Stephen Cone on Henry Gamble's Birthday Party
Ahead of the Scottish premiere of Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party at SQIFF, we speak to the film’s director, Stephen Cone, about his sensitive approach to both condemning the repression caused by organised religion while also celebrating its community spirit
Hollywood loves to celebrate the first-time filmmaker – those prodigious mavericks who come right out of film-school with a knockout movie paid for with a maxed-out credit card. Major festivals love these greenhorns too. Almost all have some sort of competition for first-timers, and various script labs and workshops to nurture movie freshmen. Great news for talented rookies with the kind of mainstream appeal to get noticed out of the gate, but what about the filmmakers who’ve been busy experimenting; trying and failing and then picking up the camera and trying again?
Chicago-based filmmaker Stephen Cone, whose latest film Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party plays the Scottish Queer International Festival (or SQIFF), fits this latter model. “I’ve made one movie per year, whether it’s a short or a feature film, for the last ten years and everyone thinks that Henry Gamble is my first movie,” he sighs via Skype on the lead up to his film’s Scottish premiere. Cone’s happy with his steady progress, though. “It’s given me time to figure out what I want to do, but it disqualifies me from a lot of the sort of instant-hype culture. But, you know, I’m OK with it.”
This fetisisation of first-time filmmakers is a relatively new phenomena. Back in the day, young directors were expected to earn their stripes. “I do sometimes wish it was more like the 60s and 70s,” says Cone. “You know, the Roger Corman days, when Coppola could make six movies before he made the Godfather, and the Godfather didn’t have to be ‘the startling debut of a great new American filmmaker.’”
Like Coppola, Cone is having his breakthrough with his seventh feature, although his similarly-themed Wise Kids, from 2011, also made ripples on the indie landscape. Filmed in the Chicago suburbs where John Hughes made teen classics like Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink, Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party is also centered on the turmoil of adolescence. Our title character (Cole Doman) is a pastor's son who’s interested in boys, a fact he’s trying to ignore for now so not to rock the boat in his father’s evangelical church community.
It’s not just Henry who’s burying his feelings. His best friend Gabe (Stranger Things’ Joe Keery), who’s straight, is also finding it difficult to balance out his faith and his carnal thoughts. The sleepover masturbation session the two boys have side-by-side in Henry’s bed in the film’s opening scene isn’t enough to temper their hormones, though. Over the course of the film, which spans the next 24 hours at Henry’s 17th birthday party, emotions for the boys, as well as several of the other believers attending the pool party – some Henry and Gabe’s age, and some older – will bubble over.
And no wonder. Tell a bunch of teenagers that sex before marriage is wrong and then throw them all together with very few clothes on in a swimming pool and you’re going to have fireworks. Add in a box of warm rosé below the sink that the middle-age party guests are surreptitiously draining and you have a tinderbox of pent-up guilt, repression and sexual tension.
If the details of the film feel authentic it’s because Cone knows this milieu well. “My dad’s a southern Baptist minister so I grew up in this world, the church three times a week – Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights, every week for the first eighteen years of my life.”
What comes through in the film is Cone’s love and understanding of his characters; his innate humanity. The writer-director is not uncritical of the religious zealots attending Henry’s soirée, but he’s never condescending. There are no bad people in the film, only misguided ones.
“I think when people hear the word 'repression' they think of it as a kind of cartoonishly oppressive thing,” says Cone. “What I found is that I had a largely pleasant upbringing and I very much loved the people that I grew up with. It wasn’t until later that I realised how there’s this very subtle neglect that happens through this sort of anti-worldly idea of where everything is focused on the next life and everything is focused on a higher plain of spiritual existence. So you’re essentially asking people to neglect their bodies, the only thing they have.”
‘Sexual opposition really messes with people’ – Stephen Cone
Henry clearly loves his family and his church friends, but they’re also holding him back. “I also loved being part of a community of having people over and eating,” says Cone. “You know, it was a very celebratory, lovely thing. It wasn’t till later that I’m like, ‘this probably affected me forever.’ This was scarring me, if not in the traditional, broader sense, then in tiny little ways.
"I think some people have giant gaping wounds from this world, and I think I probably have some teeny scars.” No matter the size of the scars, however, they take a long time to heal: “This sort of sexual opposition or closed-offness really messes with people, and it’s still there.”
Cone clearly has a side in the characters’ war of the flesh and the spirit, but he doesn’t overplay his hand. The hypocrisy and oppression of religion is exposed gradually in the film as characters try to come to terms with their faith and their physical longings. So sensitive is Cone’s approach, and so naturalistic and nuanced his actors, that even a domineering mother (played by Hanna Dworkin) who forbids her 20-something daughter from stripping down to swim and keeps bringing down the party with her tales of sex-trafficking engenders sympathy. We feel sorry for her, because we realise that this woman’s evangelical beliefs have soured her whole outlook on life.
While the characters Cone writes tend to be made up of composites of people, this sex-obsessed virago is based on a person he knew. Her attitude, however, is pretty common. “I find it a fascinating irony that there are actually people in the Christian church who are genuinely, openly obsessed with sex, but only in a negative context,” he laughs. “So they’re allowed to be obsessed with sex in a negative context, but they’re not allowed to be obsessed with sex in a positive context.”
Does he have any theories why this is? “I think it comes from the Adam and Eve story,” he suggests. “It literally comes from Adam and Eve immediately shunning their bodies. The first thing that happens in the Bible is that people are told to put their clothes on. And boy, that just started a whole deal, didn’t it?”
Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party screens at CCA, Glasgow, Fri 30 Oct as part of SQIFF
SQIFF runs 29 Sep-2 Oct. For more details on the programme, click here or go to www.sqiff.org
Read about the recent tabloid outrage surrounding SQIFF's programme here