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There are three women behind the late Brandon Teena, the doomed protagonist of the movie Boys Don't Cry. One is a Nebraska-born girl named Teena Brandon, who masqueraded as a boy and was raped and murdered in 1993 for her gender effrontery.
The other is Hilary Swank, a former Beverly Hills 90210 girly-girl who breathed cinematic life into Brandon with her Oscar-winning portrayal.
The third is novice screenwriter-director Kimberly Peirce, a graduate student at Columbia University when she first read about Brandon in a Village Voice article in April of 1994, the year after the murder.
"I felt this immediate bond, this immediate kinship with him," Peirce says, explaining that she grew up as a "tomboy" and never really grew out of that classification.
"It's probably just a typical girl thing, you're racing go-carts, you're striking conch shells open with baseball bats, you're swinging from trees and at some point, someone says it's time to act like a girl and put a dress on ... and you don't," she says.
"I didn't have any girl heroes. They were all men. The filmmakers I identified with were the neo-realists, the tough guys who just went out there with a camera and shot the world around them. Rossellini, Cassavettes, Pasolini, Scorsese -- it was like a whole tradition that was making sense to me."
Peirce had long been fascinated by stories of women passing throughout history passing as men. Indeed, she had been working on a screenplay about a Northern woman passing as a Confederate man during the Civil War when Brandon's story gripped her imagination.
"Here was a girl who shaped herself into her fantasy of herself and had the courage to go out and live the way she wanted to live, and that seemed very akin to making films and doing what I do," she says.
But turning the story into a screenplay was a challenge -- it could easily get lurid.
"It was a really sensational story and it was being reported that way," she says. "I found that few people were really getting inside of Brandon."
Finding the right actor to pay Brandon also proved formidable. After three years, one month shy of a start date, Peirce still hadn't found her Brandon after interviewing hundreds of actors, "butch lesbians" and "trans-genders."
"It wasn't like a normal role," Peirce says. "Most girls couldn't be boys, it isn't something you put on, it's something you take from the inside out."
Then a talent agent returned from a Los Angeles search with a videotape of an unrecognizable actress.
"(We) popped the tape in and there she is," Peirce remembers. "This ... this being just kind of comes across the screen with a cowboy hat on, has a gorgeous jaw, she had great big ears and those wonderful teeth, had the big brown eyes and the adam's apple. She had the confidence and the charisma but more than anything, had the smile.
"Most of the girls who came in to act like a boy had this," Peirce says, displaying a grim, set jaw. "They totally lost their personality, they were really serious and tough, and this person was opening and smiling.
"She smiled away through the audition, she blurred the gender line. We were just staring at her saying, 'Is she a boy? Is she a girl?' We had that weird exciting moment when you see an androgynous person, and that's what the character needed."
Swank modeled much of her performance on her own father and spent a month dressing, talking and living as a man before filming. She says the role was a golden opportunity -- her resume hasn't blossomed much beyond her work in the TV series Beverly Hills 90210 and the movie The Next Karate Kid.
"It's like a Catch-22. In order to get the job you really want, you have to prove yourself but in order to prove yourself, you have to get the job," she says. "So I was really lucky with this opportunity because they weren't going to hire someone who's already famous because everyone's going to be watching the movie saying, 'Oh there's so-and-so playing a boy.' You're not going to be able to get lost in it.
"I was really lucky to have the opportunity to dive deeper into my craft and challenge myself and do something that I really believe in," she says. "I think we all made a great piece of art and I'm really proud of it."