Q & A with director James Kicklighter: The Sound of Identity

Thank you for having me, Peter. I appreciate it.

I was approached by the producers about three months before the performance. They said they had gotten the rights to do a film about the first transgender opera singer to have a leading role on an American main stage, and would it be something that I would be interested in doing. I told them no three times, actually, because I wasn't sure, one, if I knew enough about opera to tell that story. Two, I wasn't sure if I was qualified to tell a story about a trans person. And three, I didn't want to make a trans film about transitions or boycotts or protests. That just didn't interest me in any way. So on the third time, when I said no, the producer said, "Well, why don't you talk to Lucia and see what you think?" As soon as I got on the phone with her, I knew I had to do it, and that was that.

I did, because I felt that the story was really a more personal one. It's about why someone performs, the reason why you are an artist and what motivates you to become an artist. One thing that I feel very strongly about in films of trans representation, or maybe even the LGBTQ genre in general, is that oftentimes it's about transitions, or it's about coming out, or it's about these things that don't have anything to do, ultimately, with the people we become. It was really important to me to explore how society perceives gender and performance, and to think about how we present ourselves to the public after we go through whatever that process may be. In the case of Lucia, of course, she is trans, but in any scenario I think the same sort of thing could apply.

No, I was very lucky on that front, actually. Lucia and Tulsa Opera really did grant us full access to shoot whatever we needed to shoot. So my mandate was, if they're going to give us that generosity of filming, the first thing I had to do was be equally reciprocal. Because clearly I'm not just making a film here. There's a real performance that is also happening, in the midst of all the international press that she is getting from every major publication around the world, on top of making a film while we're going through that whole process. That, to me, was essential: with that access also came some responsibility to make sure we were not in the way of that performance.

Yes. I didn't know that Tobias Picker, who is a prolific opera composer as well as the artistic director of Tulsa Opera, was going to play such a role in the film until we started filming. I was about a week in. There's a scene in the film where we're in a restaurant, and Lucia and Tobias are talking about using identity as a currency, effectively. Is that a good thing or a bad thing, to sell tickets to this performance? I remember calling my producers immediately after we shot that scene and saying, "I have the film. I know exactly what this film is going to be." You're not always that lucky when you're shooting a documentary, where you find out within seven days of filming how you want to structure the rest of it. But I knew that since Tobias Picker had recruited Lucia to come play this role for Tulsa Opera, to get some publicity, to shake some things up, to make the first transgender singer in a leading role on an American main stage a star at Tulsa Opera, I thought it was essential to look at the yin and yang of their relationship. Someone who is seeing the end of their career, even though he's still vibrant and working, can see the future in ways that someone at the beginning of their career cannot. They're looking back, not just looking forward. I thought that mentor-mentee relationship, and the nature of what that means to any artist, was really essential to the film.

There's a bunch of characters that are periphery pieces that add up together, or at least that was my working theory in shooting, and her wife was one of those. It's not a spoiler to say that the film is set against the backdrop of their tenth wedding anniversary, which is a really interesting space, because when we think about our relationships in life, decades have meaning. And in this decade they're across the world from each other, because this is what they do for a living. Her wife is an opera singer, she's an opera singer, and they don't get to be together for these pivotal moments, because these pivotal moments are spent developing their careers. So her wife, I think, is an important reminder, and she bookends the film, of the things that artists have to give up to become the people they want to be. That sometimes includes our time with friends and family and loved ones. The things that we miss, as much as the things that we do. It's a choice that you have to make when you're an artist. That's a tough one, and I thought that was really important to explore too.

I didn't think it was important. I know there are some people who have watched the film, and I've read a couple of reviews that disagree with that notion. I remember one critic wrote something about how they had to do some googling on that. I didn't include it, not because I was trying to hide anything, but because I didn't think it was important. It was about what these thirty days mean to her at this point in her career. I think that when you are an artist on the cusp of something, when you realize that you've been working a very long time to get to a certain point, there's going to be a point in your career, I believe, where you either make it or you don't make it. There's got to be a moment where you're divided, you know, the loaves and fishes. It's a moment where you really are separated. And this, for Lucia, I felt, was the cusp of that moment, where after all of that work she's either going to make it or she's not. She's getting all the international press. She's the first transgender opera singer to have a leading role on an American main stage. It's a big deal. It means there's a lot of pressure. So for me, in telling that story, the only thing that mattered was those thirty days, because in those thirty days the trajectory of what happened, good or bad, would be set for the rest of her career.

Yes. As I alluded to earlier, I wasn't very familiar with opera stepping into this film, and it was amazing to hear not just Lucia but also the rest of the performers. You get a master class when you spend a month or two with performers at the height of their skill. It was remarkable just to hear Lucia perform and to see how that evolved over the course of those thirty days, but also to see how the whole ensemble cast has to work together quickly and concisely to put together a piece of live performance for two days of actual delivery. That is something that boggles my mind as someone in film. We make things, and then they're finished, and you can watch them over and over again. But in the world of opera, of live theater, you spend all this time rehearsing for two performances, and that's it. That was really interesting to observe.

