We made an entire movie without ever revealing our main character's gender

Cutaways is a personal essay series where filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Inside Out 2023 edition by Trevor Anderson focuses on his film Before I Change My Mind, a coming-of-age film about a student named Robin's arrival at a small-town Alberta middle school.

When I decided it was time to make my first feature after 15 years of short films, I knew exactly where to start ... or so I thought.

I had planned to make an expansion on one of my short films, Docking. A sci-fi horror about my fear of dating, Docking opened the Midnight Madness short film program at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It's a five-minute psychosexual fantasia starring two erect penises in outer space. 

"This'll be great!" I thought, as I presented Telefilm Canada with my proposal to enlarge it to a full-length: an alien in human form begins to stalk Edmonton, consuming men with its monstrous penis! What's not to love?

The response from our national funder didn't align with my fantasy. 

I got the first "Over my dead body!" of my career — a milestone every filmmaker should cherish.

I did find one sympathetic bureaucrat there, who patiently explained to me, "The problem with comedy is, what if it's not funny?"

Was this the moment to whip out my Canadian Comedy Award and plunk it on the table between us? It was not. I plastered a smile on my face, nodded and kept listening.

"We like to fund these slower dramas for first-time features," my wonk-on-the-inside continued, "because if you get it kinda wrong, the audience can't tell." 

Gentle reader, Telefilm reps are not supposed to say such things out loud. What if a gossipy filmmaker were to get asked by the CBC to write 700 to 800 words about the process of bringing their film to the screen? 

But this person was new, and presumably hadn't yet been handed the government pamphlet of "Things to Think but Never (No, Never!) Say to a Filmmaker's Face." This earnest administrator wanted to help. 

"Do you have anything safer?" 

Safer. Ok, fine. Let's make a safe first film.

I lowered my defences and set to work on that evergreen rite of passage for first-time feature filmmakers: the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film. Dutifully, I sketched the outline of a story about a gay boy in South Central Alberta, who navigates the social battlefield of junior high school in the 1980s. 

I hated it. 

I told the idea as I imagined it to my friends and collaborators, photographer Fish Griwkowsky and editor Justin Lachance, sulking my way through the story beats. But when I got to the end, Fish and Justin despised it far less than I did. In fact, they were downright encouraging.

And then, Fish asked a fateful question: "What if, when that kid arrives at the new school… nobody can tell if they're a boy or a girl?"

Pow! Suddenly, this movie idea was interesting to me. You know how sometimes your friends know you a little better than you know yourself?

Fish knew that as a young teen I was often asked, "Are you a boy or a girl?" and that I never felt like I had an easy answer. I didn't have any words for that feeling of not seeing myself represented within this two-answer multiple choice question. 

There are more words around now, but still, they fly about my head, rarely landing on my body, certainly never attaching themselves to my skin like some deer tick of identity.

Right away, this movie idea felt more authentic — and less safe. Thank the gay gods.

"Do you want to co-write this movie with me?!" I shouted at Fish. 

"Sure, whatever," he grinned. 

I saw right away how we could smuggle in a bit of formal disruption: by never disclosing a gender for our main character throughout the entire movie. 

Certainly, the other students in this kid's class would find out quickly what gender the new kid had been assigned at birth. There would be gendered pronouns, gendered bathrooms, gendered gym uniforms, the full-court press of gender in the rough game of adolescence.

But what if we left all that just off screen, just outside the frame? 

Could we write a whole script while avoiding gendered pronouns for our protagonist? Skip any momentous gender reveal scene? Let the audience interpret what they're seeing without ever having it confirmed or denied? Let the gender signifiers of the protagonist slip and slide? Could we make queerness inherent to every moment of the film without it being the explicit point?

When we found our magnificent lead actor Vaughan Murrae to play this character, I knew the answer was yes. Not only could Vaughan give the character an effectively androgynous gender presentation, but Vaughan is the type of actor that the camera can see thinking. This talent invites the audience to look deeper than whatever superficial impressions they have in the first scenes, and hopefully by the end of the movie a viewer will love this character without needing to name a gender.

Together, all of us made a movie that Telefilm could get behind, and that I could present to the world with pride. And let's face it — "safe or subversive" is just another false binary to smash.

Before I Change My Mind screens at Inside Out 2023 on Saturday, June 3.