A scientist is an unlikely character to put at the center of a movie.
Actually, I loved Chucky. It's one of the strangest movies I've ever seen.
All the big things in Kinsey's life - all the big controversial things - are in the film.
And Kinsey thought that anybody who defined themselves based on their sexual acts was limiting themselves.
Any untrue charges that Kinsey tolerated paedophiles come from the fact that he interviewed one for 18 hours and used some of that data.
Because first of all Kinsey didn't believe in such things as homosexual in the Gore Vidal kind of formulation.
Because his basic idea that he got from the study of gall wasps is that everyone's sexuality is unique.
Being at Sundance and after that, I looked at movies that were getting picked up and you couldn't point to any one thing.
But the imposition of morality onto science, - where it does not belong - has become rampant in recent years.
First of all, just knowing people who grew up in the movie business at that time, no one had Mexican maids.
I do think that's so much a part of what being a director is - in working with actors - to really try and be sensitive to what each actor needs to get to where he wants to be.
I have been a big fan of James Whale.
I knew, as opposed to Gods And Monsters, this had to deal with Kinsey's early experiences in childhood and early marriage as they informed who he was.
I know a little more about Kinsey than I know about sex because that is his subject not mine.
I really think the biopic thing so rarely works, because people's lives don't have a dramatic shape that can be satisfying.
I think it would be fun to write about movies again.
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.
I wanted to make connections between Whale's past and present.
I'm a horrible public speaker.
In Hollywood through the 50s, there were black, English, and Middle European housekeepers and maids.
In popular culture, maybe, there's more emphasis on sex, but in the halls of power, the other side is in the ascendancy.
It is interesting to be here and to see that for certain actors they have to live in a way that you think of nobody living anymore except for in small towns. They have such elaborate double lives.
It's a story told from the inside, by a gay writer, gay director, gay actor, so that you become complicit with it.
It's an odd thing to go to New York to shoot a movie that is set in Indiana.
Kinsey himself collected absolutely everything.
Kinsey kick started a lot in shocking people with how much homosexual activity there is.
Kinsey thought that Freud in his own way was as dangerous as the Catholic Church.
Kinsey was six foot five, and he had this leader of men quality.
Kinsey was trying to study sex scientifically, get rid of the overlay of culture and religion.
Kinsey would identify himself with Galileo in moments of feelings of persecution.
One of the people that became a major source was Clarence Tripp who worked with Kinsey.
Our relationships, relationships between adults, how all those pieces fit together - that's the most complicated thing we all face.
Problems emerge and some people try to sweep them under the rug.
The idea of having stabs of memory is a way to do it and take that biopic curse off of it with Whale's flashbacks.
The real question is the tension between everyone's specific sexuality and the desire to belong, to fit in, to feel like a part of the group.
There's no question that Whale's movies are classics. They were wonderful, and successful.
Unfortunately when you have a movie with a gay figure, it can be seen as an addition to the necrology of gay suicides in movies.
We knew that there was a certain kind of interest in Whale among a genre crowd.
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.
When it comes to two of the big social earthquakes in the last fifty years - which are the gay movement and the women's movement - I think there is a direct line from Kinsey to those.
While that wasn't first and foremost in my mind, you can't get into this without being struck, on one side, by how far we've come, and then the other side, by how little things have changed.
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