Different For Girls: New TG Movie

The gender-bender romance is a uniquely poignant, but funny look into the emotional adjustments that a handsome, extroverted, heterosexual male and an attractive, introverted, transsexual "woman" must make in order to have a relationship. That the two, as young boys, were best friends at school 15 years earlier only heightens the bizarre, curious, and embarrassing aspects of their accidental reunion and subsequent courtship. Worlds apart in their attitudes toward life, they no longer appear to have anything in common. However, the physical attraction they feel now is ironically as strong as their childhood bonding. Taking the best from their differing lifestyles, she teaches him to grow up and he teaches her to have fun...and somewhere along the way they accidentally fall in love. So, expect the unexpected.

A recipient of the Grand Prix of the Americas Award at the 1996 Montreal World Film Festival, DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS won critical praise at the Sundance Film Festival for its star turns by Rupert Graves (THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE, INTIMATE RELATIONS, A ROOM WITH A VIEW) and Steven Mackintosh (LONDON KILLS ME, MEMPHIS BELLE, BLUE JUICE) as the unconventional twosome, and for the audacious psychological insights that limn this portrait of a lady...and the man who reluctantly woos her.

Produced by John Chapman and directed by Richard Spence (YOU, ME AND MARLEY) from an original screenplay by Tony Marchant, the supporting cast includes Miriam Margoyles, Saskia Reeves, Charlotte Coleman, Neil Dudgeon and Nisha K. Nayar. First Look Pictures will release DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS on August 22, 1997.

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION This is the first theatrical film by long-time collaborators John Chapman (producer) and Richard Spence (director), whose TV projects have included the BAFTA award- winning "Skallagrigg," the series "Making Out," and the thriller "Night Voice." Both men were mutually intrigued by the issues raised by transsexualism. Spence, who drafted the original story, recalls: "We wanted to do a film where you use the classic love story construction-boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, but the thing that throws it off balance is that these two used to be best friends in school and they were boys. Both have different things in mind when they get together for the first time after their chance meeting. We actually wanted to create scenes early on where substantial members of the male audience would get uncomfortable, but be curious to see what happens to these people."

For the screenplay, the team brought in Tony Marchant, who, according to Chapman, "is particularly interested in what makes people tick and has an uncanny insight into human psychological make-up." To insure accuracy both in the script and during the five-and-a-half week shooting schedule, transsexual actress and cabaret artist Adele Anderson served as consultant.

Anderson said of DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS, "This was the first script I could relate to. It mirrored a lot of what had happened in my own life." A flamboyantly successful cabaret performer whose secret was exposed in the newspapers, Anderson's the sole transsexual in a three-woman act. As a man, she had gone to university and become a radical gay, before realizing that gender reassignment was her only chance for happiness. She paid for the surgery by working in various government and civil service jobs.

Transsexuals must undergo a rigorous course of counseling which in a bizarre way teaches them to conform. Director Spence knows a group of transsexual women who meet each month in a bar in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles. "The aim of the evening," he says, "is not to be noticed, just to be ordinary."

Marchant, too, found that transsexuals want to live as anonymously as they can. "They go to lengths to realize their true sex in order to feel comfortable. I wanted to convey this reality, which is far from the more usual slightly camp nightclub-and-sequins clichÈd way."

Thus, the character of Kim Foyle hates to call attention to herself in behavior or in dress. "Some part of her personality has become very washed-out," Adele Anderson points out. "That's reflected in the muted colors she wears. When Prentice enters her life, she starts to get more daring, and finally ends up in scarlet and high heels because she has more confidence of her acceptance as a woman."

Originally, the filmmakers couldn't decide whether the role of Kim should be played by a woman playing a man turned into a woman or vice-versa. Then Steven Mackintosh became intrigued by the project and agreed to take up the challenge.

"Steven has an extraordinary ability to convey the small emotional changes, so you begin to forget the gender of the character he's playing," Spence explains.

Mackintosh saw DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS primarily as a love story. "It's two old friends meeting and getting to know each other again and, through that process, getting to know themselves better."

He prepared for the role by meeting transsexuals, as well as a psychiatrist and a voice therapist who works with transsexuals. "I think the hardest thing was sustaining my voice in a higher register. And I was thinking about how she'd stand and sit and walk. As a character, Kim is quite composed. She's very delicate and well-mannered, which I'm not at all."

Mackintosh also found it hard to adjust to high heels. Finally, the head of wardrobe bought him four different pairs of shoes, each with slightly higher heels. Throughout the filming, he worked his way up to the sexy pumps that reflect Kim's growing confidence in her femininity.

According to Spence, it was Steven's wife who helped him with such things as learning to dance "girly." The father of two, his four-year-old daughter looked at the outfits he was trying on at home and had her own moment of gender confusion. "Are you a girl now, Daddy?" she wanted to know.

