In the new film “Kinsey,” writer-director Bill Condon tries to capture a sprawling biography from the 20th century. Alfred C. Kinsey went from being an obscure biology professor (he collected more than a million gall wasps) to being one of the most famous men in America – not by studying wasps, but by studying the sexual behavior of Homo sapiens.
Condon, whose varied career has included writing horror movies and “Chicago,” won an Oscar for the script of “Gods and Monsters,” his speculative portrait of gay movie director James Whale. Condon came to the area recently to promote his new movie, and spoke of the difficulties in adapting a biography into a screen story.
“This guy is elusive,” he said of his initial research into Kinsey. “The biopic form, it’s not my favorite. I’m shocked that I’ve done two in a row. I’m the kind of person that, if I’m reading a biography, I always want to jump ahead to the part where they get famous.”
He said he prefers the structure of “Gods and Monsters,” which looks at a person through a “snapshot” of one moment in his life. But Condon felt that Kinsey’s childhood, the scientific method, and the fact that Kinsey was a virgin until age 27 were “all so crucial to presenting the story of how this incredibly unlikely guy pursued this project.”
After toying with the idea of having a narrator (to be played by “Gods and Monsters” star Ian McKellen), Condon finally stumbled across his key: The movie would unfold like the answers to one of Kinsey’s sex questionnaires. Kinsey rigorously applied the questionnaire to himself as well as to his subjects, so why not use his own answers to tell the story in flashback?
Condon said that Liam Neeson, his choice to play Kinsey, read through all his different screenplay drafts. He described Neeson’s approach to the character as “not judging him, in true Kinsey fashion, not turning away from those things that were difficult about Kinsey. To make it as truthful as possible and let people make their own judgments about him.”
For himself, Condon feels that Kinsey’s great revelation was the “fluidity” of sexuality. Kinsey’s scientific method led him to refuse to judge the normality of this idea – Kinsey insisted he was only interested in measuring, not judging, sexual behavior.
The film bluntly presents sexual topics in the same professorial, unromanticized way Kinsey did in his questionnaire, from the X-rated slides Kinsey shows in his marriage class to a creepy interview Kinsey conducts with a pedophile. (The latter is an episode Kinsey was criticized for – he used the data gathered from the man’s perverted history, but should he also have turned him in to the police?)
Such scenes are like a questionnaire for the audience. Or, as Condon put it, “They’re all like little litmus tests for people’s discomforts.”
In person, Bill Condon is both engaging and analytical – he even mused on a few of his movie’s weaknesses (not something most interview subjects do). He is currently working on a screenplay for another musical, but he said he found the writing process gets “harder and harder” the older he gets.
“It’s grim,” he said. “It’s incredibly painful to me. Writing is like the one really hard thing people do when they’re making movies.”
Associated Press
Bill Condon (center), writer and director of ”Kinsey,” chats with Wendy Corning (left) and her mother Ann Call, granddaughter and daughter of Alfred Kinsey, in a VIP reception before a screening of the film at Indiana University in Bloomington.
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