SEX ED.
After his award-winning biopic Gods and Monsters, writer-director Bill Condon returns to biography, examining this time the life and times of famed sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Peter Bowen talks with Condon.
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| PHOTO: KEN REGAN / CAMERA 5. |
When Woody Allen is threatened with a lobotomy in the sci-fi comedy Sleeper, he stammers, “The brain, the brain is my second favorite organ!” Although the pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, the subject of Bill Condon’s new feature Kinsey, studied the most favorite organ, his real pleasure seems to have come from his brain. Long before Hugh Hefner, Kinsey was laying the groundwork of the sexual revolution with his 1948 groundbreaking work Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Kinsey’s passion was not that of a libertine, however, but of a scientist. Prior to cataloging human sexuality (personally conducting nearly a third of the 17,000 sexual histories taken by his team between the years 1938-1956), Kinsey cataloged snakes and gall wasps. Indeed, Kinsey began researching sex only after discovering the impoverished state of the field when he was assigned to teach a course on marriage at the University of Indiana at Bloomington.
In his first film, Gods and Monsters, Condon highlighted Hollywood horror director James Whale, a gay working-class-born British director who has left us the cinematic legacy of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. With Kinsey, Condon focuses on another seemingly contradictory figure whose work refigured modern culture. Unlike recent glossy biopics (like A Beautiful Mind) that neatly omit those facts that don’t jibe with their story, Condon includes the whole messy affair. Told in the form of a sex history, Kinsey (Liam Neeson) recalls the tyranny of his puritanical evangelical father, his adoration of nature, his repressed youth, his nerdy sexual explorations, including a longtime affair with his assistant Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard), his enduring wife Clara (Laura Linney) and his own evangelical zeal in taking sex histories, even after the Institute for Sex Research, a non-profit corporation he founded with the assistance of the president of Indiana University, had its funds withdrawn by the National Research Council and he was publicly persecuted.
In the end, it is not sexual desire but intellectual inquiry that becomes the consuming passion and driving force of the man and the film. While a historical portrait, Kinsey also hits a contemporary note, reaffirming science’s imperative to examine clearly and without prejudice. While Kinsey preceded and provoked the sexual revolution, his all-American stick-to-it-ness and common sense is just as necessary now in public debates on reproductive rights and gay marriage as it was in the 1950s.
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| PHOTO: KEN REGAN / CAMERA 5. |
Filmmaker: How did you get interested in Kinsey?
Bill Condon: My producer Gail Mutrux had sent me a book on Kinsey, and I found him fascinating. I was immediately attracted to explore stuff I had started in Gods and Monsters. In that film, one of the reasons [James] Whale was worth examining was that his movies, which were still so iconic, had a direct connection to who he was. With Kinsey, it was the same thing. I was astonished by how driven he was to air the sexual dirty laundry of the country, and how that allowed him not only to discover things about himself, but to undo the great damage that had been done to him by a very repressive childhood.
Filmmaker: What sort of research did you do?
Condon: I read a number of biographies and talked to people who were still around.
Filmmaker: Which members of the original research group did you speak with?
Condon: Paul Gebhard [played by Timothy Hutton] has become the major source for all this stuff that has only come out in the recent decade, like [Kinsey’s] bisexuality and his open marriage. Wardell Pomeroy [played by Chris O’Donnell] died three or four years ago, before I got to talk to him. Clarence Tripp, who died a year and half ago, was a great source, along with Bill Dellenback, who did all the photography for Kinsey. Through the process I got to go to the Kinsey Institute, which was incredibly helpful. I also met with some of his grandchildren. The research process took about a year. Then I started writing the script, which took about six months.
Filmmaker: What about Clyde Martin, who plays such major part in the film.
Condon: Clyde Martin is still alive but was not interested in any of this.
Filmmaker: How much information did the Kinsey Institute provide you?
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Filmmaker: You’ve made two film biographies of not exceptionally well-known men whose work has had an extraordinary effect on our culture.
Condon: The biopic is not a form that I really liked. What most influenced me is that classic Hollywood biography idea that you only deal with one idea, and that becomes the theme. It brought me back to Gods and Monsters. James Whale was having memories of hundreds of things every day, but I would center on the memory of his father calling him “sissy boy” or his father working in a coal mine and looking like a monster, focusing on just things he created.
It was the same with this film — I looked to extract a single idea. If there is one thing that is truly unique to this story, it was Kinsey’s incredible ability to talk to people. He [personally] spoke to [close to 6,000] people. He got strangers to open up in a time that people didn’t talk about the most intimate aspect of their lives. That really struck as something very important about who he was. Kinsey trained the three members of his team to conduct sex histories by having them take his sex history, and then by critiquing them. That stuck in my head as a really powerful device.
