Although Girlfight fizzled at the box office, that obviously didn't change the quality of the film, or Kusama's abilities as a filmmaker. And, besides, the movie had still made more money than, say, Todd Haynes' first film, Poison, or David O. Russell's debut, Spanking the Monkey. Kusama believed that she'd earned at least the right for her next film — a sci-fi script she'd written about a man who begins changing into a woman against his will — to be taken seriously. But, to put it mildly, it was not.



"It was pretty interesting to have agents and managers say, 'There is no way my client is going to play a character who is shedding his masculinity, and then have that role taken over by a woman. No fucking way,'" Kusama said. One manager of a major A-list star was "repulsed" by the script, especially a scene in which the man’s balls literally fall off on the bathroom floor. "It was kind of funny, because it's not that challenging," Kusama continued, her genial voice taking on an edge. "But in the same way [as with] Girlfight [when] people said, 'Can Laura Dern play this part instead?' — people said, 'You know, you would have a lot more success making this if this guy would turn into a dog.'"

Kusama understood that her artistic taste was not naturally mainstream. On the eve of Girlfight's theatrical release, she'd even told Bomb magazine, "I wanted to test myself with a traditional narrative story because, in many regards, that's not what interests me." Other filmmakers, though, with more unorthodox career breakouts — Darren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh, Richard Linklater — gained at least some financial traction for their follow-up efforts. It had been years, and Kusama was not only nowhere, it began to feel like the system was rigged against her. "I had moments of just being like, wow, I'm kind of getting killed here," she said with a deep sigh, shaking her hands in frustration. “Like, what is legitimate success if the environment you're in feels sometimes fundamentally hostile?”

By 2003, she could not help but ask herself, What if I were male? How much easier would this be? As a female filmmaker who'd already earned a fair amount of press and plaudits, Kusama kept walking into rooms and negotiating expectations for her to be at once brash and charming, independent and humble. But men? "You can essentially be autistic and be male [in filmmaking]," she said, throwing up her hands. "I am in some ways really attempting to really nurture my inner autistic self. But ultimately, my instinct is being an antisocial woman who maybe seems like she had a chip on her shoulder, or seems like she'd be really hard to work with, or maybe seems slightly crazy — that doesn't seem like a good thing. But I feel like there's a promise, this like whiff of excitement, around men who display those traits, as if there's a secret to all of it. Women don't get that free pass."