Are you already
feeling the pressure to follow up Prodigal Sons with a second film?
Absolutely.

I’m working on a couple other character-based documentaries, but who
knows what will come to fruition first, so stay tuned. You know the
Caster Semenya story — the South African runner who had the gender
testing? About five years ago, I wrote a fictional screenplay that was
precisely about that: It’s about this Olympic athlete who takes a drug
test, finds out about her chromosomes, which makes her wonder about her
gender as a result. She’s not sure what sex she is, so it deals with the
implications that has on her relationship and her ability to get
married on a state-by-state basis. So it’s kind of this road trip romp
through different Midwestern states where her gender switches with each
state line she crosses. It’s interesting in terms of biography because
that was my first step to talk openly and publicly about the issue.

Because

you were born a biological man, could you legally marry Claire, your
biologically female partner of more than 10 years?
It’s confusing
and complicated, and it depends on the state. For a second I thought it
would be kind of funny for us to do what I was talking about in that
screenplay — go to Texas to try to get married, then go to Arizona and
try to get married ... There’s a lot more gray area in gender than many of
us recognize, and when you try to polarize gender, it becomes really
unhealthy. Any time we can blur those lines, there are valuable lessons
to be learned.

Are cameras still rolling on any new milestones
like film festival premieres, your TV appearances, or your family’s
reaction to seeing the finished film? That could make for an interesting
Prodigal Sons sequel.

Our cameras aren’t, but everybody else’s
cameras seem to be. I’m tired of being in front of the camera. You can
see in the old Super 8 films used in our film — the ones that I shot,
directed, and wrote when we were kids — that I’ve always been more
comfortable behind the lens.