Opposite attracts - filmmaker and author Don Roos - Interview - Brief Article

Don Roos's comedy The Opposite of Sex was the indie hit of the year. The Advocate talks to Roos about his success and being gay in Hollywood

Don't let his sly leprechaun grin fool you. Writer-director Don Roos may be out in Hollywood, but he's not going to spout PC jargon about how liberation from the constraints of the closet has changed his life and improved the lot of gay men and lesbians everywhere.

Like Dedee, the hard-bitten anti-heroine played by Christina Ricci in Roos's directorial debut, The Opposite of Sex, the 43-year-old filmmaker is unusually candid about human frailties--including his own. If he contradicts himself from one moment to the next, it's because he understands how complex and contradictory human emotions can be, especially when it comes to s-e-x.

Opposite, the year's surprise independent film hit, is populated by a group of equally perplexed gays and straights (and at least one character who falls uncomfortably in between) trying to navigate the treacherous road between love and libido. In Roos's universe no one is spared.

"I was equally respectful and contemptuous of everyone's sexual orientation," he says. "Sex is such a complicated thing that it doesn't matter who you're attracted to," he adds. "You can still be deeply fucked up about it."

Even Roos's few Hollywood scripts that contain openly gay characters are never just about being gay. He takes issue with movies about, well, issues. He prefers to explore the emotional life of his gay characters (Whoopi Goldberg in Boys on the Side, Martin Donovan and Ivan Sergei in Opposite) and their convoluted attempts at coexistence in a largely heterosexual world. "If you want to reach more than gay people, you have to deal with straight issues as well," he says. "And that reflects my own life, in which I have as many gay friends as straight ones."

Prior to those two films, the gay content of his scripts was largely sublimated. "As a Hollywood screenwriter, I was used to disguising my gay characters as heterosexuals," he says. It was, he realizes, a reaction to the film industry's homophobia and his own internalized feelings about it. His first produced script, Love Field, was an interracial romance set in the American South in the early '60s. It was, he now realizes, a metaphor for "forbidden love."

His gay-camouflaged characters have usually been women because, he says, heterosexual males are rarely allowed to have conflicted emotions in movies. "Men are still stuck in that ridiculous '50s attitude. They're never allowed to play real fear or any kind of weakness. Women get to play all those feelings."

Via such scripts as Single White Female and Diabolique, Roos quickly developed a reputation as a writer of strong parts for women. "I'm always being told, `You write such interesting female characters,'" he says, mimicking a voice of disingenuous wonder. "Why don't they just call me a fairy to my face?" he shrugs. How truly Dedee of him.

Ironically, the camouflaged characters sometimes turned into unintentional expressions of gay rage. In Single White Female Jennifer Jason Leigh strives to be (or maybe bed?) Bridget Fonda and eliminate all her male competition. In Diabolique the heavily lipsticked Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani join forces to overthrow the man who done them both wrong. But in that film, Roos says, Stone decided to camp up the story's lesbian undertones and came off closer to a homicidal drag queen straight out of a Charles Busch play.

In The Opposite of Sex the camouflage is gone. The gay characters are as open about their sexuality as the straight characters. And every bit as screwed up. Whatever trepidation he had about the story was purely personal. "When I wrote the script, I was embarrassed," he says. "I've always been shy about my gay feelings. I gave it to my agent and said, `If someone wants to do it, fine. If not, that's fine too.'"

But when it came time to make the movie, rather than sublimate those fears, he met them head-on--through the character of Dedee. "If I felt that The Opposite of Sex was too gay at any given moment, I'd have Dedee come out with a homophobic remark and then let the audience sort it out," he says.

Dedee's confusion about homosexuality reflected his own and that of some audience members. "I've always been too concerned with the audience. It's been a burden," he continues. "Let's face it, it's truly unusual for audiences to see two men or two women kiss," he points out. "It still makes them uncomfortable. I'm talking about a real audience, not an ideal audience. That includes people who are not only homophobic but racist, sexist, and ageist as well."

By the end of the movie, however, Dedee's attitudes toward her gay half brother and her bisexual boyfriend have softened. And since, by then, the audience trusts and identifies with Dedee, perhaps its attitude has evolved as well, Roos hopes.

Future scripts, like the upcoming romance Bounce, will more accurately incorporate the gay and straight elements of Roos's life, he says. And if every character doesn't meet with the Queer Housekeeping Seal of Approval, no matter.

"It's about visibility above all," he says, "and telling people that there's more to life. Even films like In & Out and The Birdcage at least show that we exist. And that's very different from when I was growing up."

Natale is a Los Angeles-based entertainment writer whose work appears in the Los Angeles Times and Variety.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group