There are very few actors who were willing to go there, and not feel panicky, I thought I would cast people before I had a story so they could bring their own narratives.' 'If you saw someone having sex you could tell a lot about them. The filmmaker - who also wrote, directed and starred in 2001's Hedwig and the Angry Inch - continued: 'Sex is as complex a language as music is as it can be connected to emotion and anatomy and comedy and philosophy and I felt not many films were using sex as I wanted to. Other films bring a more negative layer.' Speaking to Attitude in 2018 about Shortbus's arresting exploration of sex, director John Cameron Mitchell said: 'It started out with a more kind of artistic premise which is how can I use sex in a narrative way that respected the complexity of sex, porn looks at one sort of thin layer of it. Shortbus was released to critical acclaim upon its initial release in May 2006 and predictably sparked plenty of controversy for its explicit nature: In 2007, the film was banned in South Korea, with the film's South Korean distributor eventually winning a Supreme Court case to lift the ban in 2009.
