I love when my friends make art, and I especially love when my friends make art that’s so specific to who they are that I can’t imagine anyone else having made it. That’s absolutely how I feel about Chloe and Jame, a short film made by Drew Burnett Gregory that couldn’t have been made by anyone other than Drew Burnett Gregory.

Drew writes, directs, and stars in the film, which co-stars Drew’s longtime friend and collaborator Tirosh Schneider and is produced by Drew alongside Autostraddle favs Brittani Nichols and Gabe Dunn. Film history and interpersonal drama between two transfemme characters intertwine in surprising and imaginative ways in the film (but I’ll let Drew tell you more about the wildly delightful premise in her own words, which she does in our interview below). It’s a short film for horror fans, but especially for queer and trans horror fans, as Drew reimagines two iconic killers from horror history in a modern, more real context. It strips away the transphobia and instead explores trans identities in authentic, complex, and meaningful ways while still letting the characters be messy and imperfect. “Horror” — and queer horror especially — can look like a lot of things, as this short demonstrates well. It also satisfies a personal desire of mine: more hair removal scenes in horror!!!!!!!!!!

First, you have to watch the film, which you can do right here right now! We’re so thrilled to publicly release Chloe and Jame, which was a NewFest selection this year as well as screening at TRANSlations: The Seattle Trans Film Festival. Heads up that it opens with a sex scene, which is my favorite way to open horror, but if you’re in an office maybe wait to be home to press play.

And now enjoy an interview between myself and Drew — two friends, coworkers, artists, and horror lovers who love to geek out together.

Kayla: To get us started, I want you to give me the elevator pitch for your short that you would give to a gay person and then that you would give to a straight person.

Drew: The elevator pitch I want to give to everyone is “two transfeminine people confront their personal history and the histories that shaped them.” That’s the logline I’ve been giving out but it’s a terrible elevator pitch that means nothing to anybody. I just didn’t want to give away the hook, which is that Buffalo Bill and Norman Bates are in a situationship.

I think if I was talking to a straight person, I’d be like, “Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs and Norman Bates from Psycho are trans and lovers.” (laughs) Then, if I was talking to a gay person, I’d be like, “Buffalo Bill and Norman Bates are in a situationship.”

Kayla: Yeah, that’s a great elevator pitch, but I also understand your reluctance to give that away. That’s why I was curious how you would describe it. I actually intentionally avoided any of the festival language about the film. I was like, I actually have no idea how this is being packaged or pitched places.

Drew: I messed up. I should have leaned in. I was naive and hoped people would just watch it. But especially with a short, I think people need a little bit more context. So when I release it on the internet at large, I’m going to be open about that as the hook.

Kayla: Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of the project?

Drew: Yeah, so the idea first came to me after I saw a production of Assassins, the Stephen Sondheim musical, that was done by the East West Players in LA. It was an incredible production. I loved it. And I started to think about what a version of Assassins would be like if instead of real people who tried to or succeeded at killing United States Presidents, it was about trans women killers from film history. But I don’t write musicals unfortunately, and I do make indie dramedies about trans people. So I simplified and was like, okay, well Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill are the most important of those figures.

I was really interested in this idea of what do trans villains look like in real life? I think anyone is capable of anything. So I’m sure there have been trans women who have committed murder throughout history. But I also think there are a lot of ways that trans people are fucked up just day-to-day. I started to think about what these characters would be like if they weren’t these heightened villains, but were just real life villains to themselves and to each other. And how does media like Psycho, like Silence of the Lambs, like the much worse knockoffs of those two movies, what impact does that have in creating the self-hatred that motivates a lot of real life trans villainy?

Kayla: What’s so interesting to me is that you take these horror movies, ones that follow these more traditional procedural arcs, and then you’re like, let’s make this super interpersonal, let’s make it, yeah, they’re villains to themselves and to each other, but on a very interpersonal level, not in the like, I’m going to kill you way.

Part of why I feel very locked in right away with this short is the double epigraph you have where you have the Clarice Starling quote, “Transsexuals are very passive.” Then the quote from Norman Bates that we all know, “We all go a little mad sometimes.” Did you always know you were going to open with this?

