John Cameron Mitchell on How to Talk to Girls at Parties

Hedwig and the Angry Inch's John Cameron Mitchell is back with sci-fi-romance How to Talk to Girls at Parties. When we speak to the writer-director, he's keen to sing the praises of his film's talented stars: Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning

Article by Jamie Dunn | 30 Apr 2018

“My dick is huge in Japan,” exclaims John Cameron Mitchell proudly as we sit down to speak to him in a London hotel. The eternally youthful actor and filmmaker (he’s 55 but looks like a clean-living 30 year old) is of course referring to his most famous creation: Hedwig, the East German transgender glam rock singer he played in Off-Broadway musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and later in the 2001 film version, which he also directed. He brings her up as he’s about to fly east to resurrect her in a series of concerts. “Hedwig's inch goes the long haul. So I’m going there to make some money for my mom.”

Since the cult success of Hedwig, Cameron Mitchell films have been thin on the ground. There was his wild sex comedy Shortbus in 2006, which managed to be jaw-droppingly explicit and heartwarmingly sweet all at once. Then he showed his versatility in 2010 with Rabbit Hole: a complete detour in style and tone, it was a quiet but devastating drama exploring a couple’s grief after the death of their son. We're speaking to Cameron Mitchell ahead of the UK premiere of his first film in seven years, How to Talk to Girls at Parties. If you're a fan of those early comedies, you'll be delighted to hear this new film sees him back at his flamboyant best.

Based on Neil Gaiman’s short story of the same name, Cameron Mitchell has taken this jewel-like sci-fi romance and run with it, turning it into a vibrant anti-establishment romp full of rambunctious music, goofy humour and gender-bending aliens. The setting is Croydon at the fag end of the 70s, where teen punk Enn (Alex Sharp) and his two mates are looking for some excitement in the suburbs.

They seem to find it when they stumble across a wild house party whose guests the boys take for avant-garde performance-artists. Enn is particularly smitten with Zan (Elle Fanning), a rebellious young member of the collective who’s keen for Enn to show her the town and school her in the ethos of punk, which appears to be a completely alien concept to her and her friends. And the reason that it’s an alien concept is that these are literal aliens on a whistle-stop visit to Earth.

Cameron Mitchell reckons there are some similarities between the mood of the period depicted in How to Talk to Girls at Parties and the present day: “In some ways there are a lot of things in common with the 70s right now here and in the US, a kind of economic insecurity and panic, which resulted in voting for Brexit, for some, and Trump, for others, and the national front in the 70s.”

What’s missing in today’s climate, however, much to the director’s chagrin, is that same punk spirit. “Those people who were once punks have brought about these changes and the young people feel a little helpless,” he suggests. “They’ve been handed this stupid world by their stupid parents, and most of the young people are just left Instagramming their way into nothingness, as opposed to saying, ‘This just has to stop.’” We’re speaking to Cameron Mitchell in October 2017, so he’s not yet been witness to the extraordinary March for Our Lives protests organised by impassioned teenagers in the US and supported by young people around the world. But we take his point.

There’s certainly a punk spirit to be found in How to Talk to Girls at Parties. It’s an impetuous film full of outlandish ideas and wild flights of fancy. It’s not been to everyone’s taste, we must admit. At its premiere in Cannes last year, most critics were miffed. The Skinny’s own reviewer was particularly unimpressed, saying it “comes across like an extended episode of a BBC kids' show from the early 90s with a few lewd jokes thrown in.” This isn’t an inaccurate description of How to Talk to Girls at Parties’ tone, but we’re pretty sure the thrown-together aesthetic is close to what Cameron Mitchell was shooting for.

“We’re not trying to recreate the Roxy,” he laughs when we bring up his film’s scrappy edges. “Ours is a fictional, suburban, fairytale punk. There was a real punk scene in Croydon, but this one, we made it a bit more creative and sparkly.” These fairytale touches include Nicole Kidman playing a version of Vivienne Westwood, and a queer houseband called The Discords.

John Cameron Mitchell on working with Nicole Kidman

This is Cameron Mitchell’s second time working with Kidman – she played the grieving mother in Rabbit Hole. The 50-year-old actor is going through something of a purple patch at the minute. Last year she gave standout performances in The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Beguiled (both of which screened at Cannes alongside How to Talk to Girls at Parties), and she won multiple awards for her nuanced work on Big Little Lies. Coming up in the next 12 months, meanwhile, are roles in Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, the much-anticipated adaptation of The Goldfinch and comic book adventure Aquaman. How to Talk to Girls at Parties is lower profile than all of those projects, but Kidman, who's sporting a Toyah Wilcox-like peroxide wig and cockney accent in the film, looks to be having a whale of a time.

“There are few women in her class that are up for anything and they’re not worried about the money or the profile,” says Cameron Mitchell of his star. “Isabelle Huppert would be one, Tilda Swinton, Marion Cotillard maybe, but you don’t get a Kate Winslet seeking out Yorgis Lannsimoth. I love Emma Stone, but she’s not going to work with Park Chan Wook, she’s just not. But Nicole Kidman will. She’ll be a prison hooker in The Paperboy and do a fake blow job – whaaat? – and it’s the highlight of the movie.

As daring as Kidman’s film choices have been over the years, we’ve never seen her in a role like this. “She did find it a bit uncomfortable,” admits Cameron Mitchell. “Someone smacked her on the head with a guitar by accident and other people spat in her face – not on purpose, but, you know, things happen on a punk set. She’d be like, ‘I’m out of my comfort zone,’” says Cameron Mitchell in a spot-on impression of Kidman’s Aussie accent, “and I’m like ‘thank you for being here, Nicole’ and she’s like ‘anything for you, John’.”

'In this film it's like 'BAM!'' – on Elle Fanning in How to Talk to Girls at Parties

Cameron Mitchell has just as much praise for his younger star Elle Fanning. She’s only turned 20, but, like Kidman, she’s proven herself discerning when it comes to her choice of collaborators. “She started so young with interesting people,” says Cameron Mitchell. “I first saw her in Somewhere, and Sofia [Coppola] is up for anything too, so she was trained early to go for quality."

As impressive as Fanning has been in films like The Neon Demon and Super 8, How to Talk to Girls at Parties really shows the young star's range. Cameron Mitchell suggests this is the first role where she gets to be a “star” in the old Hollywood sense: she gets to sing, flex her comedic muscles and break hearts.

“She’s been the star of other films but in this one it’s like, BAM!!" he says. "I really hope it reminds people that she’s not just the interesting artistic flower, because she’s done a million of those roles, and she's done them really well, but she should be able to do whatever she wants.” Could she be one of the greats, we ask. “I really think she’s going to be, yes. It’s her instinctiveness, it’s her sense of humour; and she’s emotionally available in a heartbeat.”

Cameron Mitchell is an effervescent talker, but his tone darkens somewhat when we ask him about the health of independent filmmaking. “It’s not the time of the small film right now,” he laments. “People used to go see the best reviewed small film of the week, they’d look at the paper and go, ‘What’s the good one?’ It didn’t have to have a star, they’d just go. Now they wait for it to come out on some platform and go see the giant blockbuster instead – they go half assuming to hate it, but they go because they’re supposed to. People are a bit sheeplike that way. They come out and say, ‘That wasn’t bad’. That’s the best they can hope for.”

Whaterver your reaction to How to Talk to Girls at Parties, we can guarantee you’ll not come out of it ambivalently shrugging your shoulders, that’s for sure.


How to Talk to Girls at Parties is released 11 May by StudioCanal