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John Cameron Mitchell happily accepts ‘a mid-life crisis award’ at LA’s Outfest
At 52, John Cameron Mitchell has begun getting special honors for his body of work.
Last year he was honored at the Tony Awards for his stage achievements and Thursday night in Los Angeles, he was presented with the Outfest Achievement Award for his work as the director of such films as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Shortbus and Rabbit Hole.
‘I’m having a mid-life crisis award,’ Mitchell joked to the crowd at the Orpheum Theatre during opening night of the 11-day festival of queer film.
‘People who’ve won this are my heroes and people who I was looking up to in the early 90s when I was thinking of becoming a director -Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, John Waters – who were models of how to do things.’
He added: ‘Nowadays the term selling out doesn’t exist anymore because everybody is trying to make a living, that’s the way it is.’
He was acting in TV shows and films and remembers people telling him his die project, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, was ‘career suicide.’ It went on to become a sensation Off-Broadway, a feature film, and is currently a red-hot revival on Broadway.
‘We’ve just got to do something that we love,’ Mitchell told the capacity crowd. ‘Do the other jobs, do the thing you love and by accident, the world changed in the interim and now I can pay my rent from that.’
The audience clapped its approval of Mitchell’s creative career approach.
‘If you go for the money first and try to think of what other people want to see, you change your original inspiration and perhaps put out something that’s less original and less personal and maybe less satisfying,’ he said. ‘It might possibly make more money but that’s a different issue.
‘If you’re stopping yourself by, in effect, selling out, which is thinking about what a billion people want to see as opposed to what you want to see and your friends want to see, you’re short-changing yourself.’
Mitchell also cautioned against seeking approval on the internet before your full vision is realized because trolls might discourage you with the comments. He said if he had shown early Hedwig online, he would have been buried because ‘it wasn’t that good.’
‘Don’t over-document it, do it in the dark. Best things happen in the dark.’
The post John Cameron Mitchell happily accepts ‘a mid-life crisis award’ at LA’s Outfest appeared first on Gay Star News.
Greg Hernandez
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