- Forty frames. - Okay, okay, all right.
Set? And... And... And... Action!
These times are the moments where history is made.
Whatever's good and bad in the human experience
is concentrated.
A lot of people in their 20s will watch this movie and say,
"This has to be a dramatization."
And what's frightening or scary or eye-opening
is that it's a true story.
The Normal Heart is really about the first people willing to stand up
and speak out about AIDS when it was first hitting the scene.
We need your help badly, Mr. Mayor!
We're dying!
The Normal Heart's original incarnation was as a stage play,
which Larry Kramer wrote.
This, in a sense, is very much Larry's life.
Before I even met him, Larry Kramer was my hero.
Larry's writing and Ryan's direction
is the balance of keeping a story entertaining and fun to watch,
but without taking anything away from the gravity.
Writers are given one great story to tell.
I'm telling my story about a bunch of guys
who all lived in this neighborhood
who were dying and fighting to stay alive.
This is a national emergency. This is an epidemic. It's a plague!
Mark Ruffalo playing me is embarrassing.
He's so cute.
There was an article in the New York Times, all these gay guys were getting sick.
It was just very scary.
And it hit the kids I went to Fire Island with, the kids that were in the village here,
so it was pretty hard to ignore it.
It is a real-life horror story.
There's a mysterious killer on the loose.
People are dying, and we don't know why.
B-mark.
They just keep getting bigger.
As faced with a moral decision of, do I stand by and just remain status quo,
or do I get involved?
So where's this big mouth I hear you've got?
Is big mouth a symptom?
No. It's a cure.
I play a doctor who had a lot of patients in the early days of this epidemic.
How are we doing, soldier?
She was the first one to start to put together the idea of how it was transmitted.
I am taking care of more victims of this disease than anyone in the world.
So, I called a meeting in this apartment.
You are all going to infect each other.
People asked questions, and nobody believed her.
Half of all my patients die.
But there were a few of us who were frightened enough.
We have to do something.
No one else will.
We met every week, and I said, "We have to have a name,"
and we gave it "Gay Men's Health Crisis."
Can you give to cancer in our community?
Larry does a really beautiful job of showing all points of view
of the gay community at that time.
Some people didn't want to be told that it was sexually transmitted
because they had just found their liberation, this great empowerment.
Guys will become frightened of sex,
they will lose our self-respect that we fought very, very hard for.
We will be scapegoated worse than ever.
The world will think we're carriers
and the moral majority will have even more of a field day.
Welcome to gay politics.
The gay world did not want to know about this illness.
That's where I got the reputation for being such a screamer,
because that's the only way you could get anyone to pay any attention.
You know, "You dumb assholes, it's a plague!"
Excuse my French, but...
There's a new disease.
You must know about it.
Sometimes, the bureaucratic wheels,
or the wheels of justice, just are moving too slow.
This is Americal
And this is one of those times.
They turned us away from four emergency rooms.
One of the saddest things about doing this film
is how cruel the government was to these people.
Then you come to the conclusion that it's happening
because it's happening to people nobody cares about.
I am trying to understand why nobody gives a shit that we're dying!
Aggressive, obnoxious, pain in the ass... I'm all those things.
You're accusing the government of the United States
of a conspiracy to murder all gay men?
Yes.
I was saying that this was happening because people in power
didn't want to deal with anything that was gay.
Reagan wouldn't deal with it.
We knew Ed Koch was gay, our mayor.
And I said so, and that freaked some of our members out.
It is totally and politically incorrect to call someone gay
who does not self-identify as being gay.
I know it's been that way forever, but something different is going on here now.
We're dying.
Why am I only hearing from this loud mouth?
That's an excellent question.
And then, part of the story is about his fight with the Bruce Niles character,
who was the head of the organization, who was in the closet.
Have you completely forgotten how to fight?
Don't tell me how to fight. I just fight differently than you do.
I haven't seen your way yet.
We both wanna end up at B,
which is an answer.
We just have completely different ways of going about it.
When you're the head of that kind of an organization and you are in the closet,
and you can't say what you do,
you're not helping.
There was really a need
for somebody to not let polite niceties get in the way
of slapping some people silly, in the face, and waking them up.
Anger is really the only way you get anything done.
It is very tricky.
Tricky, shit. There are a million gay people in New York, a million and one counting you!
Activism doesn't work unless you're both afraid and angry.
For the first years, that didn't exist.
Ned and Emma are kindred spirits.
Very stubborn and tenacious,
just rail against any kind of injustice.
It is only a question of time. We could all be dead
before you do anything. You want my data?
You want my ideas? You want my pages? Take ‘em! Just do something with them!
So far ahead of her time, in being willing to treat these people
who were dying of something that was very mysterious.
No one knew how it was being transmitted.
She was crippled from childhood polio.
She was the only doctor in New York, for a long time,
who would see us.
She fought, and she fought,
and she would call me up at night and say, "And what have you done today?"
That kind of thing.
She was wonderful, and I loved her.
You must be careful. I'm going to do my damnedest. So must you.
Have I given it to Ned?
I don't know.
And...
And music, please.
More than anything, this movie is about love.
Love and resilience.
Haven't you ever had to fight for somebody you love?
Two people who really are grateful, and can see how important it is to them,
and how fleeting it is, and how precious itis, and how frail it is.
It turns out to be a really beautiful love story.
There's a character, a big part in the play, of my brother.
Mildly homophobic brother,
aman who isn't a homophobe in a kind of aggressive or deliberate way,
but, at the time, was perfectly acceptable.
I am the same as you. Just say it. Say it.
No.
And Ben has never met Felix.
Felix goes to the law office, and says...
Your brother and I are lovers.
I'm dying and I need to make a will.
There's never a time when that scene doesn't break me up somehow.
Felix is, in effect, the catalyst
that brings the two brothers together.
The amazing Larry Kramer.
He's one of the really important activists of my generation.
An incredibly interesting, complex character.
What he has done with his life is an extraordinary feat,
and is someone who's really used his time here very wisely.
It's a mark of the man's bravery, really,
to put all of this on the page for public consumption.
The goal is to find a cure, the goal is to get a president to pay attention,
the goal is to get a mayor to pay attention,
the goal is to get the gay world to pay attention.
None of these goals has been reached, by the way.
Please, please take care of all the people
who are still getting sick and still dying.
Please, please fight for a cure.
Please, please accept gay people. Please allow us to get married.
We're just the same as you.
Everything I write and say has to do with that.