I know a bit about his [Sirk] life, but it's more about his style than biography. He was European and came out of a theater background, and could easily be defined as 'Brechtian.' He was expressionistic in his films, and was an example of those intensely intellectual artists who ended up working for American studios, and was handed the Ladies Home Journal and asked to adapt the stories for the screen. He found ways to use his artistry to make them interesting and nuanced, while critiquing American values in the process.

In fact, to me it's liberating to not think of identity as some organic property that we have to find and stick to, but actually something that is constructed, or that's imposed, that we can then counter by taking a different route and re-dressing it, and then re-dressing it again, and then re-dressing it again.

I always bring it up to my lawyer every now and then. And another reason we have to revisit it is because there is a restoration going on right now for the film through UCLA and Sundance.

I think when you're trying to get a film together that's had a long gustation process before I came on board and was trying to get financed in various stages, sometimes you're trying to make it more friendly to the financial interests or the commercial interests of various parties.

In male-driven [films], the protagonist is not the person who's necessarily in harms way. There's a sense that they're going to figure out how to persevere and take on the obstacles and foes and you don't necessarily know if that's going to happen with the subjects of love stories.

I think camp is a really fascinating thing, and it's hard to define and hard to apply consciously. It's almost something you take from material that's already existed in the world, a reading of the world. But I think it speaks of a long tradition of gay reading of the world, before gays were allowed to be visible.

I hope it's water under the bridge, but Richard Carpenter is a complicated individual, and he's also entitled to his own opinion on how his sister is depicted. The film has lived on and survived, and to me is ultimately is an affectionate celebration of Karen Carpenter. I hope that wins out in the end.