The Gay John Hughes?

By Jeff Titterton, www.gay.net

Interview with Brian Sloan, writer/director of I Think I Do

There's no doubt about it: Queer cinema takes itself far too seriously.

Not that we should be surprised, really. There are certainly many uphill battles to be fought, rights to be won and bigots to defeat. But it may be a sign of the increasingly bright future for gay people that writer/director Brian Sloan feels comfortable making funny - very funny - films about the lives of young gay people and their straight friends.

Gay audiences will remember Sloan from his short film Pool Days, a quirky coming-out story that was one of three shorts included in the widely acclaimed Boys Life release of 1994. Now he's back with his first feature film, I Think I Do, a goofy comedy about the romantic entanglements of six college roommates who come together five years after graduation for a wedding.

The film stars Alexis Arquette as Bob, the only openly gay member of a group of housemates who spends his college days desperately in love with his supposedly straight roommate Brendan (Christian Maelen). Meanwhile Brendan is sleeping with their friend Sarah (Marianne Hagan), but secretly wants Bob, while Sarah's best friend Beth (Maddie Corman) wants their friend Eric (Guillermo Diaz), who may want Beth but instead spends most of his time getting stoned. And so on and so forth.

I Think I Do is a screwball circle of unspoken love and lust, with a queer twist to add to the hijinks. The plot really thickens when Bob shows up at Carol (Lauren Velez) and Matt's (Jamie Harrold) wedding five years after graduation with his boyfriend Sterling (Tuc Watkins), an attractive but stunningly vain soap opera star, and the friends find that five years may have gone by, but old flames die hard.

Sloan's inspiration for this story was his own experiences with the weddings of his straight friends. "About five years ago, all of my friends from college started getting married, and so for about a year there I went from wedding to wedding," recalls Sloan. "The whole idea for the movie came from a conversation I had with one of my roommates at one of the weddings. And I was talking to him, and he's gay also, and we were saying it would be very funny if one of us brought a date to the wedding. And from there the story just took off."

I Think I Do never takes itself too seriously in its examination of twentysomething angst. While there are earnest undertones throughout - issues of love, commitment, being true to oneself - they are handled in a light and humorous vein.

"In your twenties, you certainly have questions and you certainly have doubts about what am I doing and who am I dating, you definitely have those existential moments, but I think in general those years are kind of a blast," Sloan says. "And that aspect of being young like that I really wanted to capture in the film. And I felt I never saw that in a lot of these other movies about 'Generation X.' It seemed the sense of fun wasn't in these films."

Sloan is also quick to point out that he doesn't consider I Think I Do a "gay film." "I'm interested in making films that are funny," he says. "So far they've happened to have gay characters. I like doing comedy, and in a way I'm surprised that there's nobody who's really mined the comedy that's inherent in a gay person's life. All of the stuff about coming out is sort of instantly comic. It's Shakespeare, it's disguises, it's lies and gossip."

As lighthearted and ultimately nonpolitical as this film is, Sloan found it difficult to get funding, because the big studios did not know who to market it to a straight audience, a gay audience or both?

"I think that the movie kind of confused them a bit because here were gay characters and straight characters in the same movie together, and they were getting along for the most part and it wasn't really about that either, it was just a romantic comedy," says Sloan. "It's not Love! Valour! Compassion!, which would obviously be marketing toward a gay audience, and it's not My Best Friend's Wedding, because you have a gay romance at the center of it."

Eventually, after more than 100 studio rejections, I Think I Do found funding in early 1996. Of course, that wasn't the end of Sloan's difficulties; he still had to cast the film. And while Alexis Arquette, an openly gay actor with numerous gay-character credits under his belt, was an obvious and perfect choice for the role of Bob, Sloan had some problems casting the part of Brendan, because of the difficulty of getting young male actors to take on gay roles.

"Getting young male stars to do this kind of role is very difficult," he says. "Young male stars in the kind of studio scheme of things have become an incredibly valuable commodity, and are treated as such. And when we were doing casting, we were talking about names like Matt Damon, who no one had heard of at the time, and we couldn't even get his agent to read the script. Because they had already planned out his career for him."

The story of how they ended up casting Christian Maelen reveals the overprotective attitude of many agents. I Think I Do's casting director, Stephanie Corsalini, had sent Maelen's agent a copy of the script months earlier. The agent responded that Maelen had read the script and was not interested. Three months later, on the last day of casting for the role, Maelen showed up at the casting office - working as a bike messenger. A friend of his upstairs where he was delivering a package told him about the audition, and he went down to see what it was about.

"Stephanie said 'Christian, what are doing here? You passed on this script three months ago,'" recalls Sloan. "And of course he had never even heard of the script. Or read it. He auditioned. He was literally the last person, and he was great. He got cast shortly afterwards."

Despite these initial difficulties, I Think I Do was completed in 1997, and its early success - it was an official selection at both the Toronto Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival - should not only make it a winner at cinemas but help propel Sloan's vision of continuing the brat-pack tradition.

And what's next for queer film's funnyman? "I have a script that's finished," says Sloan. "It's kind of a very warped John Hughes movie, I guess you could call it. When I was at film school everyone used to joke that I was sort of like the gay John Hughes of NYU. It's an all-out comedy about high school and it's called Sluts! With an exclamation point."

Copyright 1998 www.gay.net