‘Chasing Chasing Amy’ Shows How Much One Movie Can Shape a Life

Rodgers assembled a lively crew of talking heads, including many actors who appeared in Chasing Amy, as well as Smith. Turner recounts her connection with Mosier and criticizes the character Alyssa’s gestures when explaining fisting to Holden in the movie (“I don’t know if anyone in this room has ever fisted someone, but you don’t do it like that”). Critics and other filmmakers mull the importance of Chasing Amy, which was, for its time, an extremely daring and open look at queer life, albeit through a less-than-ideal straight gaze.

But most arresting is the contribution of Adams, whose solo interview comes in about an hour into the doc and quickly turns tense. “There’s a weird energy exchange here and I feel like, are you looking to me for something I can’t give you?” Adams wonders after Rodgers has established himself as a fan.

“I don’t know what it is you want from me. I don’t know why you wanna walk to me,” Adams continues.

But after some more talk, her defenses relax and she gives a stunningly candid interview. She maintains that the depiction of her relationship with Smith in his script “wasn’t my truth,” and recalls Smith berating her for her sexual history. “He made me feel bad for living the life I had lived and being who I had been, because he was insecure,” she says.

“It made me kind of question like, is my love for ‘Chasing Amy’ a hindrance at a certain point?”

“I don’t love looking back on that time, it brings back all those old feelings of not just boyfriends, but like casting directors and producers of just like, ‘You’re just a piece of meat. You’re a whore,’” says Adams. She discusses Harvey Weinstein, whose Miramax released Chasing Amy, as well as many of Smith’s other movies. Weinstein, Adams says, “treated me like shit,” though she says he didn’t want to have sex with her. That said, it was during the 1997 Sundance Film Festival that premiered Chasing Amy that Rose McGowan later alleged Weinstein raped her—yet another reason why hindsight is anything but rose-colored for Adams. (Smith also discusses working with Weinstein at some length in the doc, saying, “I can’t undo the fact that my career is tied up with him.”)

“I just didn’t have another bullshit Chasing Amy interview in me,” Adams tells Rodgers at the end of their talk. Rodgers said that as Adams went through her revelations, they didn’t feel like a scoop. “I wasn’t really thinking about the story or even like the movie or how it would be edited at that point,” he said. The interview, though, proved pivotal. “It made me kind of question like, is my love for Chasing Amy a hindrance at a certain point?” he said, adding, “I was really thinking of it through a queer lens, certainly, but not through the lens of people who worked on the movie and were intimately involved in it.”

Chasing Amy gave Rodgers language that set him on his journey to becoming himself, but he couldn’t have predicted just how much it would align with his life. As he points out to his wife toward the end of the movie: “Let’s talk about the fact that you still call yourself a lesbian, despite being married to a man—very Alyssa of you.”

“I’m thankful that this idea of restrictive labels have not held our relationship back,” said Rodgers in his interview, while acknowledging, “If I had written this as a screenplay, I would have been told to go back to the drawing board because it was too unrealistic.”

Rodgers’ documentation of his transitioning is “intentional” and subtle—it’s acknowledged verbally and visually but there is not a ton of time spent on it. He said he sought to avoid medicalizing his experience. “We don’t need obligatory shots of me looking unhappy in the mirror. We don’t need the shots of me injecting hormones or anything like that,” he explained. He said that coming out as trans has made his life “immeasurably better.”

“Since getting to be myself fully, I feel way more confident in who I am,” he said. “My entire world has expanded. I found community with other trans people. It’s just allowed me to be more open as myself and to enjoy my life more. I’m not nearly as self-conscious as I was, and I think it has made me a better filmmaker, because if I can connect more with myself and know who I am and develop my point of view, it makes everything else better.”

I wondered if, given the wide hostility directed at trans people in the U.S. and abroad, legislatively and interpersonally, Rodgers sees his work documenting his transition as political.

“I think trans people have become the political football, so to speak—not by our own choice,” he replied. “As you can see in this movie, I’m just a guy who wants to make movies. So I think my existence is politicized, whether I like it or not. I recognize that this film enters into a culture that has its own feelings. But I just wanted to show my truth in a way that other trans people could see themselves in potentially.”