Interview with Bill Condon Making Gods and Monsters<> has been, for writer-director Bill Condon, a long and rewarding process. When, several years ago, he read Christopher Bram's novel, Father of Frankenstein<>, he knew had found a way to bring the splendid complexities of James Whale's life to the screen. He set to work, securing rights to the novel, the support of executive producer (and "patron godfather'') Clive Barker, and the participation of Ian McKellan. When I spoke with Condon on the phone from his home in LA, I asked why he began with a fictionalization of Whale's last months, rather than taking a more conventional biopic approach. BC: I hate biopics. I think that finding a way into somebody's life that's sort of off from a side angle can tell you more about that person than a greatest hits approach. Chris Bram had introduced themes that were so rich and deep, using Whale's life as an opportunity to explore aging and loneliness, and connecting to other people. CP: How did you structure the film to include various monsters that tormented Whale? BC: I wanted to make connections between Whale's past and present. David Skaal has written very well about horror as a genre, and he observed that WWI, with the advances in medicine, meant that many more people survived with grotesque deformities. Whale had horrible experiences both in the trenches and in a German POW camp, so that he had a sense of being surrounded by the grotesque and developed a gallows humor. We made connections between the monsters created by war and the monsters he created, the typical outcast that Whale was attracted to, and the monster in himself, that's inside all of us. CP: Can you say more about this monster in him or all of us? BC: First, he's an older homosexual, which makes him an outsider, and in some people's eyes, a monster. To himself, it's the sense of losing control, as his monster in Frankenstein<> has no choice in being put together. Whale's body turned against him in the end. CP: How did his poor childhood come into play? BC: In addition to his feeling that he was an outsider because he was gay, I think a large part of it had to do with the British class system: he was a working class kid with his face pressed against the window for so much of his life. We tried to make the flashbacks work differently than traditional flashbacks, so they reveal Whale's emotional life. There's a moment where he's being interviewed by that silly guy and he's making up a lie about his past, but we flash back to the truth of it, seeing his father humiliate him by accusing him of being a sissy. CP: The interview appears to set up Whale up as a standard "dirty old man,'' ogling the reporter as he strips, but it's handled affectionately, with humor. So the scene invites you in, even viewers who might feel initially repulsed by Whale's apparent interest in the kid. BC: That's it exactly, it's inviting you in. It's a story told from the inside, by a gay writer, gay director, gay actor, so that you become complicit with it. But it's less about sex than other forms of erotics and power. Even though the movie plays with this sexual tension, as if [Whale] wants sex from [the reporter] or Boone, he doesn't really want sex from anybody. CP: Do you worry about queer films -- or your film -- being "ghettoized''? BC: It's a complicated question. When people ask if it's a gay movie, my answer is always, yes and no. It's a gay film with significant gay content, and the reason we're getting such a nice release now is because the gay audience is a great audience. They show up, they don't wait six weeks to amble into a theater, they go to movies and talk about them. There are movies that are made for only gay audiences, or even only for gay men or lesbians. That's good, because we haven't had them. But I wanted to make a film for other audiences as well. CP: What was Whale's life like, as a gay man in Hollywood? BC: In the thirties it was a very sophisticated, insulated existence, so he was openly gay, living with David Lewis and out with him or young men every night, he could be flamboyant. Obviously there were studio bosses who tsk-tsked a bit, but it was a sophisticated, mostly tolerant culture. What happened was WWII, when men needed to be men and women women, and the Cold War that followed, when everything that was secret or subversive became scary to people. CP: How do you see Whale's monster films in relation to current horror movies? BC: I know movies work in cycles, but I don't get why suddenly teen slasher films are being acclaimed as humorous, ironic, and detached. Bride<> did all this before. But I was always attracted to horror movies, growing up as a Catholic boy in Queens, with a pretty religious background and solid sense of repression. The month I was born, the local movie house was converted to the parish church. I think I was fated to work out the connections.