"Filmmakers don't always show female pleasure," Peirce says, "and they rarely celebrate it. But Brandon lived for Lana's pleasure, so it was important to me that the audience felt that. If you're going to show an orgasm, you should make it orgasmic. Hilary and Chloe had asked me to treat the sex scenes like fighting or dancing scenes. They said, 'Tell us exactly what to do, we don't want to improvise.' Then I asked Chloe, 'Shall we talk through the orgasm, too?' and she said, 'No, Kim, I think I know what you want.'" In fact, Sevigny's depiction of pleasure was so unfettered that it left the US censor threatening a prohibitive rating.
"I need another part like that," Sevigny says as we finally pull up outside the studio. "Something where I can shine." And it was a boost to be nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, even though she said at the time, "I don't even feel like it would be a good thing if I got it - it feels too early."
Sevigny has done fine work since Boys Don't Cry, in Lars von Trier's Dogville and Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda, but it's outrageous that she hasn't been offered another meaty part. Typically, she adds more to a film than it adds to her. It may be a problem that she and Korine drifted apart, though she looks aghast when I ask if she needs another Harmony. I point out that I mean artistically, rather than romantically: someone who knows her range and writes her bespoke parts. She likes the sound of that - "Like Hanna Schygulla and Fassbinder," she says dreamily. Sevigny and Korine split up before the latter cleaned up his act. Now she will say only that, "We're not in touch." A clean break? "More like a big messy one."
Earlier, when Sevigny was bemoaning Hollywood's lack of interest in her, I asked if it might be wise to spend a month in Los Angeles attending auditions, lobbying for parts. "One thinks one would," she giggled, self-deprecatingly. "No, you're right, I have to put in more effort. But whenever I make those plans, they just ... fall apart."
Maybe she doesn't want it badly enough. Or perhaps she realizes, like the rest of us, that Hollywood needs her, not the other way around. It just doesn't know it yet.
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