For his role of the rebellious Paul Prentice, Rupert Graves prepared by immersing himself in punk culture. "I read an awful lot about punk attitudes and I listened to punk records." Because Prentice is working as a courier, Graves had to learn how to ride a motorcycle in two weeks. "I had three days to pass my test!" he says. Prior to filming, he hung out at a courier company "to get a feel for the way those guys live and work. The bikers in the film were all real couriers. I was really pleased that, when we started shooting, they didn't laugh at me."

About his stars, director Richard Spence remembers how well they got along, from the first improvisations during rehearsals to the motorcycle course they took together with the instructor shouting insults through the speakers in their helmets.

"It was a very happy partnership," Spence says. "We all laughed a lot. Rupert is very outgoing and completely fearless about making a fool of himself. Steven is a much quieter, more self-contained person. They were very childish together, which was a fantastic release for Steven from the strictures of playing his part. You know, people think of Rupert as incredibly upper-class. But he comes from a little seaside town and left school at 16 to train to be a circus clown. He is a very flexible person with great physical skills and a fabulous sense of humor."

To emphasize the emotional gulf which initially lies between the adult Prentice and Kim Foyle, the filmmakers used diverse locations in London. "Because of its higgledy-piggledy nature, you can get lost in London," says Chapman. "That's what Kim wants to do. Prentice, however, wants to be noticed. So there's a severe contrast in where they live. He chooses an old place that's been bashed about. She lives in a slightly phony Dutch development which we found in the Surrey Docks area that is neat, precise and slightly antiseptic."

Music is an essential element in emphasizing the gulf which separates Kim nÈe Karl and her boyhood friend and protector. "You've got two musical dialogues going on," says Spence. "Whereas Kim's tastes are underlined with orchestral, refined themes that are a bit prissy, Prentice's tastes remain firmly rooted in his youth, reflecting both his nonconformity and immaturity. Eventually, when Prentice starts to grow up and Kim rediscovers an element of rebellion, their themes, rather than separate musical ideas, come together."

Both Richard Spence and Tony Marchant loved the opportunity to revisit their past as punk purists in the Summer of '76 through the beginning of 1979. "We had a very good time then. It was a period when you became true to yourself, when you created your own style. Songs were witty, a bit off-the-wall, taking on all sorts of weird subjects." Spence played in rock bands as a student, made music documentaries for BBC's "Arena," and recently began to play again in a band that includes best-selling author Ken Follett.

Shortly before pre-production on DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS, producer John Chapman attended a Buzzcocks concert. "They still had fantastic songs, the same noise, the same crowd. It wasn't stuck in aspic, but they were still troupers, doing their stuff." The group was delighted to re-create for the movie an explosive sequence at a club where Prentice tries to have Kim share again the joy of the music.

In addition to Buzzcocks, Spence and Chapman decided to cast musicians who would have been Prentice's heroes. However, as an inside joke, Ian Dury ("Ian Dury and the Blockheads") and "the wonderfully eccentric" Edward Tudor-Pole ("Ten Pole Tudor") are characters who give Prentice a hard time: Dury as the repo man and Tudor-Pole as the prosecuting counsel determined to send Prentice to prison.

Rupert Graves plays Prentice as an immature innocent, the kind of guileless boy-man that brings out the protective instincts in women. As Prentice injects chaos into Kim's ordered existence, each takes a look at the life they have. Prentice is always at the edge of financial disaster, involved in a non-involving way with Angela (Nisha K. Nayar), the dispatcher who spends most of her time saving Paul's job. Kim's sister Jean Payne (Saskia Reeves) has trouble in her marriage to the macho career soldier Neil Payne (Neil Dudgeon). She envies Kim because of her independent existence, while bolstering her own self-esteem by feeling more of a woman than Kim can ever be. Kim's job as a writer of poetry for greeting cards is a safe way of expressing emotion vicariously. BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) and Olivier Award winner Miriam Margolyes (ROMEO & JULIET) plays Kim's boss, Pamela; Charlotte Coleman (FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL) is Kim's conniving colleague, Alison, ready to step over Kim's head and into her job.

Richard Spence's original idea for a film about transsexualism has evolved to embrace wider issues surrounding gender and sexual identity. "I became interested in what happens after the operation, when the transsexual says, 'Okay, I'm a woman now. How much of a woman do I feel? How much of a woman can I allow myself to be? How much of a woman will other people allow me to be?'"

Producer Chapman insists, "We want you to be disturbed by the story but also root for the people involved in it. Transsexualism is the most acute form of confusion that anybody can be involved in about gender. It's something which transfixes people now-mainly because many of the traditional notions of gender are in crisis."

The filmmakers also see DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS as a plea for unconventionality. "Strange though it is," Richard Spence says, "Prentice and Kim's relationship is successful because they like and respect one another. They get along and, at heart, they think the same, which seems to me to be the basis for most good relationships."