“…the overwhelming majority of people today were trained in the process of making up their minds by advertisers. They also picked up the art of persuasion, not from classic texts of reason, but from advertising. As a result, many people fail to demonstrate genuine literacy in understanding and creating reasoned arguments, but are adept at producing advertising copy for their impressions. They have been taught both to process and to persuade using impressions.”

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iW: Will you talk a bit about how you came across the idea for “Paris Is Burning”? What was your initial inspiration? And as a follow up, in his review of “Paris,” Vincent Canby called you a “compassionate anthropologist.” How did you view your role as a documentarian?

JL: I would definitely not call myself an anthropolgist. I much preferred Terrence Rafferty’s New Yorker review, which says the film “is smart enough not to reduce [its] subjects to the sum of their possible meanings.” I was astounded at how profoundly this “marginalized” subculture commented on our society’s center. And thrilled with how articulate and funny the people I met were. In one of the outtakes that we put on the DVD, Pepper Labeija talks about war. I was asking her about military conflict in relation to the “military category” where masculine guys and transgender women dress up in military drag. She says “the military’s cute for the protection of the country, but we don’t always use it for that… we use it to intimidate.” I still feel what the people I met had to say, particulary the elders of the community, was not only relevant in the moment (the late ’80s) but was perceptive and timeless.

I started going to balls after I met some guys who were voguing one day in Washington Square Park. I was 22 and was taking a summer filmmaking class at NYU. My background was in painting and photography and English Lit. I studied photography at Yale with Tod Papageorge, who taught picture-making in the tradition of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand (his teacher), Diane Arbus, Brassai, etc. So naturally I wanted to hang out in cities and see what there was to see. That’s how I met the voguers in the park, and started going to drag balls.

At first it felt like a photography project. But then, the stories seemed more important, or equally as important. Also, I was trying to figure out how to be gay, and so going to balls was a particularly intense and heady atmosphere — along with AIDS activism — in which to come of age as a queer.

My documentary influences — at that time — ranged from Werner Herzog to Frederick Wiseman to Errol Morris to Ross McElwee to the Maysles and Martin Bell, but I was always thinking about my favorite dramas as well — films by Fellini, Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, John Waters, Kubrick, Peter Weir. I liked films where there was an implication that underneath it all lay some great mystery — hinted at in what’s visible, but never fully revealed.

I didn’t go to film school but was lucky in that older filmmakers were encouraging: I wrote Werner Herzog and sent him some photos, and when he came to New York he took me to dinner and encouraged me to make Paris: I went to see Martin Bell present “Streetwise,” introduced myself, and pretty soon he was introducing me to Jonathan Oppenheim, his associate editor, who became Paris’s editor; I told my uncle, Alan J. Pakula I wanted to direct. He warned me away. Kind soul, he was trying to save me a life of struggle and heartbreak! But when he saw I was serious (I interned on a Laurie Anderson film) he gave me a job in the art department of his film “Orphans.” So I learned by working for others, and by doing the work itself, and I also prepared for “Paris” by reading a lot: James Baldwin, Dick Hebdige, Esther Newton, Alex Haley (on Malcolm X), a whole list of writers who commented on the interface betwen black and white worlds, gay and straight worlds, on American ideals and histories, and on American delusions.

iW: OK, a few more “Paris” questions: What did you think of Madonna’s “Vogue” when it came out in May of 1990? Also, wow did the film change, if at all, in the months between its debut at Frameline and New Festival in June ‘90 and its Sundance ‘91 screening? And how did Miramax get involved?

JL: With “Vogue,” I thought, uh-oh, Madonna’s video is out before my film is done! But, in the end, that sequence of events turned out well for the film, because now many people had heard of “voguing,” and so the film could be described as a film about where voguing really came from.