Film Interview: THE ORGASM DIARIES Director Ashley Horner

Vegas Outsider speaks with British filmmaker Ashley Horner to discuss his new film, the erotic exploration drama "The Orgasm Diaries"

Navigating the contentious line between art and exploitation, erotic cinema has always proven to be a potent genre for artists to explore given the constant push and pull between emotional and visual honesty and crude pornography. British filmmaker Ashley Horner has bravely stepped into the fray himself now with his intriguing, raw, but honest portrait of a young couple’s emotional and sexual journey, The Orgasm Diaries, now receiving its US release courtesy of IFC Films. A tale of love gained and lost, the film’s explicit nature may be rough for some people but Horner and company approach the subject matter with respect and interest in exploring the lives of its characters rather than churning out art porn. Horner and I recently had a chance to discuss the film’s origin and his overall approach to crafting his contribution to erotic cinema.

Vegas Outsider: To provide some context, could you briefly discuss the initial origin behind the film’s story as well as what prompted you to tackle this material given its possibly scandalous nature?

Ashley Horner: When we started work on the screenplay for The Orgasm Diaries I was really interested in making an erotic piece of British cinema. It was a genre that had rarely been attempted by British filmmakers, and yet within European and Asian cinema there were plenty of interesting and successful examples. At the same time I was really interested in facets of queer cinema with regards to telling love stories, films that were clearly more explicit and for whom the audience was less easily shocked by seeing graphic sexual content. So in a way The Orgasm Diaries is about redressing the balance, attempting to make a straight explicit love story at the same time as embracing a genre for which British cinema is not known. Sean Conway (the films screenwriter) had short film script entitled EROTOLOGY which was basically an explicit, erotic road movie. The characters of Manchester and Noon came from that piece of writing, and over two years we developed it further till it became the blueprint for the film.

VO: Given the film’s exploration of honest sexuality and love between an adult couple, what are your own thoughts on sexuality in cinema and how you were able to negotiate the film's sexual content, while maintaining the fine line between “acceptable” cinema and pornography?

AH: I’d got to a point as an audience member where I found it really difficult to watch mainstream films, I think when you first set out on that journey in cinema you can accept the self censorious nature of Hollywood where people have sex with their underwear on and in post coital situations cover up even though it’s 40 degrees outside. The film itself answers the question where’s the line between the erotic and the pornographic, between ‘art’ and exploitation. Occasionally when shooting the film, we would frame a shot and it would be clear there was something not working with it. And normally the problem would be that it was echoing images that we see in pornography.

I tried to avoid that by making all of the scenes of a sexual nature either move the narrative along, or deepen our understanding of the relationship between the two characters in our story. Rather than gatecrashing straight into a scene with sexual content, often I would use long, uninterrupted takes with simple camera movements and let the scene play right through, allowing you to follow the emotional journey of the characters rather than just thrusting you straight into the physical act of sex. I was really interested in making a film that not only fetishised the female form, but also the male form. If you’re going to spend 95 minutes with two characters in love, you can’t just make a film from the gender perspective of the director. I wanted The Orgasm Diaries to appeal to both men AND women together, to be a truly grown up date film.

VO: Were there any particular films, stories, or other previous works that you and the film’s screenwriter referred to as inspiration as you crafted this tale together?

AH: There was no one particular film, but we definitely discussed European examples of cinema that had worked for us. Julio Medem’s Sex and Lucia was a point of reference, Ai No Corrida and Last Tango in Paris were films I had seen in my youth. And then films such as Baise Moi and Irreversible were looked at, often to find out what we didn’t want to do. Sean Conway (the film’s screenwriter) has a fascination for collecting striking images that he finds in the inner recesses of the world wide web. When we were writing, he would often send me CD’s with 6 or 700 hundred images on them, and if there was something really strong it would become the basis for a moment in the film. Peter Greenaway, Bruno Dumont and the Dardenne Brothers are all also in there in some twisted way, along with the work of Derek Jarman. But as a filmmaker once I start to shoot, you work on instinct to a larger degree and attempt to create something unique and beautiful every time you let the camera roll.