I did too. Very much, this is a process film as much as it is a personal one. I thought going through that sales process, again using this idea of identity as currency, how do we use it, and then actually seeing Lucia use that currency as a vehicle, not just her talent but also what all of it represented, and seeing how that interacted with the public: I thought that intertwining that story with the personal journey would be a really interesting way to go.

It was pretty much a full house, yes. They were pleased with the final results of the show. It's also something that one or two people have asked me over the past year: how many people actually showed up to the performance? I didn't give a number or a summation of that, because at the end of the day, it would have been great if there were five thousand people or a thousand people, but that really doesn't matter when it comes to performance. It matters what it means to you. And that, to me, ultimately was the thing that mattered in this film: what it meant to Lucia.

It is. My first edit, I believe, was around three hours, so it was really just paring it down to the most essential elements. I certainly had enough material to make something much longer, but I felt that giving it the ticking clock, the thirty-day timeline, and keeping it really tight was going to enhance the urgency of the story. There were several things I really enjoyed that I would have loved to leave in, that I thought were funny or interesting or entertaining. But at the end of the day, I thought that ticking-clock motif enhanced the urgency of all those elements.

Funny thing, I actually saw it with her this week for the very first time in person. There was a special screening in Atlanta that was presented by Atlanta Pride, Atlanta Opera, Out On Film and the Out Front Theatre Company. Because of the pandemic, with Lucia living in Germany and me living in Los Angeles, everything we've done over the past year since it came out has been on Zoom. So this was our first opportunity to sit down in person and watch it together. It was really fun just to jab each other throughout the screening, and to see the moments that really moved her emotionally. We had a nice dialogue at the end about it too, where she said that she was really grateful for the type of film I chose to make, not the one that she suspected was going to be made, about transition, about all those other things that we skip right past in the film.

She and her wife both live in Germany, and Lucia actually just had her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which obviously is a big deal. She also has some upcoming engagements across the globe. I believe she'll primarily be in Europe this fall. Lucia is one of the preeminent baritone singers in global opera, so she's quite busy with her schedule, for sure.

So far I've received, I think, fairly good feedback from audiences at different venues across the world, and it's really been a phenomenal journey to go on with this film. For me, two things. One, I wanted to make a film that was a little bit different within this space, because opera is in many regards, as Michael Cooper from The New York Times alludes to, a dying medium. It's a medium people don't talk about very much in pop culture. So I wanted to make something that would be accessible to people who knew absolutely nothing about opera. And two, I wanted to make something that was a really strong representation of the trans community, that's empowering, something that doesn't feel dark and depressing, something that really shows the things that we can do when we choose to become the people that we are destined to be. No matter where you stand on anything in your life when it comes to identity, I think that's a universal story, uniquely lensed through someone who's at the cusp of success. You never really see stories about opera singers until they're dead, so that makes this one pretty unique.

I like all of the above. I've been very fortunate in my career to go between docs and narrative films and advertising, and I enjoy doing all three. I think for me as a director, the thing is not so much what story I want to tell. It's about what is the story that I can tell right now. If it's a script that's ready to go, and we're packaged and we're funded, it's time to go, let's make it. If it's a doc that's packaged and ready to go, let's make that too. I'm not the kind to sit around and wait for something to happen. You might as well get it done in between. The film I'm doing next is likely going to be a narrative film. I've been very fortunate in my career to be able to have those choices.

I have always considered Sidney Lumet and Jonathan Demme, because they both, in their careers, really were able to go between dramas and docs, like you just described. I hope that if I'm fortunate enough to keep working, I'll be able to do the same thing.

It was. I have joked many times that it was great until the last day. It was a really good experience for me as a director to work with a lot of public figures and political figures and private figures, to really figure out how to package something in politics. And we, of course, won the state of Virginia, so I was very proud of that. But that also led to the film that's coming out next, later this year, called The American Question, which is about American polarization and how to get out of it. It's a very light film, as I'm sure you can imagine. We've been shooting it for five years, we just wrapped it up, and it will be debuting a little bit later in the year. We're very excited about that.

We do. We deal with a lot of those issues. We shot in a rural, a suburban and an urban town in Michigan and Pennsylvania, from 2016, right after the election, through 2021. We followed these ordinary Americans across political, ideological and socioeconomic lines, and coupled them with experts across the political, sociological and historical spectrum to put in context what's going on in America, not just today, but five years from now, twenty years from now, and way into the past, to really explain how polarization happens, how we've gotten here, and how we're going to get out of it. That process has obviously been fascinating, and it started with me working for Hillary Clinton. If it had not been for that process, I highly doubt I would have directed this film. So you really never know where things are going to come from.

Thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Thank you.