John Cameron Mitchell

You're on Facebook, and you're supposed to know your sexual orientation at 13... Nobody really knows what's going on at that time, and people seem to... know stuff, or they have to act like they do, and they make decisions before they really need to.

I think I was scared of the drag thing, as a lot of gay boys are. It's sort of knocked out of you in junior high. I wouldn't find guys who were very feminine attractive. Then, doing 'Hedwig,' I got to be man and woman, really butch and really femme at the same time, and I realized, this is kind of the ideal.

I went to theater school at Northwestern, and I was quite conservative. Reagan at the time seemed quite revolutionary, or at least a rock star: He was radical and kind of punk rock.

If I wanted to make a lot of money with 'Hedwig,' I could have spent all my time on it. But that's boring.

I always think that in some way, art is the best tool we have to prepare for death. It's like a sculpture that you can interpret differently every time you look at it.

I've avoided situations where I wouldn't have creative freedom.

I like making art that's useful to people who have a harder road. Art is a tool to get through it; it's a tool to prepare for the worst. By envisioning it in an artistic context, you can make sense of it before and after it happens.

User-comments culture is not useful for creating original work, I think.

I have a weird propensity to know what's going to happen in the future.

If you go for the money first and try to think of what other people want to see, you change your original inspiration and perhaps put out something that's less original and less personal and maybe less satisfying.