Drew: Actually, the original title was Transsexuals Are Very Passive. I think that’s how media at large has responded to the trans killer trope. We don’t want to have bad representation, so we need to have passive transsexuals on-screen. It becomes this dichotomy that you saw with cis gay people, and you’ve seen with pretty much every marginalized group on-screen. You get villainization and then a backlash to the villainization where a group has to be perfect angels. So that was the original title, but I decided it was too much of an inside trans movie nerd joke — it’s not a famous line from Silence of the Lambs, it’s just a random line that’s used to excuse the very violent transphobia of the movie. But I kept the epigraph, because I still wanted to keep that reference.

Throughout the process I also grappled with how explicit I wanted to be as far as who these people were and who they’re inspired by. At one point, I considered using footage from the movies. The epigraph felt subtle enough, while still providing a little bit of a hint as to what I’m doing. I think it also summarizes the thematic core of the movie: Transsexuals are passive, as in not serial killers, but also we all go a little mad sometimes. We are all human. Yes, we’re not serial killers, but we are human, and so we all have the capacity to hurt each other and hurt ourselves.

Kayla: It’s interesting you mention that conversation you had to have with yourself about how much of the referential material to bring in, because what you have is bookends of it. You have the epigraph at the beginning, and you have the song “Goodbye Horses” — which is featured in Silence of the Lambs — coming in at the end. Those serve as your little hints as to what’s happening here. But then when you’re actually watching the short itself and it’s playing out on screen, there’s very little of that. I found myself trying to figure out exactly how I wanted to describe the characters, because they’re not a rewriting. They’re also not a direct reference. They are this almost secret third thing. So I’m curious how you think of them or how much you were thinking of the original characters when you were writing them. Or did you really have to turn that off?

Drew: It’s a little different depending on what part of the movie we’re in. When we enter into the dream space, I think of it as film history has encroached upon the characters. But outside of that space, I really was thinking: Who would these people be if they were realistic and living today? I was like, okay, so Norman would be a trans woman who’s very beholden to her mother. The same way that Norman in Psycho doesn’t leave home, Chloe in this movie is still living at home. It was an easy jump to then decide she would be closeted around her mother, and slower to come out.

Then with Buffalo Bill, the whole idea is she wants to be a woman, but she’s not allowed to be, so she skins cis women to try to wear their bodies. Which, to be honest, isn’t even effective. She’s not that good of a seamstress! Murder-aside, I just feel like there were easier ways to do it. I know that’s not the point, but— Anyway, so this version of Buffalo Bill, of Jame Gumb, just really wants to be a cis woman. How does that lead her to treat other trans people? How does that lead her to view herself? I do think of them as their own characters, but with as much inspiration as made sense for realistic people.

The thing that’s going to get me to open Final Draft and start writing is me being like, how would Buffalo Bill and Norman Bates fuck?

Kayla: Okay. So from the epigraph, we immediately go into fucking, and you and I have spoken before about our shared love of opening art with a sex scene. For you personally, where do you think that impulse stems from?

Drew: I think it stems from — this is going to be such a weird reference to drop — but I think it stems from Michael Crichton and Stephen King. These books I read as a kid and that I was obsessed with would start with a burst of violence or a burst of sex in the prologue or the first chapter.

I had a high school English teacher call a good first sentence of an essay an ICD — an interest catching device. Starting with sex or violence is a great interest catching device, a great way to get an audience hooked and on board. That’s a different answer to why I want sex there in the first place. I think it’s just where I often start. And I’m not thinking of it deliberately. I’m not trying to figure out how to get the audience’s attention. It’s just what catches my interest too. When I’m writing a script, what’s going to get me to explore these topics about self-hatred and about media representation and all these things? The thing that’s going to get me to open Final Draft and start writing is me being like, how would Buffalo Bill and Norman Bates fuck?

Kayla: I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your collaborative history with your co-star, because I think one of the super lovely things is the chemistry you have. I know that y’all are friends outside of this, longtime friends. Can you talk a little bit about your artistic collaborative history?

Drew: We met when I was in fourth grade and Tirosh was in fifth grade. I played handball on the fifth grade courts because the fourth graders cheated. Tirosh had these two friends, one guy, one girl. They were in a love triangle, and Tirosh made a whole movie about it. I thought I was also in this quadrangle — it was not a quadrangle. I was just the fourth grader who played handball with them. But I had a crush on the girl and wanted to be friends with the three of them. Then we lost touch until high school. When I was a freshman, and Tirosh was a sophomore, we became very fast friends. I was wearing an Ingmar Bergman t-shirt; Tirosh was wearing a Bob Dylan t-shirt. We complimented each other’s t-shirts, and that’s how you make friends as a child.

