CraveOnline: Do you remember what specific scene it was, for example?
James Deen: I don’t.
I imagine it’s hard to keep track, after a while. When you do so many scenes, do they all blur together after a while?
No. I mean, it’s not so much that they all blur together, it’s just that it was a year ago. I mean, I do remember there was a big movie that… So every few years, there are certain companies, they’ll do movies all about one girl so there was like, this one scene that was a big scene in this movie for her. It was just a porno, nothing crazy but it was a special porno because it was all about her. So they booked me for it and that was one I couldn’t get out of because it was a very specific scene. They were like, “We need you and her and this other girl. It has to be just like this.” So, I called them up and I was like, “Hey guys. I know that you booked me over a month in advance and I know that it’s a special scene but I gotta do this,” and they’re like, “Dude, we can’t. We need you,” and they freaked out and tried to find other dates. They had a deadline. They had to get it done by the end of July. It was just the type of thing where like, I can’t get out of it. They booked it and I’m not gonna cancel on them and fuck them over because I work for them all the time. They’re friends. They had their schedules together, The Canyons didn’t. Sorry.
So, there’s that one, there’s a couple in San Francisco so there’s like, two days up there that I couldn’t get out of. Same sort of reason and then I think the other ones were just standard scenes or a standard movie. Where it was like, a feature where a role was written for me and they needed me in it, which I hated. I’m really not happy with that decision because it was difficult to change characters, halfway through. What I ended up doing, because The Canyons was kind of a priority, I kind of ended up playing this silly, goofy guy as Christian from The Canyons. It came out really weird but everyone on set understood. They were like, “Hey man, we get it. We appreciate you not canceling on us and stuff like that and making it work.”
What movie was that?
It was for Digital Playground. I think the kind of changed [the title] around. I think it might have been Watch Over Me or something like that. They changed it around and made it a little more like a crazy character so they changed the script.
See, now I want to watch it and see if it’s an unofficial tie-in. I want to see if it plays.
Yeah, I think it’s Watch Over Me, but they completely changed everything, because they were like, “We have you and we need to make this work,” and they made it work. Really, what it was, I felt so bad. I really didn’t like it but I cancelled a good amount of stuff. From July 20th until like, August 8th, I was booked pretty much every day on adult films and I had to move all sorts of stuff around, in order to get… They needed like, 10 days in there and so I had to rearrange a bunch of stuff to make it work. You know, I was happy to do it, I just felt bad. It was more difficult. I wouldn’t want to do that again, in an ideal world… This is the thing. It’s an independent film and as far as I understand, this is kind of how it works. In “cinema,” they’re working on low budgets, they’re working on paying people by the day, they’re doing all these like, weird things and so they weren’t able to say, “Hey, James. We’re shooting a movie from July until mid-August,” and then actually be able to shoot it from July to the beginning of August and just keep those extra days for inevitable problems. Because of that, they said, “Okay, we need you these specific days. These are the only days we’re gonna need you,” because they had to work within that realm. The inevitable happens and all this stuff and then it just got really chaotic.
In a perfect world, what I would have loved to happen, if I ever do another mainstream movie in the future, I’m going to specify, “Hey guys, give me the days and we’ll figure out how much money we’ll need so I can still pay my bills, stuff like that, so we can make this whole thing worthwhile.” Then if I just end up sitting on my ass on my days off, that’s going to be days I’ll study the script or I’ll show up to set and be like, a PA or something. I’ll do something.
The unions would have a problem with that.
In a perfect world, what would have happened is Bret [Easton Ellis] and I would have talked and it would have been like, “Okay, July 3rd is the beginning of rehearsal. August 8th is the wrap day. We might go into August 15th so how much money do you need for your acting skills and all that, compensation, blah-blah-blah?” From this day to this day, we would have talked about prices and come to terms. Then the entire time, it wouldn’t have mattered if they needed 15. I think I ended up doing 20-something days but they wouldn’t need me for that much time because they would have me and I would be at their disposal whenever they want. That would have been ideal but because they weren’t able to call up all five or ten actors, including extras, and just say, “Hey, how much money do you want to give us your entire month?” They had $200,000. They were kind of stuck. It was a weird experience for me. I now know in the future if, in the event I’m ever doing another big, mainstream movie I can tell them, “Hey, from this date to this date, I want to be all yours and give you all of my time and nothing else. I don’t want to get distracted by anything. I just want to be in the character and be in the moment and do this movie, but in order for that to happen, this is what I need,” and then they can… You know, lawyers get involved and they do all the work and I don’t deal with that stuff.
