In The Seats With...James Kicklighter and 'The Sound of Identity'

I had met the producers in Tulsa two years before I filmed this. There was an event called Tulsa Tomorrow, where they flew in fifty young professionals from all over the country who were successful in different industries, and I met them there. Two years later they thought of me for this film. They said, "We've got the rights to do this movie about the first transgender opera singer to have a leading role on an American main stage. What do you think?" I said, "I think that's fascinating, but I know nothing about opera, so I think you've called the wrong guy." They called me again, and they called me again. They said, "Why don't you talk to Lucia, the subject of the film, and see what you think?" As soon as I talked to her, I knew I had to do the film and get past that barrier.

That's the challenge, isn't it? Of course we talked about that going in, because there are a couple of parameters you have to figure out as a director. First of all, I'm a guest in somebody else's house. They are doing a real show. So I had to establish with the director of the show, the opera company and Lucia that I wanted to be a wallflower. I don't want to be bothering your process, because I understand you have a show to do. Lucia had to be okay with us following her in her downtime and on her off days, and with scheduling extra work. So we did have to set some parameters for filming. But ultimately I think those kinds of creative constraints actually help you as a filmmaker.

I was very fortunate that Tulsa Opera happened to have some of the greatest people working in modern opera, which I certainly didn't know walking in. There's Tobias Picker, the artistic director, who is a legendary composer in his own right. There's Denni Sayers, the director of the show, who is from London and has worked all over the world. And then the rest of the cast. So I did do some research, but the nice thing about this project was that, despite being in Tulsa, you had this global cast, not just Lucia from Germany. That enabled me to be a fairly quick study, because when you have that kind of talent, it's really hard not to learn something from them.

I didn't know that either. As I said, I knew very little about opera. Tulsa has remarkable arts organizations. They have the ballet, the opera, the symphony. They have all of these things because the founders of the city in the 1900s decided to endow these organizations so the city would have them. Oil money. That's why Tulsa has such a remarkable arts legacy, and why its organizations are so renowned. I think we don't think of places like Tulsa having things like that, because we always think about the Met, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles. But there are many remarkable organizations like Tulsa Opera all over the country.

The fascinating thing for me, as a director, was to observe someone else's artistic process. It's very rare, because as a creative you're usually in your own box. As a director specifically, you work with yourself, which is a strange thing. If you're an actor, a producer or a writer, you work with a variety of different talents. But as a director, steering the ship, the only time you observe is when you visit someone else's set and see how someone else works. It's such an interior process. Being able to observe Denni Sayers, for example, I was just blown away by her techniques as a stage director, as someone who understands choreography, movement and motion in such specific ways. I felt like I was getting a special master class that I didn't pay for. It was really remarkable.

You're right. I told Lucia and the producers this: I felt that if the story was about that, it would in fact be kind of gimmicky. It's the obvious thing. The obvious carrot is that the story is about the first transgender opera singer to have a leading role on an American main stage. That's not intrinsically an interesting story to me. Nor is the story of "we're putting on a performance." That's a structure. That's not a story. The structure is: we have thirty days to get to a performance. The logline is: there's the first transgender opera singer to have a leading role on an American main stage. The story has to be about something else. It has to be about something personal for Lucia. In digging around, I felt the narrative I wanted to tell was much more personal, about what it means to be an artist and what drives us to be artists. I think that can apply to anyone who's an actor, a writer, a director, a musician, all the way across the board. That, to me, would be a lot more interesting for someone to watch.

I understand. It took me a minute too. I think one of the challenging things in culture at the moment is that, because societies are so polarized, it's hard to see places like Tulsa as being both things. It can be a town that is probably a little more conservative, and it can also have the first transgender opera singer in a leading role on an American main stage. In America, at least, we think of states as being red or blue, but that's not really true. There are places like Tulsa, or Atlanta, or Austin, Texas. The list goes on and on. I was surprised that there were no protests or pickets or things like that, because we were fully expecting it walking into the film. I was really glad I did not have to tell that story. Again, it goes back to what I said earlier. That is not a story that's very interesting to me. That's the obvious story. That's the thing you're expecting. As a director, the challenge I always try to set myself is: if you read the logline, what can I do as a director to surprise you with the plot? That's one thing I think a lot of people walking into this film will expect, and I'm really proud and happy that it didn't happen in Tulsa.

I did think of that as we were shooting. About five or six days into filming, I knew what the plot was going to be, start to finish. Then my job was figuring out how to tell that story, and whether I could tell it. One of the challenges of filming a documentary is that the film you think you're going to walk in and make is not usually the film you make. And if you do happen to find it early, like I did on The Sound of Identity, it's a matter of figuring out whether you can tell that story, and then tracking those plot lines as they happen in real time. So I knew early on that the coexistence in Tulsa was something I wanted to tap into. But I also felt it had a lot of import beyond the reasons we just described. A story like this is going to have more influence on the people in the surrounding area who are in the LGBTQ community than it perhaps would in New York or Los Angeles or Miami, a major city. It's going to mean more to them, because they may not have the same acceptance in this little dot that sits in a sea of people who are different from them. I felt that was really important to highlight for the people there, too.