The first thing I made with Tirosh was a documentary about their love life called Love, Lust, and Everything in Between: The Enigma of Young Love As Told Through Tirosh Schneider. That is not available on the internet publicly. I’m so sorry.

At the time, we romanticized these pairings that you see on screen of De Niro and Scorsese or whatever. So then we were like, oh, we’re that. So then I made… God, how many short films did I make in high school with Tirosh? Three more? Two narrative shorts about love and break ups and then a horror movie based on the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story Young Goodman Brown.

Then I went to college, and in the early years of film school, you make movies really quickly. Tirosh was also living in New York at the time, so it was just easy to make them the lead of most of my movies. That included a movie called Mister Dog. This was before I was out, before Tirosh was out, we were just two cis straight boys in a movie. It’s available online, which it probably shouldn’t be, but I think I leave it online because we make out in it, we’re gay in it. And I thought I was so closeted! It’s even dedicated to my first girlfriend at the end. My justification for it being gay was that it’s based on this children’s book, Mister Dog, and I was like, oh, if it’s straight, then I’m calling a woman a dog, and that’s wrong because I’m a feminist, so it has to just be gay. So then there I was making out with my friend.

It’s weird to say this because we’ve now had sex scenes in multiple films, but Tirosh is like my sibling. We’ve been so close for so long. Tirosh has always been there. For a while, we didn’t really collaborate beyond reading each other’s work because everything I was writing was about trans people and lesbians. But then Tirosh came out as genderqueer and bisexual. It was just such an obvious thing to cast them again. We were having all these conversations about gender and sexuality, and it was like wow now I have so many parts for you. The one time coming out as trans has helped someone get acting work.

Kayla: Did you know right away that you wanted them to be in it?

Drew: Yeah.

Kayla: Did you know right away that you were going to be in it?

Drew: I knew that I wanted to be in it, too. I love acting. But I think I learned a lot from this experience, and I don’t necessarily know if I want to be the lead of another movie I direct. I love working with actors, and I missed that additional collaboration. But yeah, I wrote it for the two of us.

Kayla: Okay. Yeah, that’s what I was ultimately asking.

Drew: Tirosh saw Assassins with me. So afterwards, we were at a diner talking about this great production we just saw, and then it turned into thinking about these ideas.

Kayla: A book goes through different stages, and there are technically different moments in which it can change. But I feel like that’s much more pronounced in filmmaking. So I was curious if between drafting, shooting, editing, there were any significant changes or transformations?

Drew: The biggest change is the ending. Initially it ended with the murder. It ended with Jame dying and it wasn’t really a dream space. It was real, and Jame died. Then it started to become more of a dream space. But even then it wasn’t quite working. It was actually Elise Bauman, my partner, who was just like, huh. They pointed out that the end felt counter to the things I was talking about and why I wanted to make the film. I think I can sometimes be a little bit of…I’m not Lars von Trier, I’m not an edgelord. But I think there’s a part of me that was like, yeah, and then it ends with a murder, good. If we’re going to have trans killers, let’s add some realism to it. But the more that I was talking about what I wanted to achieve with these characters, Elise was like: “Really? This is the end?”

So I started thinking about it, and then that’s how this new ending came about. Now I can’t imagine it any different. I’m so happy it ends with romance. Also it feels more truthful, because the reality is that most trans people are not killing each other. Most trans people are dealing with the weight of this history of representation, the burden of living as a trans person in our world, and trying to be kind to each other and ourselves, and then just still living. I don’t want to say that’s harder, because obviously I don’t want to be dead and murdered by Tirosh, but there is something to be said about the challenge of living. At first this seems like a happier ending, but in some ways it’s also not. Genre allows a little bit of an escapism that I think ending on me looking in the mirror a little teary-eyed, you don’t really escape from that. That’s just the reality.

Kayla: I can’t imagine the ending any other way. I think it’s a good example of: You don’t have to kill someone to make it horror. You don’t have to have some devastating ending in order for it to still be horror and exist in that genre.

