Writer-director Chris Mason Johnson was a young teen dancer in 1985. “I was just barely sexual,” he says, “and there was this brief window of maximum ignorance and paranoia about AIDS, just before the first HIV test arrived. I’ve never seen that period represented in any AIDS film.
They’ve mostly been death-bed movies, which is important and emotionally immediate. But I felt like enough time had passed that I could tell this different story about hope and survival.”
Johnson’s film Test centres on a group of gay dancers working up the courage to take their first AIDS test, a moment that forces them to face their mortality as well as the possibility of being outed. “A lot of AIDS films leave out the eroticism,” he says, “since people have a hard time thinking about sex and disease at the same time. So there’s chaste people dying in hospitals. But I wanted sexual young dancers.”
And casting them was tricky. “You can’t fake this kind of dancing,” Johnson says. “I interviewed local dancers where I was shooting in San Francisco. We found Scott Marlowe, who just had an instinct for acting, then we workshopped for six months, which helped him be natural with the material. But the second lead, Matthew Risch, is an actor who has done musical theatre so was able to fit in with the dancers.”
Johnson was also determined to avoid movie cliches, so he focussed on the characters’ internal journey. “Where the climactic dance would be, I put the sex scene,” he says. “Because that’s their big dance number, so to speak!”
This scene is a huge catharsis in a story about people who are afraid to talk about Aids, and who only really express themselves through dance. “Scott and Matthew did a great job,” Johnson says. “They had great chemistry together, and it just feels like real sex. Not necessarily the best sex, because it’s awkward and humorous. But very real. We shot it with the minimal crew so they would feel safe. And we did use cock-socks, although it was difficult keeping them on!”
Johnson believes that this story is of its time, and there are bigger troublesome issues today. “If I was going to update this story,” he says, “I would deal with young gay men being on drugs and having bareback sex.”
• Test is available now on Peccadillo BluRay, DVD and VOD
