I was watching your Dior commercial earlier today and I was struck by how incredibly tender everything you do is, even in the middle of the most outrageous musical number in ‘Hedwig’ or sex orgy in ‘Shortbus,’ it’s so tender, and I think ‘Rabbit Hole’ really reflects that.

Most of the questions I’ve been getting are, why would you do this? Was this hard? It’s such a departure. It doesn’t feel like a departure to me. It feels like another story of characters who are trapped in their emotional prisons who are desperately trying to get out, and Hedwig shares that with Nicole’s character. I mean, they’re freaks in their own world. Becca is in a more — well, it’s no more normal than Hedwig is [in]. You know, Hedwig is on a tour of Bennigan’s, basically, and Nicole is ensconced in suburbia and clearly didn’t go through the same experiences as Hedwig, but she is marked by the tragedy. Hedwig’s tragedy is a more physical one, perhaps more unusual, but Nicole is nonetheless marked. She’s alone; none of the usual sources of comfort work for her — religion, therapy, family — and the strange, unique event, the story that really attracted me is that the only person she can get comfort from is the kid who killed her son, which is just beautiful, unexpected, and tender.

- Read the full interview with John Cameron Mitchell at Moviefone.com