| The story of the man who changed the way we think about sex opens in the UK next week. Kinsey tells the story of Alfred Kinsey who shocked late 1940's America when he revealed that most men had a least one homosexual experience in their lives. OutUK correspondent Ron Dicker has been talking to the film's gay writer-director Bill Condon about his latest acclaimed movie. |
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Bill Condon remembers a conversation he had with his agent after winning an Academy
Award for writing the screenplay of Gods and Monsters. The 1998 art-house hit,
which starred Ian McKellen, explored the final days of Frankenstein director James Whale, who had retreated from Hollywood's gay society.
The agent urged Condon to move into mainstream film, a suggestion that perplexes him to this day. "Why?" Condon says in a recent interview. "You get to do musicals and movies like Kinsey. I don't see much limitation there." |
Bill Condon on the set of Kinsey.
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| Score one for the client. Condon is now one of the industry's hottest commodities, thanks to his Oscar-nominated Chicago script and now Kinsey, which he wrote and directed. | |
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His biography of the 1940s researcher Alfred Kinsey, who interviewed thousands
of Americans about their sex habits, has become one of the most anticipated releases
this year. It's been a hit a Festivals around the world since its US release and Laura
Linney has received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress Liam Neeson plays the title character, who struggled with his own wavering sexuality. Kinsey's statistics revealed that sex between men was not the aberrant behaviour it was presumed to be. "As an openly gay filmmaker and because Kinsey had such an effect on the gay movement, I was really concerned about not making a gay movie per se," Condon says by phone. |
Liam Neeson as Kinsey.
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| "I hope gay audiences embrace it, but if they don't know to do that because it's not identified as a gay film, it wouldn't bother me either." |
| Ian McKellen stars in Gods & Monsters which is available on DVD from Amazon as is a new paperback about Kinsey which features the full shooting script of the film and background on Alfred Kinsey. |