Outfest Spotlight: A chat with the director of "Were the World Mine"

Festival-goers who are planning to attend the Awards Night screening of "Were the World Mine" on Sunday are in for a real treat. It's a musical fantasy that is beautifully done.

Directed and co-written by Tom Gustafson, it's set at an all-boys high school that is putting on a production of that Shakespearean classic. Handsome and imaginative Timothy (Tanner Cohen) is the class outsider who mentally escapes his surroundings by imagining a row of dodgeball-wielding jocks as a corps de ballet.

Then he gets cast as Puck opposite his secret crush, dreamy jock Jonathon (Nathaniel David Becker) and things get complicated and absolutely turned upside down. With the help of a certain flower, Timothy gains the power to make the unlikeliest of people besotted with each other.- incliuding Jonathon with him! Bascially, he goes about making his entire closed-minded town gay!

Gustafson adapted the film from his acclaimed short film "Fairies." I talked to him last week just as he was about to leave for the airport. His film opened the Tokyo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival last Friday.

"The festival circuit is pretty great, traveling and getting the work out there and encouraging people to spread the world," he added. "The only way these movies have a life is if people keep talking about them. It's been amazing. We premiered at the Florida Film Festival, a non-gay festival. It was great to kick-off at that type of festival to break down the barriers and we won the audience award. We played Nashville and won a music award, then Italy. We just played the Castro in San Francisco. It's been a really great, exciting ride. Mainstream and gay and lesbian audiences have reacted to it like a live theatrical event."

There is am lot of making out in the movie and I can tell you, the cast really goes for it! Tom told me why: "It was really important to me to cast gay actors in gay roles but some are, some aren't publicly out. Obviously, I wouldn't have cast them if they weren't comfortable with the script. We made it clear: everyone's got to get over any sort of homophobic thing you have. You are in a musical with gay characters so get so over it."

The film was shot in Chicago in 24 days on a budget that was "way under" $1 million.
"We are a small film with a big heart. It can be overwhelming (making a movie) but the thing I stress to other first-time filmmakers is to surround yourself with others doing it for the first time because they want to prove themselves too and make something magical."

Often times, LGBT films are relegated to a brief arthouse run - if they are lucky - then discovered on DVD. Tom is hoping for major big-screen exposure.

"We have some offers, we hope to close out some distribution deals soon," he said. "We really want this to have a theatrical run where people can experience it in a communal setting. Obviously we will keep playing festivals and are talking about doing a school tour. We want youths to be able to see it."

Here is a sneak peek of the movie:

For more information about Outfest, the 26th Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival - which runs July 9-21 - go to Outfest.org