On that note, I want to talk a little bit about horror influences. So starting with the obvious ones of Silence of the Lambs and Psycho, in many ways, you’re a little bit writing against those movies and against some of the tropes they’re dealing with. So I would like to hear a little about what you took from those movies, the things that you wanted to evoke from them or how you felt influenced by them.

Drew: Look, I think they’re two of the greatest movies of all time.

Kayla: Yeah. Same.

Drew: What I’ve often said is that the reason why they have the impact they do and had the impact on me that they did is that they’re so good.

Kayla: Wait, yeah, let’s actually rewind real quick. Could you tell me a little bit about your personal experiences of those films and initial experiences, how it’s maybe shifted?

Drew: I watched Psycho at a very young age. Hitchcock was one of my first classic film— I went—

Wait, I hate when I’m interviewing people and they start sentences and don’t finish them, and then I don’t know what they were going to say. Hitchcock was one of my first classic film… Now I don’t remember what I was saying. I just fucked it up. Anyways, you can also text me after.

Kayla: (laughs) The expert interviewer becomes the interviewee.

Drew: I went to a double feature of Rope and Lifeboat with my dad at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. That was mind-blowing. I’d never seen a classic movie in theaters before. After that, I watched every Hitchcock movie I could find. A lot of them played on TV. So I saw Psycho very young and I thought it was incredible.

Kayla: How young are we talking?

Drew: Probably fifth or sixth grade.

Kayla: Okay. Yeah, that’s young.

Drew: I don’t think that left as deep of a wound on me. There’s something about Anthony Perkins’ own queerness that to me makes Norman feel so much more human. Something I like about Hitchcock’s queer villains in general is they all feel really human. I’m not offended by them. I know Hitchcock was a piece of shit, and I’m sure he wasn’t trying to give queer people good representation or whatever. But they just feel like such people to me, and they’re often played by queer actors. So I don’t really have negative feelings about Psycho, even re-watching it before shooting this. I still have a hard time getting upset about it. Other than the way that it influenced movies like Dressed to Kill, which did leave more of a mark on me.

Silence of the Lambs is trickier. I think Silence of the Lambs, despite having that line about how Bill’s not a real transsexual or whatever, is like…Silence of the Lambs fucked me up. For a long time, it was the only genderqueer body I’d seen on screen.

I think the text of the movie is transphobic. I know there are trans people who adamantly don’t think the movie is transphobic, and I have read many essays arguing that point. I think those perspectives are valid and interesting. But to me, the movie is about Clarice and the violence she experiences from men in society. You have Hannibal Lecter, and you have Buffalo Bill as these two versions of male predatory behavior, one of which is hyper-masculine, and one of which is trying to co-opt femininity. In the end, Hannibal lives and is a weird mentor figure. Buffalo Bill is tragically killed… Well, not tragically, it’s probably a good thing she’s killed, but she’s killed, she’s defeated. So in the end, the movie to me is very much saying, if you have to have a predatory male figure, it’s better to have one that’s out in the open and clear about being a predator and this daddy figure. And you see that play out in real life with TERFs who align with anti-feminist conservatives, and they basically are like, I’d rather be with a real man who hates me than a trans woman living her life.

Silence of the Lambs feels really predictive of that. But it’s also so incredibly well-made. I will never watch Philadelphia again. I think it’s such an awful movie. It’s Jonathan Demme’s apology for Silence of the Lambs, and I don’t want that apology. I watch Silence of the Lambs regularly. It makes me feel like shit, but it’s a really good movie. It’s one that I’ve written about a lot on Autostraddle. It’s one that I’ve grappled with a lot. I think because it’s so good, it impacted how I view myself. I said this in one of the essays that when I was first transitioning, it took a long time before I would look in the mirror at my naked body and not think about Buffalo Bill. That’s not great. So yeah, it feels a part of me in a way.

Kayla: So now I’d like to return to my original question of what from the films did you hope to evoke? You mentioned, and this was interesting to hear, that you rewatched both before filming. So when you were rewatching, what were you rewatching for and what did you take from that?

Drew: So the conversations that I had with both Siobhan McCarthy, my DP, and Leah Hewlings, my production designer, were like, even though these movies have very different styles, I want our movie to evoke both of these styles. So how do we find a middle ground of Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, and our own thing? When do we pull from each of those movies more directly?

