Many things have been said of Sook-Yin Lee over the years, but the notion that she lacks sufficient courage has not been among them.

As an artist and writer, as the charismatic lead singer and songwriter of Vancouver proto-punk band Bob's Your Uncle, the former British Columbian has long been known for a balls-out attitude as well as a willingness to pull up stakes and make big changes, even when things are working well for her. Hence the shift, in the late 1990s, from rough-and-tumble West Coast scenemaker to well groomed, Toronto-based veejay on MuchMusic. Lee went right from that high-profile gig to a lower-key, more cerebral job hosting CBC Radio One's Definitely Not the Opera””a job that moved her to Winnipeg for a spell.

Through all these changes, she kept writing screenplays and taking small acting jobs””the biggest of which had her, rather uncomfortably, as a Holly Golightly–inspired ingénue, in The Art of Woo (which wasn't and didn't).

A couple of other developments put her on the path to starring in Shortbus, a film that has garnered rave reviews in the States and brought her big press there and in Canada. Back in the early '90s, Lee made a couple of films herself, including “Escapades of One Particular Mr. Noodle” . And at the beginning of the next decade, she landed a small part in John Cameron Mitchell's rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The association with Mitchell stuck and the cross-dressing cabaret creator vowed to find a place for her in something big.

He did. In the new film, Shortbus, which opened here recently, she downplays her iconic boldness to play Sofia, a seemingly gentle couples counsellor with some serious relationship problems of her own. Despite a vigorous””really vigorous, as we see in the movie's long, highly explicit opening sequence””sex life with her husband, Sofia has never had an orgasm. And thus launches a pursuit that centres the rest of the tale, which takes her repeatedly to the anything-goes nightclub of the title.

The movie itself, set in Manhattan but shot in Toronto (with the exception of one scene notable for its, um, climactic sequence in Central Park) was a kind of 3-D therapy for the multitasking Lee, clarifying her strengths and weaknesses as a performer.

“Frankly, I don't think I did any acting before this,”  confessed Lee, back in town for the film's local debut, at the just-wrapped Vancouver International Film Festival.

“It's just like making music,”  she said, with a hint of Annie Hall flippancy””heightened, no doubt, by the striped shirt and wildly checked necktie she wore to the hospitality suite of our fest's home hotel. “You know when you're being a phony and you know when you are locking into the moment. A lot of it is conviction, for sure. That's what got me through it plenty of times when I was in the band, because””let's face it””I was doing a lot more yelling than singing.

“There's a tremendous amount of craft involved, and I think I can only begin to claim the label of actor now. There's a lot to learn, but at the same time, your worst enemy as an artist, and even as a person, is overthinking things. You need form, so you don't just go in there and wank, and some sense of compositional structure. But you have to really inhabit the moment, and own it.” 

As musical as Mitchell may be, in his free-flowing bohemian way, he also provides what Lee calls an almost military environment in which things get done.

“I'm such a jock. I grew up doing sports, and I always needed a coach. Doing this movie, I could always feel John's presence, egging me on. He would just say, 'Smudge the lines' or 'Sharpen this up'. There was one scene, with Lindsay Beamish, who plays the dominatrix I hook up with, and John was very dissatisfied with what he had written. He said, 'We're breaking for lunch, and then reshooting this. If either of you say one word from this script, you're fired!' We just had to know how to get there, and we did.” 

Beyond the basic level of craft, making Shortbus meant more than the average amount of courage required to step before the cameras. Mitchell himself doesn't have a role in the movie. But Lee made sure he appears on-screen.

“A lot of us had to be brave, in terms not just of nudity but in the sexual intimacy of it. So one day I said to him, 'John, if we're doing this, you have to do something too.' There was another time when I was having a hard time taking my clothes off, so I asked everyone in the room to get naked too. They did, and it turned into Wreck Beach; I mean, it quickly dispelled any kind of discomfort.

“So I took it one step further one day and John said, 'You're right. I'm going to do something I've never done before.' Now, John had never been with a woman before, but if you look closely at one of the sex scenes, you'll see John Mitchell going down on a woman who has never been with a man. There were a lot of firsts in this movie. But in fact it wasn't the sex that proved the most difficult, but some of the emotion. You have to get pretty naked in that department, too, and I wasn't always ready for that.” 

In fact, Shortbus required daring, not to mention perspicacity, in the verbal department, as well. Mitchell developed a framework for the Shortbus story, allowing lots of space for musical performances within the cabaret setting, and he left the actual badinage to the actors””something that worked particularly well for veteran drag queen Justin Bond, who stands in for the director as the club's wisdom-dispensing mistress of ceremonies.

“Justin is a masterful improviser,”  Lee recalled with a giggle. “He was throwing in zingers there all the time. 'It's the '60s, but with less hope.' Those kinds of things. But all our characters were born out of improvisation. We basically took three years to develop our characters and their relationships with one another. John took on the monumental task of bookmarking the best of these inventions and transcribing them into a script.

“We just had to swim around in this unknown universe, throwing things back and forth to see what stuck. As a filmmaker myself, there were plenty of times when I thought 'What the fuck are you doing, John? There's no story here!' But miraculously, by the first day of shooting, we actually had a document in our hands.” 

Since completing the film, Lee was able to take more time off from the CBC to stay on the road with Shortbus.

“So many people in the movie are freakin' musicians. So wherever we went, Cannes or Toronto or wherever, we put on a big show afterwards. We show up somewhere and there are burlesque performers and trombone players and you think 'No, this is show business'. In New York, I was hanging out with John Zorn, and he was struck with the way John Mitchell created a community. That's what Zorn does, too: he brings people together to make interesting things they would never do on their own. In fact, what you see on-screen is just a small little sliver of what this community does and can do together.” 

After spending all this road time with her “ragtag bunch of people” , she happened to be the movie's sole representative here. Nonetheless, Vancouver was a kind of personal milestone.

“Are you kidding? Seeing it in my hometown, with all my old friends in the audience? I'm scared shitless.” 

Chalk that up, then, to another one of Lee's strengths: the courage to be afraid.