Be honest: You clicked on this article because it had the words “adult film” in the headline. You’re probably even familiar with Kink.com, the massive BDSM site that specializes in creative bondage and people getting fucked by all manner of industrial machinery. You’d be lying if you weren’t hoping for some just-barely SFW content to surreptitiously lurk on at your day job. And you'll get that. But, chances are Kink isn't quite what you'd think.
Kink, which opens today, is an intimate look inside Kink.com, a hugely successful porn production company headquartered in the enormous San Francisco Armory. The film is directed by Christina Voros, best known as the cinematographer behind 127 Hours and James Franco's adaptation of As I Lay Dying. Voros takes on Kink with an unassuming, cinéma-vérité-style, exploring the motivations and logistics behind producing some of the most extreme videos in the business. Did you know that a bank loan was contingent on performers not peeing on each other? I didn't! Did you know that you could step on a penis in stilettos and make it painless? Now I do.
Along with showing plenty of erect members and body-shaking orgasms, the film goes to great lengths to normalize and humanize an industry that most people write off as deviant or harmful. (Turns out these people actually like their jobs—who knew?) Read on as Franco and Voros discuss making Kink, subverting expectations, and spending hours around sex of every type imaginable.
James, how did you decide that Christina was the right person to direct Kink?
James Franco: I had known Christina for a while. We had done a lot of different types of projects together. We had met at film school and continued working on features and documentaries together after. We had done a documentary about SNL, which was an observational vérité style documentary about what how one episode of Saturday Night Live gets put together. We got access behind the scenes and access that Lorne Michaels had never given anyone before. And I’m happy to say that that documentary, although we made it six years ago, is finally going to come out on Hulu, I think. So we had that, and we kind of knew how to make a documentary that was a portrait of the entertainment industry.
Christina, what context for the porn industry did you have before you decided to make the film?
Christina Voros: I didn’t have a tremendous amount of context. My experience in the porn world was in many ways what I had experienced through its portrayal in other mainstream films. When James first came up with the idea of doing the film, I wasn’t necessarily sure I was the right person to make it, because it wasn’t something I had any background in. But in hindsight, I think that’s the reason why, in James’ mind, I was the right person to make the movie.
James: Watching that first video being made, I was like, wow, in some ways this could be like the SNL doc where we see the behind-the-scenes and how a piece of entertainment is made, but obviously it would be different because their product is so different form SNL. I had a history with Christina and I knew that if anybody could go into that place and disappear, and to the extent that the people in front of the camera would be relaxed and be themselves, it would be Christina, so I immediately asked her. It took us a little while to convince Kink that our intentions were just to capture an honest portrait of them, but once we did that we were ready to go.
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What was your first visit to Kink like?
Christina: I walked into Kink on my first day there and spent eight hours in the green room with directors who worked there. From those eight hours of conversation, I realized that there was so much to this world that had not been explored in films that I’d seen, and in those films had been portrayed in a one-sided way.
I became fascinated with people in the porn industry who love it, do it because they love it, and are excited to go to work everyday. They find an artistry in it. Pornographers and pornography in mainstream media have always been marginalized and potentially portrayed as [a group of] people who get into it because they didn’t end up where they wanted to be. And I found that Kink was a group of people who were very smart, very capable, very brassy, very creative, very expressive, and very in love with what they doing.
James: I was doing a movie in San Francisco, About Cherry, directed by the writer Stephen Elliott. He had connections with Kink and we shot in there. Between set-ups, one of the guys from Kink, Duke, asked if we wanted to go on a tour. So he showed me around the facility and it was amazing. Five or six stories, there’s like an earth floor in the basement with a little river! They make their own props there. We watched them make a video and it was like, immediately we should examine this. Not only is this facility kind of amazing, but the [energy] on the set was so interesting.
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What sort of scene were they shooting?
James: They were making some hardcore video like they normally do—it was a girl in a cage. The set-up was, she was kidnapped or something. When they were making the video in front of the camera there was this master-slave dynamic, but when they called "Cut," behind the scenes there was this completely different dynamic. They were like a team, or in a lot of ways a regular film crew that I was used to. They were all talking about how to put the scene together or asking what they'd do next. Later what we learned, when Christina shot the movie, was that the submissive performer is actually the one in control, because that is the person who can say, “I’m not going to do that,” or, “Stop,” or whatever.
Christina, when you approach something like this film, how does it differ from how you’re shooting on the set of a drama?
Christina: I think when it comes to the work that I’ve done with James, our goal is to create an atmosphere where people can be themselves and be relaxed. That’s very much the environment he seems to create on his narrative sets. For our documentary work, you’re still trying to back off and be a fly on the wall so that the performers on the set can forget that you’re there.
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Is there any point where you are around a porn set where you stop thinking, “Whoa, I’m watching people having sex”? Is there a point where you start to view it more objectively?
James: It’s surprising at first, but you kind of get used to it in a weird way. [Laughs.]
Christina: I think it helps to have a camera in your hand, too. And this goes for anything that’s shocking, whether it’s violence or poverty or pornography. You’re looking through your frame, you’re making sure it’s in focus, and you’re following the action. In some ways it’s more shocking or jarring. I tend to spend so much time trying to be invisible that I’m insulated from how intense what I’m watching actually is.
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What was the most shocking or surprising thing that you learned while filming the documentary?
Christina: Coming to terms with the misconceptions or assumptions I had about the industry going in, and weighing that against how similar what these directors are doing is to what I do every day. It's the sense of purpose or aspiration and creativity coupled with having an audience to please. I came out of it realizing that what we’re doing is very similar, we’re just doing it in very different worlds.
James: For me, I was so impressed by the endurance that these particular performers have. So much of this involves pain and the audience is so aware of authenticity. You’d never go to porn to watch good acting, but here in these kind of films, a lot of what you’re looking for is the actual pain. They’re more aware of when it’s being faked or not. So it’s this really kind of intense, almost endurance performance in a lot of ways. It’s just this side of these things Marina Abramovic did early in her career. That was really fascinating for me.
Here's the trailer, which is technically suitable for work, I guess. Just make sure you have headphones on.
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Nathan Reese is a News Editor at Complex. Before this interview he had never heard of Kink.com. He's serious! What!? Jeez. He tweets here.
