The Joe Wright adaptation is one of my favourite movies. The Pride and Prejudice of it all – I love the novel, I’ve watched the BBC series. I grew up watching a lot of those popular rom-coms, like You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle. For me, the romance was a lot easier than the comedy. There’s nothing more compelling on screen than seeing people fall in love. I see it with a certain kind of objectivity, while relying on Joel and the cast to make sure the film felt authentic.ĭid you watch a lot of rom-coms before you started this? Read a lot of Jane Austen? I liked that I had an outsider’s perspective. But that’s all in the script and the story doesn’t sanitize or avoid the bad stuff that happens there, like racism, classism. So I was wary of it because the island has a certain reputation that it’s for a certain type of queer person. I’ve been to Palm Springs a lot that’s my gay mecca. I will fully admit that I had never been to Fire Island before. How much did you know about Fire Island and its unique gay culture – with its shade-throwing muscle boys – before you read Joel Kim Booster’s script?
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Joel told me he wrote this movie because he wanted to spend time with Bowen and to have a fun summer with his best gal pal, and I adopted that philosophy to making the film. I wanted to focus on the story of friendship and I wanted to have as much fun making the movie as the characters have in the film. You must have felt some additional pressure because this film is much more high profile than your first two films, with wider distribution and bigger stars. But on Fire Island, a lot of sex happens, so we didn’t want to shy away from that. I basically negotiated: “Okay, if there’s no dick in the movie, can I have as many butts as I want?” So that was the arrangement.
I knew with Fire Island that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to go super, super far. With Spa Night, I showed a lot of nudity because that’s just the world of the film. Did you wonder if you went too far, especially since it’s essentially a Disney release ? The film is a bit racy and it’s certainly blunt about casual sex. When I think about filmmakers that I really love, like Ang Lee, he hops genres and tries different things, which is what I really hope to do in my career. Sometimes the difference between a joke working and a joke not working is a quick reaction shot or a couple of frames in the edit. But on a micro level – directing comedy is super hard. So in a grand philosophical sense, I don’t think I did. I’m always trying to find the emotional truth of the scene, and I don’t think something is funny or moving unless it feels authentic. Did you have to adapt your directing style? I talked to Ahn while he was in New York doing a final edit of the film.įire Island is definitely more, um, rambunctious than your first two films. Streaming on Hulu/Disney+ starting in June, it’s a major studio release that, like its characters, doesn’t care what straight people think of it. “I knew I smelled some bottoms!” declares Cho’s character, Erin, when her gaggle of gays arrives to spend a week in her Fire Island beach home. While Ahn’s first two features, Spa Night and Driveways, could be described as artsy festival faves, Fire Island is a snappy carnival of gay friendship, eye candy and saucy commentary on modern queer life. It’s also a fish-out-of-water story with a sassy band of brunch waiters dropped amid the monied (and mostly white) body fascists of New York gay society. Based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the obstacles to love are, well, pride and prejudice, particularly the human habits of self-doubt and misreading other people’s desires. In this gay holiday setting, there’s barely even a straight person to be shocked by the hilariously naughty dialogue (“Why would you say hello to someone you don’t want to fuck?”), the cruising through the Meat Rack or the dark-room mishaps.
In Andrew Ahn’s Fire Island – a rom-com written by Joel Kim Booster, and starring Booster himself along with Bowen Yang, Conrad Ricamora, Matt Rogers and Margaret Cho – there is no homophobia in sight. Trick, a 1999 romp with Tori Spelling, Christian Campbell and John Paul Pitoc, is noteworthy because it broke this formula: the rom-com obstacle was simply the two guys finding a place to be alone together.
Straight people’s falling-in-love was interrupted by careers or misunderstandings or an ex or whatever, but gay love was always “forbidden love.” The lead would meet a cute guy, but then they had to hide or abandon their love because nobody would ever accept it. “Okay, if there’s no dick in the movie, can I have as many butts as I want?”…īack in the 1990s, when gay cinema was starting to go mainstream, my friends and I would complain that what kept lovers apart in these films – the plot’s main engine – was always homophobia.