Writer/director/actor Eric Schaeffer has been a strong voice in indie-comedy filmmaking for close to two decades. I’ve been familiar with his movies since around 2003, when a film professor declared him a young Albert Brooks, and showed his class his romantic comedy If Lucy Fell. Schaeffer, despite his interest in looking comedically at the darker things in life, like suicide and eating disorders, has an affinity for romantic comedies, especially using the familiar genre to look at those who otherwise feel disenfranchised and underrepresented in mass media.
Schaeffer’s latest film, and his gentlest film to day, is Boy Meets Girl, the coming of age romantic comedy about a Ricky, a transgender woman in Kentucky (played by newcomer Michelle Hendley) with a male best friend (Twilight’s Michael Welch) who develops feelings for a girl (Alexandra Turshen) for the first time. The movie has been celebrated at multiple LGBT film festivals, including winning 10 best picture honors. Schaeffer spoke with us about his new movie, available April 28th on DVD.
Lesley Coffin (TMS): Knowing your filmography, it seems you have an affinity for romantic comedies, particularly using the genre conventions to tell stories about people we don’t normally see as often in mainstream films. Where does your interest in that genre come from?
Eric Schaeffer: You know, you said it better than I could, because that is what I’m interested in doing. I want to widen the lens of what we look at, and not only in romantic comedies but in all part of our emotional lives; romantically, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. How we feel about who we are at the core. And most of use have a much more complicated relationship with our sexual and spiritual make-up than the confined boxes society places on us. And that has always been so confusing to me because society is made up of so many diverse people with a complicated inner life, who are being shamed by society saying we shouldn’t feel or behave in a certain way based on the sex and gender we are defined by – such as how society see older people, as I addressed in Never Again; old people having sex, we just don’t see. So while I’m interested in widening the lens, it is no different than how most of us experience our lives, but in films, we have traditionally had a very narrow view of romance and sex, so I’m just interesting in widening that view.
TMS: Is that what initially sparked your interested in being a writer and storyteller?
Schaeffer: Not really. The thesis I just described was not something I set out to do. It’s a view of life that I’ve cultivated over the years, after having made nine films, a hundred episodes of TV, and written a book. I didn’t set out to have a message behind my work, I just wrote from my heart. Overtime I’ve gone back to look at my recurring themes, but it just happened accidentally. I’m really just interesting in writing my honest perceptions of life, which is the reason I also like to act and direct my own work, because I felt it was the most organic way of getting the story across.
TMS: Why did you decide not to take a major role in this film? [Schaeffer only makes a very small cameo as a police officer].
Schaeffer: After everything I just said, I didn’t want people to go into this film with preconceptions based on my previous work. For people who like my movies and like me, this movie is just going to be preaching to the choir. But there are people who aren’t fans of my films, or just don’t know about me or my films, and I wanted to give them a fresher lens to view my work from. I felt that fundamentally, me not being in it would be the quickest and easiest way to do that, and making a movie about three people in their 20s, in the south, would be a way to do that, even though it involves themes which appear in all my work. I’m an aware enough person about how my films are viewed and they can be polarizing, and that’s fine. Few filmmakers or artists are going to please everyone, but I wanted to give people the opportunity to see this film without being prejudiced for any reason.
TMS: What was the reason for setting the film in a small town in the south?
Schaeffer: Well, I wanted to blow up all the stereotypes I could, with this cliche kind of story on the surface. Hence the title Boy Meets Girl, it seems like the most cliche, familiar story we’ve ever seen, that won’t be threatening to anyone. And then as you go through the film you realize it actually is a very familiar love story, with things that make it very unique. Keeping with that spirit, setting the film in New York City or San Francisco, or any big city that is known to be LGBT friendly, like Austin or Atlanta, people would assume that a person like Ricky would have an easier time. I wanted people to go into the movie with perception that by setting it in a small town, Ricky would have to overcome more than if she were in a northern city. And I wanted to illustrate that there are many pockets in the rural south supportive and loving to all kinds of people. That part of the country is capable of love and acceptance too, there is no part of the country more capable of love than another.
TMS: You’ve been very open with the fact that you describe yourself as a heterosexual man with diverse sexual interests. With the character of Robby, he expresses the fact that men tend to define themselves by much stricter terms of being straight or gay, and are less comfortable with the idea of bisexuality than someone like Francesca or Ricky. Do you feel bisexuality and sexual curiosity is harder for men to publicly admit to than it is for women?
Schaeffer: I think that the cliche, born out of some correct assumptions, is that women are allowed to by physically affectionate and sexually intimate with other women without being labeled. For women, it makes it okay to explore their sexuality and for men, they still can’t publicly do that. We know that in many cultures, including our own, the idea of a man being bisexual is pervasive. Anyone with kids knows that their sons, as with their daughters, there is a natural exploration of their bodies and I’m not afraid to call it like it is, according to my personal experiences and the experiences of people I know. I don’t know what the label would be if you experiment and then spend the rest of your life sleeping with the opposite sex. So in this film, this is emblematic of the fact that women are allowed to explore their bisexuality in a far more open fashion than men are. If men acknowledge even fantasizing about another man, having that thought labels them as gay.
TMS: The film has a very positive view of the internet and the kind of support that kind of community can provide to trans people, despite hearing so often that the internet is this place for bullying and attacks. Did you look at the relationship transgender people have with the internet?
Schaeffer: I don’t know much about the internet. I’m a an old person who wasn’t raised on the internet, and I have extremely polarized and mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I think it can unify us in a global way and that can be beautiful; but as you suggest, in the wrong hands, people can hide behind anonymity and hate mongrel in a way that a lot of people wouldn’t do face to face. I think that it almost creates through anonymity, it can create a sort of wilding in both directions, good and evil. Because of the internet, people all over the world can stream the film, and that’s a beautiful thing, and that wasn’t something that could happen when I first started in the ’90s. So that’s beautiful. And people who may not have a community, like a trans girl in a small town, can have a community of trans women through the internet. The unification properties of the internet are great and the other stuff’s still just a great work in progress.
TMS: What has the experience been like doing Q&As with Michelle and meeting transgendered people in the audience?
Schaeffer: It’s deeply moving. The reason I make films is to create a unifying heartfelt bond among the audience. Being a filmmaker can often be a solitary experience, and I can get reports if it means something to them, but I like to experience it first hand. Which is the reason I go to the screenings and do Q&As. You can experience their body language and timber of their voices, which the internet and written word does not express, and that can be really beautiful to witness first hand. I’ve done Q&As for a lot of my films but this particular film moves people in a way which is profound and deeply moving. And they share those feelings with me, and I’m like a big crybaby, and everyone always laughs when I start crying.
Lesley Coffin is a New York transplant from the midwest. She is the New York-based writer/podcast editor for Filmoria and film contributor at The Interrobang. When not doing that, she’s writing books on classic Hollywood, including Lew Ayres: Hollywood’s Conscientious Objector and her new book Hitchcock’s Stars: Alfred Hitchcock and the Hollywood Studio System.
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