Filmmaker: How do you feel that this approach helped you tell the story?
Condon: The use of flashbacks, which is inevitable if you are telling the biography of an adult, has to be justified. In Gods and Monsters, I got lucky. James Whale’s small stroke left him incapable of directing where his mind took him. But in Kinsey there was no such thing to fall back on. Then I remembered how the sex history involved getting biographical data. And I thought that finding out the facts of someone, well, that could help justify showing the things from an earlier part of his life.
Filmmaker: Where did you take poetic license in writing the screenplay?
Condon: You take license with whatever project you choose, and there have been conflicts with all the stories. Both biographies, for example, discuss how Kinsey gave advice to his daughter about losing her virginity. At the time, she was 18 and going steady with a guy who eventually became her husband. When Kinsey’s granddaughter came to visit the set on the day that Kinsey was talking about these things, she told us that her mother — who is the other sister — didn’t remember it that way at all.
Filmmaker: Do you think there will be conflicts about what is in the film?
Condon: There are a lot of people who want to stop the film in its tracks. There is a core group of people who believe — and probably correctly so — that Kinsey is responsible for the sexual revolution. I just got sent this publication called the American Decency Association Newsletter, which read, “On November 12, Hollywood will release a movie intended to convince the public that sex researcher Alfred Kinsey was an American hero when, in fact, his ‘research’ was fraudulent and without question has been a major contributor to the decline of America.”
Filmmaker: Hopefully the controversy will spur interest in the film. What sort of interest was there when you tried to get the movie made?
Condon: It was very hard to put together. It will be fun to hear the same question that we heard after Gods and Monsters got such attention, when people said, “Why didn’t you come to me with this?” And I’ll be able to say, ”Well, I did. Three times.”
Filmmaker: What was the budget for the film?
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Filmmaker: Do you think that companies were afraid because they wouldn’t know how to market it, since Kinsey is not all that well known?
Condon:> Yes, and I think they feared that it would be too clinical. But you look at Fox Searchlight’s campaign, with posters like, “Let’s Talk About Sex” or “Discover Yourself,” and it doesn’t seem that hard to market.
Filmmaker: The film also has a great cast. How did you go about casting?
Condon:Much of the casting depended on location. I couldn’t shoot it in California since there is only one school that could double for Bloomington. We felt that it would be too hard to shoot in Indiana off this budget. So we shot everything in New York, and we used Fordham as the campus. We also wanted New York because we had over 100 speaking parts. The film is really an epic story; Kinsey and his team crossed the country several times, taking the sexual temperature of an entire country. And since we couldn’t shoot all of that, we needed actors to represent the wide range of people he talked to. And I don’t know where else we could have gotten those actors. Also Liam and Laura lived in New York.
Filmmaker: Wasn’t it a bit expensive shooting in New York?
Condon: There were some hard aspects. Obviously money doesn’t stretch as far there, especially for a period piece. But at the same time, we got an extraordinary group of actors, like Jefferson Mays, who just won a Tony for I Am My Own Wife, and the playwright Romulus Linney, who’s Laura’s father.
Filmmaker: In writing, you made Kinsey’s assistant Clyde Martin a crucial character in the story. Why was he so important to you?
Condon:He was the person who slept with both Kinsey and his wife. And he was the catalyst that changed their marriage. He was always the third leg of the triangle.
Filmmaker: Cinematically, you used nature a lot to frame the story. I am thinking about the grand vistas in the beginning, the campus, the parks at the end of the film.
Condon: There isn’t that much outdoors but it has such an impact in the film. Kinsey loved the outdoors. It is where he found himself and found relief from everything else. In fact, he and his family spent as many nights as they could eating outside. Nature is also such a basic idea here. Just remembering that that is what all this fuss comes down to, something that happens every second of the day. For Kinsey as a youth, just observing and recording what happens in nature was his salvation from a childhood that was so overwrought with religion.
Filmmaker: How else did you frame the film?
Condon: The motif we used for a lot of shooting was the grid. I had seen a picture from the Institute of a naked man standing in front of graph paper and our production designer worked with that as a recurring image. The contradiction of Kinsey’s project is that he attempted to categorize and quantify and prove scientifically that you can’t put people into boxes.
Filmmaker: Having given so much time in defining this man, what do you think is Kinsey’s legacy?
Condon: I asked Clarence Tripp what Kinsey would have made of the woman’s movement and, more importantly, the gay movement, and he said he would have been appalled. His whole thing was, “Don’t identify with the group. Don’t align yourself and don’t define yourself by your sexual activities. First, they are multihued, and second, they will change over your life. Don’t become that thing. That is the job of society — to define you — and it is your job to fight that.”
Go to the sidebar: A Visit to the Kinsey Institute.
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