Kimberly Peirce (Director)

"I identified with Teena. Probably the re-telling of Teena's search for family was about my own search for a family. And her drifting reflected my own moving around. Making herself into the fantasy she had of herself is something I related to as a filmmaker. I make sense of my own life by what I write about and what I make movies about. This film is very autobiographical, really. I used myself to understand my characters more deeply." - Peirce on "Boys Don't Cry" quoted in Moviemaker magazine, December 1999

"This story had been covered so sensationalistically, and people were making Brandon into an icon, so I knew that what I needed to do was enter as deeply as possible into his character. And I thought that the heart of that was actually to be inside of his desire. I didn't want to reduce it to questions like 'Was he a lesbian?' or 'Which came first, wanting to be with women or wanting to dress like a boy?' I wanted to be deeply inside his experience, and that's why I chose a lot of close-ups, that's why the color is saturated, that's why you start the movie in his bedroom [with him] looking at himself in the mirror - that's like the birth of Brandon. What I really wanted to do was bring the audience in and allow them to enter into a pretty epic tragedy, but on a really, really human level [in order to] bring Brandon to life. And to see the world as he saw it." - Peirce on her "Boys Don't Cry" filmmaking approach in Filmmaker magazine, Fall 1999

Peirce on necessarily toning down the violence in "Boys Don't Cry": "By its nature, the film reduced the reality Brandon faced. The real story is a kind of horror that I think few people will ever know" - From The Los Angeles Times, Sept. 12, 1999