CraveOnline: Everyone kept talking about when Lindsay auditioned, they said she’s great, she’s perfect, we have to cast her regardless of whatever might happen in the media. It seems like less of the focus has been on James Deen. What was it about James that made you want to cast him, specifically?
Paul Schrader: It was Bret. I mean, even while Bret was writing the script he was talking about James, and saying that James Deen sort of epitomizes this character. He tweeted that out and James tweeted back to him. Then they met and Bret said, “Well, we’ll give you a screen test,” and of course I had to give him a screen test because Bret’s my partner. I never thought I would really cast him but the further we got down the road the more I started to see that Bret was really right, that James was perfect to embody this guy, and that it really wasn’t about porn except the buzz factor, that you could make a little media noise. But he didn’t need to be a porn star for the role.
The film has several sex scenes. Did that make it easier to shoot or was it so different from the way he normally shot his sex scenes that it was still learning something new?
The fourway was a very, very difficult night because the other two performers were friends of James and they were from the adult world. So you had three adult performers who thought this was a lark. “Hey, let’s do a sex scene in which nobody fucks anybody! What a laugh!” And you had Lindsay, who had never done one before [Laughs] and she is freaking out, as you can imagine!
Lily [Labeau] was the girl in there, and she kept walking around naked, and I said, “Lily, come on put on a robe.” And she said, “I was just trying to make Lindsay feel comfortable.” [Laughs] I said, “You’re not making her feel comfortable! You’re freaking her out!” So it was easy for the three of them.
Lindsay didn’t have problems with nudity. The only problem she had was with working with adult actors, because there’s such a cultural dissonance between… She’s still in many ways a sweet girl, and [she felt] threatened by people who do this professionally.
Tell me about the lighting in that fourway scene. What did you use to create that disco ball effect?
Yeah, those are just gobos. I think they are party gobos. I knew I needed something nice to shoot this because you have four naked people on a bed, and that looks pretty ugly, like four carcasses. So I was going down the street and I saw this light pattern on the sidewalk in New York from a little gobo ball. It was doing a pattern on the sidewalk, and I said, “Oh, that’s it. That’s how I’ll do it, I’ll do it that way.” It helped a lot because it also made the room very dark, so that made Lindsay more comfortable. One of the worst things about shooting nude scenes in the old way, before you had digital cameras, was that the room had to be so bright and then you would [process] it down.
Were you friends with Gus Van Sant before his cameo?
I didn’t know him, but the producer Braxton Pope was friends with him.
Did he have to screen test? How did that process go?
Well, you’re just asking your friends. I asked Willem Dafoe and I asked Michael McKean and I asked Stellan Skarsgård and they were all busy. So I turned to Braxton and I said, “Do you have any friends?” And Braxton said, “Maybe Gus would do it.”
Did talk to him about it beforehand, or did he just come on set and do his part?
Yeah, I knew him and I knew his approach to acting. So I sort of knew what I would get.
I asked James Deen about this, and he said it was more of a question for you and Bret. When you talked to Bret about casting him, did you look at any of his other work to see what kind of screen presence he had, or acting experience?
Well, yeah, I did but what appealed to Bret about James didn’t really appeal to me. What Bret liked is that James does play a fair amount of “boy next door,” but he also does some particularly nasty porn. He does rape fantasy porn, he does bondage fantasy porn, stuff that has no appeal to me whatsoever. But what Bret liked was that James could go both ways. He could be the sweet kid and he could be the creepy kid, and that’s why Bret was so focused on him.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
