What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that is always very flattering.- Katherine Dunn
Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.
We're also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.
Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.
This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.
The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power.
The more potent, unasked question is how society at large reacts to eager, voluntary violence by females, and to the growing evidence that women can be just as aggressive as men.
The intense campaigns against domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, and inequity in the schools all too often depend on an image of women as weak and victimized.
Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.
Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless.
Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.
In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.
I think that it's really important to go away and come back.
I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.
I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object.
