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Desiree Akhavan: No, not at all a pathology. They can be the worst, so embarrassing. That's actually how my web series started. I co-created it with my girlfriend at the time—we were sitting around one day and just bitching and moaning about how much we hated gay movies and how we didn't identify with them. And then we thought, Is this internalized homophobia? Maybe we're homophobic lesbians! And that was like the whole premise for a show. So we did a comedy about self-hating lesbians, because that's what we sounded like.
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It's called The Slope. We were at film school at the time, so after school we would get together with friends and shoot these five minute scenes with no budget, just based on the kind of comedy—situational comedy—where we'd just say the most inappropriate things you could say.Did that evolve quite naturally into Appropriate Behavior ?
Yeah. They're different for sure, but when I was making the show I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to make a feature film. And I wanted to take the low-budget energy I had from the show—it was so effortless, a really fun, and easy thing to do—I wanted to take that and apply it to a feature film.When you say "low budget and effortless," did that involve casting your friends?
Lots of the people are people I knew, like Crystal, who's played by one of my oldest friends, Halley Feiffer. We held auditions for Maxine—I didn't write the part with Rebecca Henderson in mind, but it was really clear to me that she was the frontrunner from the word go.
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A lot of people came in and did something on par with blackface—I call it "gayface": when straight actresses walk in with, like, a backward baseball cap and baggy jeans and do their impression of a lesbian, as though a lesbian would not be a real human being. So, that happened a couple of times, and I remember thinking, This is both hilarious and really telling of how most people approach films with gay protagonists.
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People either love or hate her—it's funny. She wasn't really influenced by anyone, no, but I recognized her traits in lesbians I had loved growing up: she's incredibly sensitive and political. I had never dated someone who was like that, though—I think it's hard to be a very politically correct, sensitive person and date someone like me.I can see that. How much of the film is telling a story that's close to you and how much of a political impetus was there on your part? Do you think there should be more bisexual women on our screens?
First and foremost, there definitely should. However, I am the world's laziest activist, and if I were Paris Hilton, then I would make stories about being Paris Hilton. I am a storyteller—I really care about telling my story and expressing myself, and the fact that I've never seen stories that reflect life as I know it is a real motivator. I don't want to make propaganda, but I believe in the work I do. I feel I have a moral obligation to do it. We never talk about bisexual people's stories, and it's such a missed opportunity.
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Yeah. I'm a really big fan of those shows, so I feel honored to be compared to them.I guess one similarity is the Brooklyn setting—you definitely take the piss out of Brooklyn's culture a little bit.
I mean, we're making fun of everything, but we're making fun of things that are in ourselves as well. Sometimes you wake up and you're like, "I didn't do it consciously, but I just belong to a movement of young assholes who are completely entitled. It wasn't even like a conscious decision, it just happened." I can appreciate the things that are amusing about me and appreciate how there are, like, 40 other bisexual filmmakers out there on my street corner in Brooklyn, and you just have to laugh at it at a certain point.How has the film changed things for you? Now you've moved to London, do you get recognized? Or do you at least get hit on more?
I get recognized maybe twice a week, and it's just like a friendly, "Hello! I like you!" which is actually quite lovely. I never get hit on. If anything, I think people are less interested in dating me after seeing Appropriate Behavior.
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I don't consider my work autobiographical, I consider it personal, and I do think that I'll always be making work that's personal to me. The next feature I'm making is based on a young adult novel, so it's already written and the story's not mine. We haven't announced the name of the book that we're adapting yet, but I can tell you it's LGBT, it's set in the States, and it's a book I really love.What else is coming next?
I'm also working on a TV series based in the UK—a bisexual dating comedy. It's about a woman who's been a lesbian her entire life and comes out as bisexual in her 30s and starts dating men for the first time. It's not true to my life; I always came out as bisexual and I wasn't closeted in that way, but it's exploring something that's very personal to me, which is living and dating as a bisexual woman, what that means in the gay community, what it means in the straight community, and what it means as a single person trying to fall in love or get laid.Thanks, Desiree.Appropriate Behavior was released on DVD and On-Demand on June 29 from Peccadillo Pictures. You can order from Amazon, iTunes, and all other good retailers.Follow Amelia on Twitter.