14 Weird Questions With Louise Weard, Part 3 of 7

The filmmaker speaks to The Needle about trans culture and trans cinema.

By Jane Migliara Brigham

One of the latest, (and as I have argued, one of the greatest) recent pieces of trans cinema is Louise Weard’s Castration Movie Anthology II. For The Needle’s culture coverage, I spoke to Weard at length about the film, what got her into film making, and other things.

Weard's director statement for the film opens with this paragraph.

“I sit with my co-producer co-star Dakota Blais with my Sony TRV330 pointed at my 720i Sony TV’s screen. 

We are in the midst of filming the backing track to a scene that complements our characters’ prior moment together in the RV for Chapter 3 of Castration Movie.

On the TV, Trump signs executive orders one after the other for hours on end. I hurriedly ask Dakota to toss me another Hi8 tape. 

A few minutes later, as co-producer co-star Aoife Josie Clements enters the apartment, we yell Shush! as we hear the words “Defending Women from Gender Ideology…” and I zoom the camera in on the pen. 

Trump lets out a deflating “Oooo” and then everyone on TV is ushered out of the room. No fanfare or comment for the biggest rollback of transgender rights in the USA to date. 

We watch this unfold knowing that our country will be soon to follow.

I wanted to ensure I had that moment, in its stark lived entirety, captured on camera to place exactly where we begin with the second half of Castration Movie as the narrative jumps forward a year later from the events of Part 1.”

To understand more surrounding the woman behind the film, this article is Part 3 (of 7) in The Needle’s series of articles called “14 Weird Questions with Louise Weard.”

In the style of her work, I have done the minimum amount of editing needed to immerse the reader in the conversation.

Question 5

Jane: You say that you're not specifically making a trans movie. But you yourself say that a lot of the main characters are based on playing the worst archetypes of trans people.

Louise: I think it definitely is a trans movie. I think I just push back against the idea of the canonization of what a trans genre would be or a trans film movement would be. I think that it's all too new in terms of the focus on trans filmmakers versus a history of erasure and the lack of canonization of trans filmmakers. So it's hard to look at it within the scope of trans cinema and then say, is this a trans movie? So I think it's more just a semantic designation. Obviously the movie's about trans people. I wrote it to comment on the screen depictions of trans people. But I think that I would be hard pressed to say Castration Movie and the Danish Girl are the same type of movie. 

Jane: Yeah. They both have trans main characters and that's where the similarity ends.