Maybe it's the graying blond hair and crinkly blue eyes, the preppy cardigan and belted blue jeans, or the overall air of decency. But at first glance, Mitchell Lichtenstein doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would harbor a decades-long fascination with fanged female genitalia.
Of course, looks can be deceiving.
Best known for his roles as the yuppie lover of a Taiwanese American man in Ang Lee's "The Wedding Banquet" and as a gay soldier in Robert Altman's "Streamers," Lichtenstein, the 51-year-old actor turned writer and director, makes his feature directorial debut with "Teeth," a coming-of-age tale about a high school virgin who discovers that she has a quite literal case of the mythological vagina dentata.
That is, a vagina with teeth.
"I think it's more of a fear for straight men. I mean, I can't imagine that the myth was created by women -- and gay people, I doubt that we can take credit," Lichtenstein says over breakfast at Restaurant Florent in Manhattan. "I'm really looking at it from an outsider's perspective."
When "Teeth" premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival -- the movie opened this weekend in limited release -- the film's tricky hybrid of high and low culture elicited comparisons to the work of the filmmaker's father, the legendary Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, a fact that is not lost on Mitchell. Though he and his older brother, David, spent most of their childhood in Princeton, N.J., with their mother, Isabel, an interior designer, the boys used to visit their father in his studio in Southampton, N.Y.
From a young age, Mitchell dabbled in drawing and painting, as well as writing. "I wouldn't say that I never felt like I was in his shadow, because it's inevitable," he says, "but I never felt that it kept me down in any way."
Lichtenstein is no stranger to the subversive. Early on in his career as an actor, he figured out that he has a tendency to come across as "sweet and good-natured" and savored the chance to play against type. Indeed, the resume of the Yale School of Drama master's grad reads more like a rap sheet, with roles including a pampered drug addict on TV's "Miami Vice," a hustler with a connection to a murdered senator on "Law &Order" and a psychotic screenwriter with a revenge plan in "Ratchet." "I always found it hard to play someone without a secret," he says.
Off screen, his dirtiest little secret might be that he doesn't have many. "I just wish I had something interesting to say about myself," Lichtenstein says, looking genuinely concerned.
