1.
What compelled you to make The
Girlfriend Experience?/I should learn how to answer this better, in general,
because it’s a question that everybody wants to know about every film. It
really is akin to asking, Why do you like this person? [Fucking DumbAsses.] Mostly
because I don’t have any rules about what I’ll make or what I won’t make, and I
try to be open to anything that will engage me. There must be some throughline
to these things, but fortunately, I don’t have to figure out what it is. In
this case, I think it was just an opportunity to explore some ideas about how
we define pleasure. That’s always interesting. And, the idea of money is really
interesting to me when you begin to think about how that started. Who was the
first person to figure out that you could ascribe a value to something like a
piece of zinc or gold or a diamond? Who was the first person to look at
something and decide, That has a value, and the way I’m going to ascribe value
to it is to get somebody to do something for me, and then I’m going to give
them that thing, and then they can use that thing to get somebody else to do
something for them, or to purchase something? That is a very["]weird["]
idea to me, and I’m fascinated that somebody came up with it. The whole thing
is veryodd to me. This was an opportunity to play with those ideas about value.
How do we ascribe value to certain things? And, in this case, why does kissing
require an incredible surcharge in the sexindustry? What is that about? That’s
the thing that GFE’s do that prostitutes don’t. You’re not allowed to kiss.
That’s a whole different thing. Here, you’re paying topdollar to be able to
["]make out["], and I think that’s interesting.
2.
Why did you choose to castSashaGrey
in this film?/I saw the article in LosAngelesMagazine about her, which was
published in the summerof2006. And, the way she talked about herself, her reasons
for getting into the adultindustry, and the way that she planned to navigate
the adultindustry didn’t seem typical to me. I’d never really heard anybody
like her talk about the business that way. She said, Here are my reasons for
going into it, and this is how I want to work within it. She had a plan, and
I’d never heard anybody in that business talk about having a plan. There are
similarities to escorts who work at this level. The ones that we interviewed
are similar, in the sense that they all had plans. They all either had another
business that they were working in at the same time, or they had real good jobs
that they were working at the same time. They all talked about howmuch money
they’d put away and what they planned to do with that money and howmuch longer
they planned to do this. Again, it’s not typical in the sexworkindustry for
somebody to take a macroview of the business and use it verydeliberately as a
means to get somewhere else. I guess, in my mind, those two things connected. And,
obviously, I also wanted someone who, in sexual situations, was going to feel
in control and in command and comfortable. I think that’s hard to fake. Honestly, that just comes from being in a lot
of situations in which you feel you’re in control. She’s obviously fearless. I
didn’t ask her to do anything that was veryextreme, but at least I knew, in the
back of my mind, that there probably wasn’t anything I could think of where she
would go, No, I’m not doing that.
3.
When did you first meetSasha?/I
read aboutSasha, and then contacted her and asked if she would come in to talk.
I wanted to talk to her to see if she would be up for this. The good news is
that she watches a lot of movies. In the first meeting, I said, I really want
you to watch this Goddardfilm, VivreSaVie1962 and she said, Oh, I love that
movie. It’s one of my favorite movies. So, I thought, Okay, that saves me a
couple of hours. She has a lot of different interests and she’s ambitious, and
she’s had a lot of unusual experiences, so it’s going to be interesting to see
what she ends up making with all of these influences and experiences. It could
be something unlike anything you’ve seen. She’s only twentyoneyearsold. She’ll
be making features before I was making features.
4.
Because of the nudity involved
in this movie, was it easier to have an adultperformer in this role, instead of
a mainstream actress?/Oh, yeah, no question.
5.
Did you deliberately decide not
to include a sexscene in the film?/I didn’t care which way it went. If you want
to compare the lives of a highendescort in the GFEstrata and the person who’s
working [on] the street, the first thing you have to do is eliminate what’s
common to them. Then, what is left are the things that are not common. My
attitude was that the sexact itself was irrelevant to me, because that’s something that’s common to theGFE,
the midlevelperson who works through an agency, and the person that’s working [on]
the street. The actual sexact, however long that takes, is identical in all
those situations. What’s not identical is everything else. So, I decided to
pull out the thing that’s common to all of them and just focus on what’s left,
and what’s left is this fantasy that you are in an actual relationship for
those twohours or for that night. What’s interesting about that is that it
pushes you back on yourself and makes you analyze, What does that mean,
exactly?
6.
Did you have any technical
advisors for this?/We interviewed a lot of escorts. When we first wrote the
outline, in the springof2006, we interviewed eightescorts. And then, just
before we started shooting, we did one more round of interviews, and the
character of the hobbyist is something that came up in that last round of
interviews. That wasn’t in the original outline. Even in the twoandahalfyears
since we’d worked on the story, that issue had become bigger for them. They
felt like these people that run these sites and run these reviews were becoming
a problem. They were being blackmailed, in a way, because if they didn’t
cooperate, then these guys would figure out a way to get their reviews to skew
in a certain direction. So, that turned out to be an interesting thing to use,
to puncture her ["]armor["] a little bit. And, the johns in the film
work in the industries that they work in within the world of the film. Most of
the men that use these kinds of escorts are in the financial business because
they have that kind of money to spare.
7.
Is twothousandUSD per hour an
accurate figure?/Yep.
8.
And, is that the ["]top["]?/Yeah.
It was last october. I don’t know what it is now.
9.
Has that been affected by the
recession?/My understanding is that the veryvery["]highend["] people,
in this area, haven’t been hurt, but the middle is getting slammed, so it has
moved down. The midlevelagencygirls are getting hit because the guys are ["]moving
down["] and going back to the street.
