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Interview: Donna Deitch

Gay Peoples Chronicle

May 1986

By ROB DAROFF

[The film "Desert Hearts" premiered in Cleveland April 5 as a part of the Tenth Annual International Film Festival at the Cedar-Lee. The theater is bringing the film back for an extended engagement in June. Director/producer Donna Deitch was on hand to introduce the premiere to the sold-out CedarLee crowd. Before the showing, she granted the following interview.]

Why do you think "Desert Hearts" has been so successful?

For the lesbian/gay community, I think it has been successful because there has not been a film that has been so honest and forthright and loving about a homosexual relationship. In the straight community, I think it is because people really identify with this business of becoming vulnerable and opening yourself up

somebody, or feeling repressed and reluctant to do it. That happens in every relationship. Those feelings are made accessible by these actors and then a straight person can pick up on it and cart up. I think

that straight people do want to accept homosexual relationships and I think this film offers an opportunity for them to feel positive about it.

What kind of resistance did you have to face to make the Film?

The hardest part of making the film was raising enough money. It took me two and a half years selling shares at $15,000 a share all over the country. I have more female than male investors; more of the women who have invested are lesbian than are not. But my single largest investor is a gay man. You obviously gone have through a lot of struggle to get this movie into its final form. What's been the notivation for you?

I am one of those driven film makers. I am not a careerist. Like when I was in school, I'd only get good grades in things I was interested in and in everything else I'd get F's. With this film in particular,

when I bought the book I thought that there hadn't been a story told in the American commercial cinema about a relationship between two women that didn't end in either suicide or bisexual triangle. I felt the time had come to do that and that the audience was ready and willing.

What do the friendships between Cay and Silver and between Cay and her stepmother mean for you?

All of the relationships between those women were there to begin to develop a sense of intimacy between women in a way that happens in real life. That's why you see Cay and Silver kissing in the beginning, or two of them in the bathtub together, or Cay and Francis dancing. It is to break down the barrier and fear about intimacy between women so that when the two women become intimate in a sexual way, it is just like another step as opposed to a shock to your system.

In Alice Walker's "Color Purple," lovemaking scenes were an important part of the story, yet Spielberg chose to reduce them to a few seconds and a single kiss in his movie version of the same story. Did you consider reducing the love scenes from "Desert Hearts"?

People talk about a love "scene" when they are not scenes at all. They are just a kiss and a fade to black. In most so-called love "scenes" there is no beginning, middle, and end, or something that happens that changes the story. I wanted this love scene to be a real scene. What is happening is that it is based on a kind of three-steps-forward, twosteps-back dynamic on the part of the English professor. It takes that amount of time to develop that before she surrenders to the other woman and to herself.

You are saying something inportant in that; and I think The Color Purple" could have done the same thing, but they decided to reduce it to almost nothing.

Well, Steven Spielberg has

Donna Deitch, Director and Producer of "Desert Hearts."

his way and I have mine. What can I say? I never considered reducing it.

Most of the people in the movie are heterosexual in real life. I know that gays and lesbians have been playing hetero roles since the beginning of film. How did that work in reverse?

No problem. They were good actors and I think they were believable characters: People have asked me why I didn't hire lesbian actresses. Well, I think that question is a real tribute to their abilities as actors, because they pull off those parts in

a believable way.

Here's a broad question: Who are the Cays and Vivians of the world?

No one has ever asked me that before. I guess the Vivians are the repressed, academic people approaching mid-ife who are at a turning point, about to have a new experience that in a sense means going back to square one in terms of their emotionalism and sexuality.

The one line of Vivian's that sticks out for me is when she says, "I want to be free of who I've been."

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