John Cameron Mitchell is co-writer and director of How to Talk to Girls at Parties, the new movie based on a short story by Neil Gaiman. The creator of Hedwig and the Angry Inch took a few minutes away from working on his new project to talk to Paul Simpson… [NB There are minor spoilers in this piece]

What was it about Neil Gaiman’s original story that spoke to you that made you want to do the movie?

I loved the original story. It felt like a kind of poem, and the central thought in it is: when you’re that age, first love, everyone’s an alien. When you’re in lust, everyone’s an alien. Really when you’re older, everyone’s an alien too. He just made it literal and I thought it was lovely.

I grew up in the UK in the early 70s – my mother’s Glaswegian. The 70s’ drear and doldrums was very clear to me. I wasn’t there in the late 70s but I just loved the setting. Philippa Goslett, the co-writer, interviewed Neil and injected a lot of his own life into the story. The punk element came in – Neil was in a band, he had a zine. He was in Croydon and broke into the punk clubs because he was underage. All the things that he did found their way into the ethos of the film. It became richer.

I was wooed in by my producer, who also did Shortbus, to think about it more. The more I thought about it, the more I could inject a bit more of myself in – the sense of humour and even a little bit of the idea of parenting, which is the flipside of first love. In the end the film becomes much more about what it means to be a good parent. That was interesting to me – parents declining forgiveness, failures in parenting and also the new hope of parenting, which informs the ending of the film.

Neil very much didn’t want it to be as much of a sci-fi outer space film as a Romeo and Juliet type story – which was great for me and also great for our budget! I got to make the YA romance comic book fable that I wanted.

In designing it, we also realised we were making our 70s Midnight Movie – we’d have a good time with it, and the aliens, when they take human form, would take the form of aliens in the 70s as opposed to some other aliens. Aliens have nostalgia too!

It’s the old line about nothing dating like yesterday’s future.

Yes – but I was also looking at a Gary Numan video on YouTube and one of the user comments was, “Ah, the future in 1979 was so much cooler than it turned out to be.” You never know when you’re in a golden age.

In terms of the expansion of the backstory, did you draw from other parts of Neil’s writing?

That was really taking his stuff as a kind of germ. There were different classes of aliens and Parent Teachers, so I expanded that into a hierarchical system of what we call the Body Celestial so it’s a colony of aliens based on the Eastern chakra system. There’s a missing colony – the heart colony which requires a human and an alien miscegenation to create. The heart is the crossroads, it’s where the circulatory system has its train station – the way in and the way out. It’s really what the heart is: it’s a way into yourself and out of yourself. And of course another way to define that is “love”. The Eastern system said that the soul was behind the heart, rather than in the brain or anything. That felt really nice and was fun to extrapolate.

In terms of the plot machinery, it’s a bit bonkers but one of the jokes is, in the 70s the kids forgive the aliens because they could be American – anything could happen, they could be from California, so anything they said must be natural to Californians. They must be in a cult; that would explain the rigid system – and cults were very au courant in the 70s. Very exciting for a teenage boy, extracting her from the cult, deprogramming her and all that. That was more plot machinery,.

And then there’s the fun magical device of the fact that only Enn seems to have clairvoyance and dream connection to the alien world, can see what’s going on in the house, can see their true forms in outer space. It’s not really explained until Elle Fanning’s character says, “I told you he was different”, and Enn says, “Well, I’m an artist, you know”. The artist is the shaman, the interface between the supernatural and the real – and that’s of course Neil’s special spot, as the interlocutor between the fantastical and the real.

Enn really was Neil – this was an alternate history of Neil Gaiman.

There also feels to be a strong influence of Bowie – consciously?

There would be no punks without David Bowie. That was a direct line – Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, David Bowie leads to punk. All the punks were listening to Bowie, and that includes Enn. We hear Enn listening to Lou Reed at one point. I originally wanted that to be a Bowie song, Conversation Piece, but he had just passed away and all the rights were locked up at that point. Ziggy Stardust was certainly an influence on the aliens.

There’s an odd coincidence at the moment – the final shots of the different coloured “jewels” when we’re in the middle of all the publicity for Avengers: Infinity War. You couldn’t find two movies more different!

Exactly. There’s not a lot of latitude for those films. But when you have a smaller budget you do, and we were making our sci-fi Midnight Movie of the 70s. We were making our Liquid Sky, our Repo Man, our Harold and Maude.

I know you’ve worked with Nicole Kidman before, but how did you get her involved with this?

We had a great relationship on Rabbit Hole and I just sent her the script and told her about the role. It was something she had never done before and was instantly, “I’m in”. It was more about scheduling.

She was doing a play in the West End at the time we were shooting so it was perfect timing for her. We would rehearse in the intervals or between shows on matinee days in her dressing room. She’d say, “Just say the line out loud and I’ll copy you”, because in some ways, her role was one that I would probably play.

I think of her [character] as the Australian who’s lived in London for 15 years and kind of flopped as a designer and is a bit bitter and created her own enclave in the suburbs. She was hoping to be Vivienne Westwood or Leigh Bowery and was exiled, probably by her ambition, to a smaller Croydon pond that she rules. She’s the Queen Mother, she’s the Boadicea, she fancies herself the cock of her walk, and when the aliens come around it’s the perfect opportunity for her to be the warrior queen.

One of my favourite scenes is where Enn comes to her and points out that she is Elle Fanning’s character’s mother effectively. Nicole doesn’t say anything – it’s all in the face…

I love that expression. The whole film has the parenting thing going on, and there’s all sorts of mother figures, including Elle, Ruth Wilson, Edward Petherbridge – who kind of plays a trans mother of all the aliens – and Nicole. There are all these queen mothers and some of them don’t have kids yet. Suddenly Nicole gets one and she can be Sigourney Weaver in Aliens and save her kid.

It’s a matriarchal film despite the fact that our protagonist is a young guy – in the end he gets the kids dumped on him, which is why he’s crying in the last shot.

Not happiness then?

I think it is happiness, but there’s something funny about “We’ve come to live with you… all seven of us!”

That is a beautifully shot scene.

Thanks – in Sheffield in an actual comic book shop in the high street.

What was the biggest challenge for you creatively with this?

It was the budget, but as with my other films, Hedwig and Shortbus, budgetary constraints create opportunities for creativity.

In Shortbus we have a 3D animated model of New York City when originally I wanted a real model – but it looks much better than a real model would. In this case when you do a period piece, it adds a million pounds to the budget, which is insane, but you also find people like Sandy Powell and Helen Scott, the designers, and animators like John Bair who can come up with something that seems like you’re cutting a corner but you end up with something that doesn’t look like anything else.

Sandy was inspired by the designer Pam Hogg and her punk credentials are impeccable – between her Scorsese films and Cinderellas and stuff, she does Todd Haynes’ and my films for fun and not for profit!

The opportunity when you have a low budget is that everyone feels part of something because they’re killing themselves to do it – and it’s very important that everyone feels welcome and appreciated throughout. Every PA and intern and grip and electric. It really was a group effort. The crew were old punks, remembering the day, and gave us extra hours when usually British crews walk after hours, they gave us extra hours because they love the film – and that’s very rare.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is in cinemas now. Thanks to Marie Zeraati at Organic for her help in arranging this interview. John Cameron Mitchell photo (c) Matthew Placek