One thing we talked about was the way that Silence of the Lambs does shot-reverse shot. People are isolated in frames. So it’s unsettling, it feels like they’re looking at you, and it places you in it. So that was something we talked about, how to make shot-reverse shot feel more immersive and unsettling, whether that’s from similar techniques of isolating in the frame or from camera movement, which is actually something that I’ve been stealing from David Lynch and the Winkies scene in Mulholland Drive. If you’re watching for the first time, you don’t maybe clock it, but then when you re-watch it, you’re like, none of these shots make sense. The camera’s always floating. You never feel tethered, even though it’s following this traditional cinematic pattern.

The knife raise for the stabbing in Chloe and Jame is very direct Psycho. Production design wise, it was like, this is Buffalo Bill’s apartment, so what do we take from Buffalo Bill’s lair and how do we turn it into just a 20-something young transsexual’s place? Psycho is so specific that outside of the dream space I do think we pulled more from Silence of the Lambs. Although starting with two characters in bed having an affair is Psycho.

If I died tomorrow and was never able to make another movie, this is a movie, and short films are films.

Kayla: So you brought up Mulholland Drive too, but what were some of your other influences, whether that’s just in the style or even in the writing?

Drew: Some things are just ingrained in me. Anything that’s an extended sequence in an apartment bedroom, I am thinking about Godard’s Breathless. I’m sure the way the celluloid itself encroaches on the characters is inspired by Bergman’s Persona. When I pulled the still we’re using as a feature image, I was like, oh, this reminds me of a shot from Raw. But I didn’t think about that like I didn’t think about the Mulholland Drive thing specifically. A lot of these things are just ingrained in me as a second language.

It’s funny, because it’s my least favorite Xavier Dolan movie, but with the aspect ratio change, I did have my editor look at the moment from Mommy. I wanted it to happen gradually like in that movie and it was the easiest way to communicate that. Even if I think that’s a bad movie from a great filmmaker.

Kayla: Please talk more about that visual turn though, because I had a question about it, but I was also like, this is where my formal and technical lack of film knowledge is going to show, because I didn’t even really know how to word it. But I love that turn so much because it does happen so gradually. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that transition and why you wanted to do that, other than just signaling to the audience that maybe we’re in this dreamscape now.

Drew: It wasn’t something we were totally certain about while filming. But I knew I wanted to have the dirty edges. It was really important for me to shoot on film, because I wanted to signify an artificiality in a way that called back to the ’60s and ’90s when these movies came out. Artificial now, you think digital camera with that soap opera flatness. But I want this to be recalling film history and these specific moments in film history.

The aspect ratio change was something I wasn’t sure would work. In the eight years since I graduated from film school, there’s been a lot of me trying to return to experimentation and return to my own voice. I think initially my thought was like, is this going to be corny? Is this going to be okay? The way people roll their eyes about switching aspect ratios and stuff. Ultimately when looking at it, I was like, no, this is what I want, this is how this is. It communicates something for me. It communicates this history encroaching upon these two individuals and their relationship. I love what Shiv, the DP, did with both that zoom and the zoom in on Tirosh’s back.

Kayla: I love that. That’s one of my favorite parts.

Drew: I think Shiv did such a lovely job with both of those shots. And, in a way, the aspect ratio change emphasizes the shot. Also, it emphasizes that we’re entering a dream sequence. The further along in the process, the more adamant I felt about that. It’s funny because in another world it wouldn’t have existed at all, and it would’ve been grounded in reality. But once it was no longer real, I was like, oh, I really don’t want people to think this is real. I don’t want it to be a fake out. This is happening in this other space.

Kayla: I wonder if there’s a type of person whose reading would be like, well, no, the murder was real and the part that comes after is not real. But I don’t think you leave a ton of room for that interpretation because of that switch.

On that note, I feel like one of the coolest, but to some people the scariest, parts of making art is that once you make it and you put it out there, it’s no longer your own. People get to have their own relationship to it. Has there been anything that someone has said that has surprised you or shifted the way that you saw the story or the characters?

