'Boys Don't Cry' Director Turns Her Lens on What It Means to Be a Soldier

She did, many agree. Roger Ebert called it "a worthy companion to those other masterpieces of death on the prairie, 'Badlands' and 'In Cold Blood.' " And yet getting a second project on screen has been a struggle.

"Look, it's hard making movies. It's hard even for the people that it's easy for," Vachon says. "Finding that combination of the story that you want to tell, and having it align with the elements just right -- so you can actually get it done -- it's crazy."

A little crazier for Peirce. "Boys" brought her to the attention not just of Hollywood, but the Academy (co-star Chloe Sevigny was also nominated, as Best Supporting Actress).

"It was the greatest experience of my life," Peirce says. "It was my gender, my sexuality, my friends. My friends were screaming, 'You said the words 'lesbian' and 'transsexual' on the red carpet!! Oh my God!' -- we had the big cellphones back then, and they were like, 'Whoooooaaaa, you said that to Joan Rivers!! Whooaaaa!!' "

Hollywood started throwing money at Peirce. But she had her eye on one story: The 1922 shooting death of film director William Desmond Taylor, which, coinciding as it did with the equally sensationalized Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle sex-murder case, led to a crackdown on Hollywood immorality.

"King Vidor tried to make a movie about it," Peirce says, referring to the late, great director. "So did [screenwriter] Robert Towne. It's Hollywood's greatest unsolved murder mystery, and the whole thing was covered up. Completely covered up, white-glove coverup, by the government and by Hollywood, to save Hollywood and America's innocence. That's my take."

So Peirce says she solved the murder ("We did! I'm a big researcher"), wrote a script and got her film cast with Annette Bening, Hugh Jackman, Ben Kingsley and Evan Rachel Wood.

"Then the studio [DreamWorks] runs the numbers," she says. "They love it, but they say, 'We've run the numbers and we'd love to see the $30 million version, but we only want to pay for the $20 million version. And we don't want to see the movie we want to pay for."

"Being a director for me is about being a realist, so it's like, 'Okay, that's how the ball rolls,' but I'd lost a lot of time. That was the end of '03, which would not have been terribly long, but literally the next week I said, 'I can be massively depressed, but screw it: I'm gonna do it differently.' " So she took off with her then-intern Reid Carolin. ("He had just graduated Harvard and came in saying, 'I'll do anything for you, I'll go anywhere, I want to make movies with you.' ") "He was from a military family, I was from a military family, so we picked up our cameras, I paid for everything, and we flew to Paris, Illinois."

Peirce, whose grandfather fought in World War II and whose 19-year-old brother served in Iraq, had an automatic connection with the soldiers and the families of the 1,000 soldiers at the homecoming in Paris. Less so with the "industry."

"As the project was developing, I would have conversations with people from the various studios and tell them about the film," she recalls. "They'd say, 'That's amazing! That's amazing! Do you want us to develop it with you?' "

I said, " 'No.' Not to put down executives, but I don't want an executive looking over my shoulder saying, 'Is that interesting? Is that necessary? Do both of you need a plane ticket?' I was like, 'I can spend $800 and do what it would cost $10,000 to do in the studio system, because I'm gonna just do it.' "

Ryan Philippe says Peirce's personal involvement -- the interviews she'd done, the research, the fact that her brother was there -- was essential to the success of the filming.

"Knowing it came from such a personal place for her, and having seen the research she did, and that she was going to these homecomings, and watching hours upon hours of soldier videos, all that passion, that was important to me," he said.

He found it strange, however, when he realized she was the first female director he'd ever worked with.

"That is shocking," Phillippe says, "because I've made about 30 films, and it's a strange commentary on this business. We need more female writers and more voices, and that's one thing I've been encouraging Kim about -- don't wait another nine years to make a film. People need to have that kind of inspiration she can provide."

On the other hand, he says, gender had very little relevance in regards to making the film. "She's tougher than a lot of the men I've worked with," he says. "Tougher than Eastwood or Altman."