John Cameron Mitchell

Some people go off to an ashram or they, you know, have a midlife crisis and buy a sports car. For me, I do 'Hedwig,' and I see it's a midlife crisis maybe, and I see what's next. And it's a good trampoline, maybe, into the next part of my life.

Nowadays, the term 'selling out' doesn't exist anymore because everyone is trying to make a living.

I actually came out the year that AIDS hit the front pages. So there was this mixed feeling about it - excitement that life's finally begun, but it was completely tied up with mortality and danger and politics.

I quickly found that I didn't really fit into 'gay culture,' as identified by many gay people, and that it can be just as confining as straight culture, not least in the way that bisexual people are told that 'they can't make up their mind.'

I remember seeing a stage version of Plato's 'Symposium' and being really moved because it was written by a man rather than a culture.

Hedwig' was pretty much all the things I wanted to do that other people said I probably shouldn't do: drag, punk rock, stand-up comedy... You know, combine them all in a thing that's supremely uncommercial from the objective point of view.

Isn't it funny - why is it called a tennis bracelet? It doesn't seem very tennis, does it?

Humor without sadness underneath it feels cheap and aggressive.

Coming out as a gay man, it was very much about finding my own identity and dealing with labeling.

Nothing is a calling card. Everything is what you do. If you do it in order to get somewhere else, you're not actually doing it. If you're thinking, 'What is the weird thing I want to make with my friends?' money and other things will come later.

Hedwig' was born in '94. I was thinking of a theater piece; Hedwig was one of the characters.

You can make serious pop, you know? There was a time when the best movies were the most popular, and I keep thinking that can happen again.