Kimberly Peirce's biggest concern while making the film Boys Don't Cry was that the audience wouldn't sympathise with her heroine. Beaten, raped and eventually murdered, the true story of Teena Brandon's short life would appear to demand only the tenderest reception. But to sympathise with her is to make a leap that Peirce wasn't sure a large slice of her audience would be capable of: Brandon was a transsexual, a girl who passed herself off as a boy.
In the logic of the Nebraska outpost she came from, she forfeited her right to public sympathy when she shoved a pair of socks down her trousers and started dating the town's girls. Now that the film has won a Golden Globe award and a best actress Oscar for Hillary Swank, the movie's star, Peirce's faith in a five-year-long project has been vindicated.
The good reception that Boys Don't Cry has had, particularly in the conservative mid-west where the story takes place, is only upstaged by the fact that it is Peirce's first film. In April 1994, while enrolled on a graduate film course at Columbia University - she is now in her early 30s - she started reading reports in the press about a hate crime that had rocked a little place called Falls City, way out in Nebraska.
"I was writing another script at the time, based on a true story about a woman who passed as a man during the civil war. Then I picked up the Village Voice and started reading about Brandon." Teena Brandon, or Brandon Teena as he/she called him/herself, was a popular fixture in Falls City. He drank with the boys, dated the girls, fell in love with a bold young woman called Lana and, when his identity as a woman was discovered, was shot dead by two young men who couldn't process the inverted values that came with his unmasking.
The story was picked up by the New York Times and the New Yorker; a novel and a play were written about it. "I fell in love with a story that was bigger than me," says Peirce. "It was capturing the nation's imagination."
While much of the coverage concentrated on the brutal killing and the "freak" factor of Brandon's sexuality, what interested Peirce was the love story between Brandon and Lana. The film student made a brave move: she caught a plane to Nebraska and, inspired by such prose works as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, began doing some background journalism.
She attended the killers' trials; she interviewed the witnesses; she read every scrap of material on the case until, two years and another visit later, the angle of her story became clear to her. The extraordinary fact about the case, Peirce thought, was that these people weren't east coast sophisticates dabbling with homosexuality, but a young couple from redneck country, heroic enough to love each other even after it emerged that both of them were girls.
Lana, whom Peirce interviewed at length, resents any suggestion that she is a lesbian. Her suspension of disbelief about Brandon's identity is at the psychological heart of the movie. She still alternates her references to his gender. Against the backdrop of an endless Nebraska skyline, this really is the stuff of poetry, of love as the ultimate agent of transformation. When Peirce first came up against it, however, it threatened to blow her whole story.
"I said to Lana, when did you first know that Brandon was a girl? She replied, `Oh, I knew the day that I met him.' I thought if she knew when she met him, there's no story here. Then she said, `No, I didn't really know until that day Brandon told me.' Then she said, `No I didn't really know until later.' "
Lana and Brandon had planned to run away together and when Peirce asked Lana if they meant to go as lovers or as friends, Lana replied, "As friends, of course, because Brandon was a girl." But when Peirce mentioned Brandon's desire for a sex change, Lana said quickly, "Brandon didn't need a sex change, he was always a man to me".
As Peirce says, "Whether Brandon is a boy or girl changes for Lana, sentence by sentence. So I have to ask myself, what can I trust? I can trust that she loves Brandon."
Unsurprisingly, the synopsis of a film this complicated, did not excite a bidding war between the major studios. Peirce didn't even set out with the idea of making a feature film. She gained her first degree in English and Japanese literature at the University of Chicago, during which time she spent two years living in Japan and working as a stills photographer. After moving to New York's Columbia University, she progressed from stills to making 16 mm shorts. One, The Last Good Breath, about two lovers who take turns sacrificing themselves to survive a war, won second place at the Canada international film festival.
When Peirce wrote the script of Boys Don't Cry, it was as her graduate thesis, and she filmed a short version of it. But somewhere around 1995 she began to realise its potential as a feature film. But there were serious difficulties. As well as the challenging nature of its material, Peirce was a first-time director who wanted to retain full creative control. She could have had "high risk" printed across her forehead. "The fact that the movie could not get made, made total sense to me," she says. "My culture destroyed Brandon, my culture couldn't make sense of Brandon, I made sense of Brandon."
Peirce frowns under the weight of her mission to inspire awe, and not disgust, for Lana and Brandon. The impression Peirce gives is of an earnest, incredibly hard-working woman, erring on the side of sobriety, but passionate about her material to an extent that makes it hard to imagine how she would handle a story she was less personally involved in.
In the project's early days, Peirce was helped by the casting of Hilary Swank in the lead role as Brandon and Chloe Sevigny as Lana. Swank is superb, utterly believable as a male lead, and Sevigny brings her usual, Plasticine-featured intensity to the role. Both have been nominated for Oscars and Swank won the best actress award at this year's Golden Globes after Fox Searchlight, an arm of Rupert Murdoch's Fox, eventually backed the film on the strength of a 20-minute trailer.
What is most surprising in all this is the way the American heart-lands have reacted to the film. When it showed in St Louis, Missouri, people poured round Peirce after the screening to congratulate her.
"I loved Brandon," a lot of them said, no minor admission, since to make this statement they had had to digest a scene in which one girl wearing a dildo made love to another girl who believed her to be a boy. Yet digest it they did. "In St Louis there was a question-and-answer session after the film," says Peirce. "The greatest thing that emerged from it was that the audience didn't think of Brandon as a sexual deviant. My aim had been to make him as deeply human as possible, so that people fell in love with him the way that Lana did; so that they didn't think gay, didn't think weird, just thought Brandon. And that's what happened."
They were helped along in this by a shift in American culture that has been symbolised by the public reaction to the Matthew Shepherd case. When Brandon was murdered in 1993, the public outcry was limited. When Matthew Shepherd, a gay student, was murdered in Wyoming last year, the outcry was huge and Shepherd became an icon for everyone opposed to what Peirce calls "the straight white boys picking up guns and taking their frustrations out on people who aren't like them.
"When Brandon was killed, the country wasn't as aware of its own cultural violence as it is now. Now the corporate financiers are looking at my film and saying, `oh my God, you're recognising a problem that's out there'. But the problem has been out there."
The story of his life is, Peirce believes, the story of a wounded culture that is only just beginning to look at itself without panicking at what it sees. For a while after the crime, Lana was ostracised in Falls City and moved to live with an aunt in Omaha. She is back at home now, though, has had a baby and is finding that the prevailing sentiment towards her is curiosity not hostility. She did, however, launch a lawsuit just prior to the film's release against Fox for invasion of privacy, which was settled out of court. Peirce is still in touch with her and intends to remain so. "The great thing is that in the end, Lana didn't know anything about gender politics. She was just trying desperately to hang on to something that was beautiful in her life."
Boys Don't Cry runs until May 18th at the IFC, and is on general release from May 21st.