Drew: The response that has been really nice is trans people recognizing the specific dynamic of being with someone who’s new. As much as I want people to see Jame’s treatment of Chloe as inspired by self-hatred, I don’t think what she says is wrong. I’ve had experiences with people who are newly transitioning, and it’s a lot going on, and you can project a lot onto another trans woman. It doesn’t mean that it can’t be romantic; it doesn’t mean that they can’t have a relationship at some point. But having that be recognized as a true relationship. It’s not one we see on-screen often, partially because we don’t see that many relationships between two transfeminine people on-screen period. But especially this very specific dynamic of being someone who’s been out for a while and your interactions with someone who hasn’t been out for a while, and the ways that brings up stuff for yourself and the ways it creates a barrier between you. I’m glad that a trans audience is relating to that and picking up on that.

Kayla: Did you have any Kill Your Darlings moments? It’s so hard when working in short form sometimes. But also at the same time, just as a viewer, there are times when I watch a short film and I’m like, oh, they really forced this into this shape. It was meant to be something longer, and they just didn’t have the financing. I love short form. I write in short form all the time. Chloe and Jame was an example of something where I felt it was meant to be short form. This is the shape it’s supposed to be. But I was wondering if there were still any things that you felt were under-explored or that you would’ve liked to stick with longer? I feel like it’s doing a lot all at once.

Drew: Most of the things that were cut out were references I felt were walking that line of being too obvious or not. I didn’t want the movie to be the sort of, oh, I get that reference, I get that reference. I didn’t want that to be what it was about. So cutting a lot of that and cutting exposition. I’m always overwriting, and I think there’s an argument that the script is still overwritten. It could be subtler. So there was a lot of cutting stuff out and being like, we don’t need to know that detail about that character. It’s a short.

But no I wouldn’t want this to be a feature, because I think it’s a gimmick. To make a movie about Buffalo Bill and Norman Bates having sex is a gimmick, and I think that works better in short form. Speaking of random influences, there’s this play I really liked as a teenager called Dog Sees God that’s like a dark take on the Peanuts. It’s like, oh, what if the Peanuts were angsty teens? That was full-length. I loved it so much as a teenager, but I don’t necessarily know if the idea would hold up for me as an adult.

I also think about something Abbi Jacobson or Ilana Glazer said after Broad City when all of these people were trying to make webseries to get on TV. They were like, we want to be the next Broad City. But the creators of Broad City were like, when we created Broad City, we wanted to make a funny show for YouTube. That doesn’t mean they didn’t have ambitions to make bigger projects or whatever, but they weren’t like, oh, this is the start of a Comedy Central show.

I really took that to heart. I know there’s a lot of really great examples of shorts as proof of concept, shorts that turn into really great features. But just for me, as a trans woman working in Hollywood in this day and age when there are no guarantees at all, even less so than normally in Hollywood, everything I make I think of as its own thing. So I have features I’ve written that I think share elements with this where if I were to send the script of the feature and this short, people will be like, oh, I see your style. I see what you’re going for. Some are more rom-com or romancey. Some are horror. The feature that I want to make as my first feature is also playing with film and 16mm film in the way that this does to some extent. They all have a lot of trans sex in them.

So there are throughlines, but I really thought of this as its own thing. If I died tomorrow and was never able to make another movie, this is a movie, and short films are films. So there wasn’t anything major that felt like, oh, we lost it. If anything, I think there are arguments that it could be tighter. That’s usually how I feel about my work.

Kayla: I’m interviewing you right at the start of NewFest. How are you feeling? You’ve been there as a critic, you’re there as a filmmaker for the first time. What are you feeling? Be honest.

Drew: It’s been really cool walking around with my filmmaker badge as opposed to my press badge. I don’t want to seem ungrateful. I know there are a lot of people whose dream it is to be a film critic who gets to do things like see over 40 movies at TIFF. So I don’t want to be an asshole and be like, I think of criticism as my day job, but I do. I do also think that it informs my writing. I think when I interview filmmakers, I’m interviewing them from the perspective of a filmmaker.

But it feels really nice. I think, especially since being full-time at Autostraddle, I feel fine saying this publicly, it took me a bit to figure out how to still work on my own creative projects. But I did manage to write a feature this year that I’m excited about, and this film is coming out, and I’m excited for it to come out.

It feels good to have something I made out into the world. I also think of it all as the same thing. I just want great movies to exist, whether I make them or someone else makes them and I highlight them so other people know about them. I just love this art form, while also acknowledging that it’s a very complicated art form with a lot of money and abuse involved in the industry. I just want to do my part either as a filmmaker or as a critic in making film better.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!