In what is easily the most daring and rewarding film performance of the year, Emmy Award-winning actress Felicity Huffman portrays Bree, a pre-operative male-to-female transsexual in Duncan Tucker’s feature-length motion picture debut, Transamerica. The title has more than one meaning, referring first to Bree’s transition from one gender to another. It also makes reference to crossing America, a journey which Bree undertakes: beginning in California, when she learns that Toby (Kevin Zegers), a teenage son she never knew she fathered, is in trouble with the law in New York. On the road trip back to California, to where Bree is anxious to return for the fulfillment of her gender reassignment surgery, she and Toby get to know each other, and the audience is that much better for having the opportunity to ride along with them. I spoke with Tucker while he was in Chicago meeting the press.

Gay & Lesbian Times: What is the genesis of your interest in the subject of the transgender community?

Duncan Tucker: First of all, I want to say the subject of this movie is not transsexuality. [If] this movie is subversive at all, it’s that the main character is a transsexual woman, but it’s a movie about family, and connection; the universal feeling of trying to wonder why we sometimes feel different and alone, and how we can connect with one another. It’s a celebration of a life, and of life. It’s about authenticity. The main character happens to be a transsexual woman. But then, once I made the decision that that was who she was going to be, I tried to be as honest – as clearly, incisively honest as I could be; did a lot of research. The genesis: I was thinking about the themes I just described, and then a woman I knew in Los Angeles told me that she was transgendered and I had no idea; I had no clue. And a light bulb went off and I thought wow, these people really are a community whose stories haven’t been told. And talk about feeling different and alone. I mean, it’s just like the way we all felt in high school to a factor of a thousand.

GLT: In the process of putting the film together, you cast a female actor, Felicity Huffman, in the role of Bree, as opposed to a male actor. What was involved in that decision?

DT: As I just said, the woman I first met was very feminine-looking, very voluptuous, curvaceous, had a female-sounding voice. Then I went over the next months [and] interviewed a lot of women in the trans community at different stages of their journey, and some didn’t pass so well. But a surprising amount of women I met, I would arrange to meet them in a café and it was difficult to find these women. They were very self-protective, with good reason. I would go to the café and look at the women around and had no idea which was the trans woman. I just learned that trans women do not necessarily look like guys in dresses, which is how they’re typically portrayed by Hollywood. The ones we recognize are often the ones in the beginning of their journeys. I wanted to honor where the character was going and not anchor her in what she left behind.

GLT: Right, because it is very much transitional; these women are on a journey, in transition.

DT: And Felicity in that scene at the party in Dallas with the other trans women, she was not the most feminine-looking woman in the room [laughs]. Some of the real trans women were a lot more petite and girly than she.

GLT: I’m glad you mentioned that scene, because Calpernia Addams is in that scene. How did you come to work with here?

DT: Calpernia and her business partner, Andrea James, run a company called Deep Stealth to help consult with trans people, trans women, [on] make-up, voice, carriage. Somehow I found them and was in touch with them, and then I put them in touch with Felicity and she consulted with them quite intensively in preparing for the role. And then I invited them both to be in the movie. Andrea gives the voice instruction at the very beginning, and Calpernia does a cameo for us at the Dallas party playing her fiddle. How many times do you get to see a room full of trans-suburban women singing “Home on the Range”? [Laughs.]

GLT: It’s a once-in-a-lifetime moment. So Felicity did the basic research for the role?

DT: Very much so. She consulted with Calpernia and Andrea. She went to a couple of trans conventions. She worked intensively with a woman who teaches men who are transitioning how to speak and how to walk. Men tend to sprawl on a couch, and Felicity made the decision that Bree was going to draw all of her limbs in very tightly. And the physical transformation that she pulled off in this was so brilliant. Sometimes we would be shooting, and even in the middle of a scene that maybe was a tough scene, I’d call cut, and then I would start laughing hysterically because there was such an amazing humor, even when she didn’t know it. Also, I was just delighted with how amazing her performance was.

GLT: Transamerica is probably her first lead role in a feature film. As you said, it’s an Oscar-caliber performance. What is it about her that made her the right actress for that role?

DT: They say that the most important thing a director does is cast well. This is like complimenting myself, because I feel like I cast well throughout. I’m really in love with all my actors in this. I think most of my first choices wanted to do the material, and the producers said, “Duncan, on our budget, anybody you’ve heard of we can’t afford.” But they were, thank God, proved wrong.

GLT: With good timing, too; with this coming out, and then her winning the Emmy.

DT: When I cast her, and she said yes, the first thing that we learned is she had to do some television pilot [for “Desperate Housewives”], and we had to hurry up and do pre-production because we were going to lose her to this pesky pilot, which I was really ticked off about. Because we had to go into hyper drive, I didn’t sleep for like four months, and little did I know.

GLT: That’s amazing. The character of Toby, Bree’s son, is gay, works in the sex trade. He’s on the fringes of culture in the same way that Bree is. Can you say something about the fact that the two main characters are these people on the outside of society?

DT: The theme of any of us who ever felt like we were weird or different or something was wrong with us, I’ve had great compassion for anybody like that, because I’m like that. I wanted Bree and Toby to sort of be like yin and yang; opposites of each other. As policed and uptight about her body as she is, he has been a child-abused kid who, for 50 bucks, will take his clothes off and thinks nothing about it. So he’s her worst nightmare. He takes up space in a way that … she’s always cleaning up the car on his side. When I first met Kevin Zegers, who I ended up casting … I was meeting so many young men for this role, and I interviewed a lot of street hustlers who were a very tough and sad bunch of kids. Kevin walked in to the Chateau Marmont for a meeting in a T-shirt and jeans, and scruffy hair. I took one look at him and said, “No way, no way.” Because he was the most ridiculously gorgeous human being I’d ever seen in my life. You can’t believe how pretty he is. He was so smart and so vulnerable, and he auditioned for me. It was a fantastic audition, and I kept thinking, can I do this? I’m so glad I forgave his disability, the poor thing [laughs]. And he never had a chance to do anything this raw and real before, and he worked his butt off. I really worked hard with him, and he worked hard. He pared that performance down to the simple, bare essentials. He had to be very naked emotionally, as well as physically.

GLT: Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers is also a road movie, and it has a very similar concept of men who fathered children that they were completely unaware of. What is interesting to you about that subject?

DT: I never made a conscious decision that was like, wow, this is the subject that interests me. Sometimes when I feel lonely I dream of family and connection and how we all used to live in tribal communities with people we were all basically related to, and sleeping in a tangle of arms and legs. There’s this kind of need, hard-wired into us, to belong. What could be more poignant and dramatic and funny than somebody who’s the ultimate loner finding that they have the deepest connection possible with somebody they didn’t even know existed. When it starts out, they are like a couple of kids, and she’s not grown up emotionally, which is why her therapist makes her go on this journey; because she’s not ready yet. She’s very smart academically, but she never really learned how to relate to people. Her emotional intelligence is down there at zero level. They start off as a couple of kids, but she grows up and learns how to become a parent. She really is a different person at the end of the movie.

GLT: Have you started work on your next film?

DT: I am trying to find time. I am basically at a different [film] festival every three days. The way this movie is going to survive is through word of mouth and through people; it’s not like a blockbuster, star-studded movie. So it has to have a groundswell.