The California-based directing duo Will Hoffman and Julius Metoyer were greatly dissatisfied with how sex is portrayed in films, so they decided to shoot their own short film, called Lover, for Nowness.
Lover
Lover from Hoffman / Metoyer on Vimeo.
Love : the missing ingredient?
I don’t know why, but it’s supposed to be cheesy to talk about love. Maybe that’s because of all the bad romantic comedies that most of us have grown up with. When I talk about adding feelings to porn, I sometimes get this really ignorant, macho response, like “oh that’s erotica” or “that’s for girls”. No. It’s about showing the intimacy and the real fun that two people can have together. It doesn’t have to be great romantic love, but there has to be love nonetheless. And it can take many different forms.
For Lover, the directors picked actors from their circles of friends, and Craigslist, but only hired real couples, in order to show the essence of sex in its truest form. That moment when you’re in love and sex with your partner make you feel like walking on clouds. I like how they phrase it: that moment where you let go of judgment or self-consciousness and just open yourself up to impulse and desire.
Is love anti porn?
It’s great to show love in a porn film. You know me, I’m all for it. That’s why I think love and porn are not opposites. Shooting people who love each other doesn’t mean it’s not a porn film. I don’t know if it was the choice of Nowness or the directors to market it as an anti-porn film, because it’s simply not true.
I think it’s important that we reclaim the word porn instead of automatically associating it with all the bad, mainstream porn we know. Porn can be beautiful. It can be full of love. You can have close-up shots of genitals and still call it a love story.
Porn is just sex on camera, so it’s our mission to make it as impactful just like any other director who makes a movie, porno or not.
However, as they explain it, and I quite agree with them:
If your only goal is to arouse someone then you should make porn. If you want to try to make someone think or feel something else, you have to create a different set of rules…
People are always surprised that I can sell my films online, and that enough people will jerk off to them so I can make a living off it. I do believe that the only goal is not to make somebody jerk off. It’s like anything: if you corrupt your content by trying to anticipate what people want, then it’s going to be a shitty film. I strongly believe that you can make anything hot, beautiful, impactful… by speaking from the heart, or the cunt, in my case…
Mainstream porn producers have already tried all angles to appeal to their specifically heteronormative audience. But it’s not working. I mean, yes, they made a bunch of money from it, but look at us, we’ve become sex zombies addicted to growing bra sizes. That’s why we need feelings, we need love, we need to be reminded what makes sex so great and such a complete experience when you don’t reduce it to a couple of positions of hard fucking.
The directors also explain:
To maximize our footage we had to speak up and say things like, ‘Can you do that but put your heads toward the window?’ Speaking up was weird at first, but you learned that there was a right time to ask and a wrong time ask.”
That’s something that is tricky to learn. You need to have good shots, but you also need to let the performers do their thing, otherwise the concept is lost. So there are some good moments to ask somebody to move a leg, but mostly, you should just let them go with the flow.
So, I’d like to stress that this is definitely porn, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Let’s all make better porn!
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