That was another layer I tried to weave into the film. I thought of Don Giovanni as a character within the picture itself. The opera had decided on it before they cast Lucia. They were going to do Giovanni because it's a classic opera, and every opera company tends to do a classic opera every season, I have learned. When they added Lucia to the cast, it added a lot of dimension, because it brings in some really fascinating cultural conversations about toxic masculinity and what it means to cast a trans woman in that role. That negotiation between voice, gender and identity was such an intriguing triangulation, and I felt it was really important for the film to tap into it.

Oh, yes. And she liked it, fortunately. She gave a really nice interview today in NewNowNext where she said nice things, so I'm very glad she liked it. That's the challenge of making a film not just about a real person, but about someone who's on the cusp of success. You have a lot of responsibility as a director, because I could easily make something that's damaging to her career. So I tried to find something that was honest to who she was and to what happened during those thirty days, while being mindful that this is something that's going to have a big influence on her career. In the world of opera, it's extremely rare to have a film like this. I don't know if there is one. If there is, someone tell me. But I don't think there are many films, if any, that follow an artist on the cusp of success in opera. Usually it's when they're dead, almost dead or dying. It's always at the end of their life, not at the beginning of what will be a successful career for Lucia.

And that, to me, was a much higher stake than her being trans. I thought it was way more interesting. You were asking earlier what I knew going in. I knew this story would not be a transition story. I told Lucia that on day one. I said, I feel like filmmakers are doing a major disservice to the trans community by constantly telling stories that are only about transition. I'm not saying there are no films about trans people that aren't about transition, but nine out of ten of them are. I thought that if we could tell a story about someone who is beyond that, and is now grappling with something else, it would actually answer the social question you just raised in a much more powerful way. Then we're having a conversation about what it means to exist, as opposed to what it means to become something else. That becoming is more of a personal journey than a physical one. And if we continue to almost fetishize the transition process, I don't think we're doing very much to build acceptance among people who do not want to accept trans people.

I wanted it to feel like a narrative film, which I think it does. Obviously it's a documentary. My director of photography and I go way back. We went to college together. We met each other our first week of freshman year, we were roommates for years, and we've worked together now for fifteen years, so we have a really close personal and professional working relationship. When we were first engaged to do this film, that was one of our early conversations: the world of opera is really heightened. It's cinematic. We would do a major disservice to that world if we didn't treat it the same way. So we decided to shoot it like a narrative film. We composed every shot. We were very specific about every interview location. With Lucia, for example, it starts on a smaller stage, moves to a medium-sized stage, and finishes on the large stage. That required me to structure the interviews in an extraordinarily specific way, and in hindsight a kind of risky way. I give the producers a lot of credit for letting me do that, because if it hadn't worked, structurally the film wouldn't have worked. I can't go back to a previous stage, just like you can't go back to a previous stage in your life. So I had to be really specific about how that was structured. With the secondary characters we did the same thing. I observed them and asked: what is a setting that is like this character, that puts them in a place that feels like this person? With all those specific choices, we tried to craft a film that felt much more narrative, and I think we pulled it off. I'm really happy about that.

I go between making narrative films and documentaries. I do both, and I do advertising as well. Because I have that mixed skill set, and I've done the traditional talking-heads documentary, I felt that with this film we had the opportunity to do something different. For me the question always is, in addition to how we subvert the audience's expectation of the logline: how do you best serve the story? To my mind, the best way to serve this story was to meet the world of opera where my perception of it was, because I thought that might change a viewer's perception of it. I think we think of opera as a dead medium. We don't think of it as something living and breathing. At least I didn't, walking into the film. As I said, I knew very little about it. So while I was making this, I was asking: what can we do to make opera feel exciting and fresh, and have stakes? To me, that was the only answer.

Sure. Network. Sidney Lumet. In fact, I don't know if you can see it, but right here in my office I have Making Movies, which I think is the bible for filmmaking. If any of you want to make a film, this is what you should read first. It's a masterpiece of writing. And I actually have a little homage to Network in my film. The CEO of Tulsa Opera is framed in the exact same way. That's a little Easter egg for you film buffs out there. I did it on purpose, because I thought about Network and the end of that scene, when he's talking about the gospel of money, and I felt that would be an appropriate framing. One of my production assistants ran out to get those lights when we saw that table, and we framed it that way. Again, it's putting the characters in the setting that makes sense. But that was my homage to Network, and I'm really pleased we pulled it off.

I grew up in south Georgia and live in Los Angeles, so I didn't know much about that part of the world either. It's really a remarkable place. Take a trip to Tulsa. It's a cool town.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much.