Curiosity of Chance
The Curiosity of Chance is a high-school coming of age comedy that also takes from the traditions of New Queer Cinema. Chance is Russell Marleau’s directorial debut. After a few years working in TV, Marleau sold a script to Sony that was produced and released under the title Three Way (Gina Gershon, Dwight Yokum and Dominic Purcell). Marleau is well read and charming: two decidedly winning traits for a man responsible for a film that sweetly, and intelligently plums the depths of teen comedy and queer-core simultaneously.
You can see The Curiosity of Chance June 23, at the Castro ($9 member/$10 general) as part of Frameline 31 Film Festival.
Which was your priority to represent: teen comedy or queer-core?
Initially teen comedy. I always wanted a gay lead so I started with that conceit and those conventions and as I was writing it the conventions of coming of age films and queer films in general kind of came into play but first and foremost I wrote it as a genre teen comedy with a gay lead. Chance is gay but I wanted his story to be universal and I definitely did not want to do a coming out story. They’ve been done well and to death and I felt I had nothing new to add.
Where does Superman factor in? Chance has a flamboyant secret identity, his friends are like Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson…
That’s interesting and you’re actually the first to bring that up. Everything is a costume to Chance: it’s Halloween every day. But costume changes are part of him and also part of the teen experience. You’re looking for your identity and you try on different things. Part of that is your clothing and style – you try to create a personal style but also borrow from other places. I think of Chance as an old soul who doesn’t just take from current fashion but from everywhere. I never thought of him as super-hero like.
He’s even got a little swoop of hair in the front.
Well now you say that, I think Tad (Hilgenbrinck) even auditioned for the Jimmy Olson character in Superman Returns. It’s funny.
Your story takes place in the 80’s and at an international school. When you ask an audience to make a leap like that it makes the characters that much easier to identify with. So, why Belgium, and why the 80’s?
It was a condition of our financing. I was working with Bigfoot Entertainment, the company that made this film and the executive producer on another script I’d been hired to write. Working with Michael (Gleissner) he mentioned he wanted to do a gay script. He was living in Belgium at the time and he said, “I want to shoot a film here in Belgium.” I told him I wrote this script and it’s something I want to direct, and the company liked it. The original script was set in Northern California and Michaels said he’d be willing to have the company make this movie but ‘you have to make it in Belgium’. I thought about it and tried to figure out how that would work and in every draft, Chance’s father had been in the military and that kind of made sense he’d be traveling around a lot. I had gone to an international school for a while and I had some experience with that. So I thought “this could work.” The script didn’t change a lot with that shift and I think it enhanced the fish-out-of-water aspect of the film. As far as setting it in the 80’s, there were two reasons for that. First, I wanted to use a lot of Journey songs to touch upon Chance’s journey.
That’s like taking the kitsch sincerely.
Yeah and the songs are emotional and the teen angst in those songs – when you look back at the angst you’re like ‘that wasn’t a big deal’ but when you’re a teenager it’s a big deal. Journey’s music hammered that home but I felt like with all that Journey music in the movie, it’d be better if the music were current to the movie you were watching. Also, I felt that if Chance is an out gay student that it was harder to be like that in the 80’s and the persecution would be heightened and more believable - not that it wouldn’t be believable in this day and age but - I had the liberty to push it and still make it believable. You know, people who read the script liked the idea that it was in the 80’s. People also said we could make it current - which I agree with – and for money reasons we only ended up using one Journey song.
I wanted to ask about music licensing. Your film is packed with 80’s hits.
Right now we have festival license and we’ll see what we can keep when we go for distribution. All the songs that are performed on screen and the drag performances we have license for. I had a really good music supervisor [Cathy Duncan] and we had a really great time picking out just the right song for each scene.
I was really impressed with the way you managed the ambiguity of identity in the story. You have a happy, healthy conclusion but at the same time, certain major issues that seemed to cause a lot of tension stay with only a modicum of resolution.
I agree and I guess I was just trying to find the right emotional ending for a film with that sort of emotional conflict. I also wanted to communicate that you haven’t seen all of Chance’s story yet. He’s got a lot more to go through and all those characters too and that’s high school – there’s so much more to come. With Chance, there’s the added thing he’s out and he still has a lot of work on that issue. I’d hoped that came through but I also hope that when people watch the movie they feel like they had a good emotional resolution and could walk away feeling satisfied.
I was also impressed you dealt with fantasy because that’s important to the character of Chance and his phase in life. It also seems like a nod to films of the period and the tendency popular in that time frame to dissect classic films with a queer lens. I feel like you were using fantasies as a convention to deal with identity. The kiss, for example –
That was tough. I intentionally wrote and shot the kiss in a way that I could make it seem either an unambiguous fantasy, an obvious reality or somewhere in the middle. It was interesting working with Brett Chukerman who played Levi and Tad who played Chance and we talked a lot about that scene because they came to it with questions. And they needed to know everything behind it in order to play it. When we finally put it all together I didn’t want to go into a total fantasy. I felt like this was going to be a nice moment and people will want it or not know they want it until they see it and I felt playing it as a complete fantasy, would be a cop out. But I also didn’t want to present Levi as this straight character and then not be true to who he is. I thought the best way to deal with that was to make it ambiguous and plant the question in the audience that Levi might turn or maybe he’s giving it to Chance because Chance deserved it and they’re friends, but I like there to be different interpretations for it. It was a tricky thing and it’s been interesting to see the response. The first scene where you see Levi stripping is obviously a fantasy and the issue of Chance’s fantasy life and what’s real is a line you have to walk because people have to finally invest in these characters.
Photo by Mark Schieron - Set
You also gave a good bit of time to the management of fantasy and the management of reality that made me feel like you were consciously not presenting one as an escape from the other. That became really valid in the scenes when he enters drag – he’s not doing it as a life long commitment.
My original idea was that drag was going to be huge but as I wrote more and these other characters came in and Chance had to go through more, the drag became less and less. But then it became a centerpiece for the Brad (Maxim Maes) story. I always felt like Chance would ultimately be a professional drag queen but he’s trying things on and he has that curiosity so I think drag ultimately has the right amount of weight in the final story.