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.