’77 punks and other aliens in ‘Parties’
Filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell and author Neil Gaiman are known for their knack at creating evocative, highly specific worlds and characters. Now, they’re turning their vision toward the waning days of punk — and an alien visitation— in Mitchell’s film adaptation of Gaiman’s short story “How to Talk to Girls at Parties. ”
“I didn’t want to do someone else’s story after directing ‘Rabbit Hole,’ ” said Mitchell at a recent press day with Gaiman at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in San Francisco. “I wanted to do my own story, but it kept getting more attractive in the treatment. I always love a good puzzle to extrapolate; then there was an opportunity to put my own sense of humor in it, and I fell in love.”
Mitchell, the creator and star of the musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and director of the 2001 film adaptation, as well as the writerdirector of the film “Shortbus,” and Gaiman, the English fantasy writer best known for the comic book series “The Sandman” and the novel “American Gods” (since adapted into a Starz television series), spoke at length about the process of transferring, and expanding, the original short story into an intimate sociological sci-fi adventure.
“It’s an intentionally little film,” said Gaiman. “On the cover of books, they used to have ‘soon to be a major motion picture,’ and I joked I could get ‘soon to be a minor motion picture’ on this. Not that it’s a minor picture; but the idea was always that the budget was going to be small, it wasn’t going to be about huge special effects.”
“Girls” (adapted for the screen by Mitchell and Philippa Goslett) tells the story of Enn (Alex Sharp), a suburban English teenager, and Zan (Elle Fanning), one of the title girls at the party, who is also an extraterrestrial visitor. The original short story, said Gaiman, was the basis for Act 1 of the film, “and in Act 2 one of those girls follows our hero home and then we get to see his world through her eyes.” Gaiman’s conversations with Mitchell and Goslett about the cultural mood in 1977 England elevated punk’s role in the film and became the basis for Acts 2 and 3.
“One of the things John and I both globbed on to was the jubilee,” said Gaiman of the period around Queen Elizabeth II’s 25th year as queen of England. “I said, what can we do with that?’ ”
“Then the idea came that London is always the end of the aliens’ circuit on their tour but wait, they forgot to book accommodations ahead of time,” joked Mitchell.
“Already for the punk kids it’s kind of over, the giant flowering of punk has happened,” Gaiman continued. “The kids are still in school uniform, they’re the kind of punks me and my friends were. The real punks at King’s Road with the dyed hair would not have considered us proper punks. We get to superimpose these 1970s aliens onto a world of 1970s punks and the jubilee.”
Like “Hedwig” and “American Gods,” “Girls” is a visually rich world that mashes together many sensibilities, but it’s the tension between British punk and retro ’60s and ’70s futurism that inform the film’s look and mood the most, call it Vivienne Westwood
meets “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“In the ’70s, it wasn’t all apocalyptic; there were alternate futures that were interesting and not all doom,” said Mitchell. “Sadly, our future stories are all now dystopia and ‘how do we survive the end days?,’ which is a limited palette.” Mitchell wanted his aliens to have a sense of humor about their appearances, almost as if they were appearing as “what people in the ’70s thought aliens would look like.”
But even with all the highly specific design references, Mitchell and Gaiman agree that the film’s central motif that “Everybody is an alien when you’re in love, and everyone is an alien when you’re a teenager,” as Gaiman says, drives the story.
“Before puberty you knew who everyone was and how everything worked,” said Gaiman. “Now it’s like you’ve been issued with a completely new body, an alien body, and everyone else has an alien body too and nobody gets an instruction manual.”