contours helped pull her into it. She was born in Harrisburg, Penn., lived there for four years and considers that period her time of "primal memories." Although she rambled on to New York, Miami, Puerto Rico and Chicago, Peirce always has been drawn to small towns: "Even now I live in the East Village, a small town within a big city." She went to the University of Chicago in two stints. When she ran out of money, she moved to Japan to teach English before returning to get her degree in English and Japanese literature. Then she signed up for Columbia's film school. That's where she met her "Boys Don't Cry" co-writer, Andy Bienen, who worked with her for a year and a half on the final drafts and made sure they didn't "mythologize" Brandon -- that they kept him human.

Next Page: "Everyone watching is in as much denial as Brandon"

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