VO: How was the overall process of putting the production and casting the right people given the film's content, especially concerning the two lead characters, Manchester and Noon?

AH: It was extremely difficult to get anyone to even consider playing the lead roles of Manchester and Noon. I tried initially to go the traditional route when casting the film, approaching agents and attempting to persuade a casting director to come on board. But we had little money, a very explicit script and a moderately unknown director in my good self. Nearly all of the established industry who saw the project basically baulked at it, and doors were firmly shut in my face. So we decided to do everything ourselves, we set up castings in London through Spotlight, an online casting directory, booked a casting suite and made sure that everyone who came to audition had read the script beforehand. It meant that I didn’t see hundreds of people, more like tens of people for the two leads. I also had the dilemma that the characters on the page were younger than I eventually cast.

At one point I had two possible sets of lead actors, one in their early twenties and one in their mid twenties. I was worried that if I cast actors with less life experience that I might not be able to go to some of the darker and more explicit place in the story. I found Nancy (Trotter Landry) very close to shooting and she had this wonderful energy about her and a great look. Thankfully when she came for a callback and played opposite Liam Browne they really hit it off and I knew I’d found my Noon and Manchester.

The shoot itself was always going to be tough, but as times were tough in the UK that summer, it meant that we had a very high quality crew that were really happy to come out and work on something interesting. Karl Liegis (fellow producer) and I had been in prep for three months prior to the shoot, which was about right, it meant that we had five good weeks of shooting, but most importantly I had time for two weeks of rehearsal amongst the melee of pre production. Some of that rehearsal was actually on the set of their garage home that had been built by then. So Nancy and Liam were able to explore the characters in costume and on location, allowing us to really get deep into the world of Manchester and Noon, as well as to experiment with a lot of photography!

VO: One plot thread I found interesting is the commercialization of Manchester's images by Franny and how that decision to make these intimate moments public had a profound effect on the couple’s overall relationship. I’m curious to know your own viewpoint of that particular thread and how it reflects the overall theme of artists exploiting their own private lives for wider gain and how the film addresses it both positively and negatively.

AH: After Manchester’s breakout show in the film we see him discard his camera in Franny’s swimming pool. He wants nothing to do with the hobby that has caused his world to implode. He never picks up a camera again. Later in scenes that were cut from the finished film, he meets his older self, a man now in his seventies. When asked what he does Manchester replies “I used to be an artist, but now I’ve retired” and his older self castigates him shouting “Artists can’t retire! It’s who you are and have to carry on doing it forever.” I think that artists always exploit elements of their self, whether they’re writing lyrics in a band, painting or taking photographs. The ones who aren’t feel phoney in some way, or are not interesting enough to warrant attention. Manchester is something of an accidental artist, an idiot savant and the film is partly satirical of the idea that anyone’s personal work can be held up as art and embraced by some sort of scene or tastemakers, even when it may have no inherent value but breaks some sort of taboo. Having said that a lot of the low art that I love comes from this place, from the accidental artist….

VO: Finally, as a filmmaker, what themes or ideas would you like the audience to come away with after viewing The Orgasm Diaries if they are paying their full attention to it? Do you feel that you accomplished what you set out to achieve with this film?

AH: I was playing with lots of things. Love, sex and death, the private versus the public, the line between the erotic and the pornographic, the fine art of exploitation. But ultimately I was making a love story that wasn’t afraid to show every facet of what that entails, including sex. The Orgasm Diaries, for me, works on many levels and as a brave piece of British cinema I think we succeeded in creating a world and telling a story that stays with you long after the film itself has ended. Some will love it, some will hate it but I will take the lovers every day of the week…

To learn more about this film, go to www.ifcfilms.com