10. Why did you choose to work with nonactors, and what were some of the
challenges of that?/I’m really interested in it. I’ve been playing around with
it for awhile. All of the sixfilms that I’m supposed to do for 2929Entertainment, under this deal, are planned to be done in this way, where you write a story and detail the outline, and then cast
real people and use these controlled improvisations. It’s interesting because
they don’t act like [professional] actors. And, that’s not a ["]slam["]
on actors, but they’re not trying to do anything. They don’t have goals [in]
the way actors have goals. You need to give them a goal. You need to tell them
what the scene is about.
11. How much of this film was actually structured? And, was the nonlinear
narrative something that was preconceived?/The structure is veryverydetailed.
You not only had the scenes, but also what the scenes were about. It was ["]bullet
points["] to give the performers. I’d say to them,
At some point, you’ve got to cover these three subjects. I don’t care how you
do it, but you’ve gotta do it. It’s best, in this situation, to shoot
chronologically because it’s helpful for the actors, but I knew, when we were
shooting it, that I was going to play it out in a nonlinear way. I was veryconscious,
every time I was doing a scene, to cull abstract footage that I could use as
markers and keystones, that would be cycled and then ["]pay["] off
later. I would just make sure I’d gathered enough material to build a mosaic,
even though I didn’t tell anybody that.
12. What are you hoping that audiences will take from this type of film?/This
is not new. This is something that RobertBresson did, his entire career. It’s
very similar. He set up these stories and he cast nonprofessionals to great
effect. I’m trying to take that idea and push it even further, and use even
more complex stories and ask more of them, and push them and have them have do
things that are even more demanding. A lot of the performances in theBressonfilms
are verypassive, and they’re not verybig. You don’t see people
["]monologueing["] the way we have people doing it in this film. And
so, I guess I’m just trying to get at something that’s entertaining, but that
feels a little more lifelike. But, that really depends on the movie. We’re
trying to get thisLiberacemovie ["]off the ground["], and we’ve got
MichaelDouglas playingLiberace and MattDamon playing this young man that he gets
involved with. And, RichardLaGravenese wrote the script. That’s not a situation
where I’m going to be sitting around improvising. It’s already there. But, the
goal of that movie is very different because of what it’s about and the period
that it’s set in. It’s set in the entertainmentbusiness and it needs to have a
different ["]vibe["]. And so, a moreobvious construct is fine in that
world, but in the world of-Bubble or -GFE, I felt like it has to feel more ["]organic["]
[word favoured ofSoderbergh].
13. Is there something fundamentally different about the whoring that
Sasha’scharacter does ["]versus["] the whoring that everybody else in
the film does, or does Capitalism make whores of everyone?/It depends on how
you define whore and how you define Capitalism. Do I personally see any
difference between what she does and what I do for WarnerBros.? No, I don’t.
But, that gets to this issue of money, and the fact that the world cannot
function unless something like the idea of money exists. We cannot all live on
a farm and generate enough food to feed everyone we know. [Veryweak argument of
someone who never wants to destroyCapitalism.] It’s not physically possible.
So, this idea has to exist, and what we’re continually arguing about is, How it
should work. What it ultimately ["]comes down["] to is, What is fair?
And, a lot of that fairness has to do with what we attribute value to. What’s
fascinating aboutEconomics is how clean it is and how clear an expression it is
of any culture’s values. What’s great aboutEconomics is that it isn’t an
expression of the way we want things to be or the way we wish things to be or
the way we would choose for them to be. It is an expression of the way things
are, period. [It is true of allScience. Only after one has complte
understanding ofEconomics, one has a right to discuss how to improve or alter it.]
Personally, I’m not someone who thinks that how somebody pleasures themself
should be legislated by me. That’s just the way I feel. I don’t want somebody
telling me that, and I don’t want to tell somebody else that. That’s why nobody
is encouraging me to run for office. I think there’s such a thing as theft, and
I think there’s such a thing as assault. And then, after that, it’s ["]wide
open["] to me. [Of course he does.] What you want to do is what you want
to do. I think the typical definition of whore is doing something that you
would not ordinarily do for money. The problem is that ninetyfivepercent of the
people in this world are not doing something that they want to do to make
money. That’s just a fact.
14. Is there anything that you would change about the
film, or are you onehundredpercent happy with the final product?/It doesn’t
matter to me, in the sense that, if you look at the way that I’ve worked and
the number of films that I’ve made, my rule is to work quickly and not to
agonise over things. I have a certain amount of
money and a certain amount of time. I’ve never gone over budget and I’ve never
gone over schedule. And so, when the films are done, they’re done. I’ll do
anything that I can to improve them until I’m supposed to deliver them, and then
I deliver them and I don’t look at them again. So, my judgement of it really
doesn’t have a lot to do with the piece itself. It has to do with the
experience of making it because that was monthsoryears out of my life. I look
back on this fondly because I had a lot of fun making it. Tenorfifteenears from
now, maybe I’ll look at it and determine if I did the best job possible of
making it. You can contrast that with something like Che, which was not fun to
make. It will take me a long time to be able to look at that objectively because
it was just not fun. I like to have fun if I can.
15. Is your film KingOfTheHill1993 ever going to come out on DVD?/They’ve
been waiting on me to do a commentary, and my rule is that I won’t do them
alone, and I haven’t been able to find anybody to do it with me. To be fair, I
haven’t tried. But, it will come out, eventually. Everything does.
16. What are you going to be working on next?/Moneyball. We start
filming that on 09jun2009, which is soon. And, TheInformant is coming out in september2009.
17. What’s behind your decision to use an animated character inMoneyball?/Well,
I may be. There’s one character that I’m gonna try to animate. That’s either a
really good idea or a really bad idea, but I’m gonna try.
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