What really happens on the set of an ethical porn film To understand it, we attended the filming of ERIKALUST's new film
Porn is a bit like Coca-Cola: everyone consumes it but no one could say precisely how it's made. In fact, when talking about a porn set, the common imagination still seems tied to the sordid atmospheres of the 1970s films by Gerard Damiano or Boogie Nights. A type of cliché that today's modern production houses are completely overturning. The main one among these is ERIKALUST, which is also the stage name of the director, producer, and screenwriter who founded it twenty years ago. Erika Lust is the creator of a new type of porn: ethical porn. But what exactly does “ethical porn” mean? She herself explained it to us some time ago in an interview featured in our digital cover Future Porn – but as we know, theory is one thing and practice is another.
And precisely to show us (and the public) what it means in concrete terms to produce porn according to precise standards of correctness, the filmmaker invited us to the set of the new film she is producing, directed by the Italian-Australian Gianna Mazzeo in Sardinia. The setting was a historic farmhouse recently transformed by art curator Constance van Berckel into an interdisciplinary artistic residency called SOPRA SOTTO. A special occasion because the film's shooting was a “first time” not only for the person writing these words, but also for the director herself, whose experience so far has involved music videos and advertisements; and even for one of the performers, Beatrice Segreti, for whom this would be her first real film after a highly successful career on OnlyFans.
How do you make ethical porn?
“I didn't choose to do this job: I ended up in it,” said Beatrice Segreti just before entering the set. “I've always felt like a very exhibitionist person, full of eroticism. I like sex, but not explicit sex for its own sake. I like sharing, getting to know people, finding intimacy with them, whether women or men.” Segreti, as we mentioned, comes from the world of OnlyFans. A world that has always allowed her a certain degree of self-determination and where “everything is much more spontaneous but also more amateur, even though at the same time there are obviously guidelines to follow to make everything suitable for viewing.”
Here Segreti is present only as a performer: she doesn't have to handle, as usual, cameras, makeup, and “direction”. For her true debut on the professional scene, Segreti sought “a production that was a bit more in line with my way of being, working, and my mentality,” noting that “the way of caring for performers is still sorely lacking in the production world.” It's precisely this kind of tact in managing the shoots that “is reflected in the film itself and is completely different because women are not just an object of entertainment but we have a whole sensory part to care for, we have emotions.” But what was Segreti's concrete experience on an “ethical” set?
“Before arriving here today, there were several video calls and even forms to fill out where they asked me if I had any specific requests or needs,” Segreti told us. “There was truly a very human attention and I felt it a lot. It was a constant asking if it was okay with me. And there was a question that I really liked that was asked among the first ones: “How should we behave if you were in a situation of discomfort? Tell us everything.” And so I explained: I think it would be useful to stop, talk for a second, I really need the human person to come and confront me.”
Even before arriving on set, then, “we had a little conversation, we looked at each other a bit.” For Segreti, there's always “a sexual barrier to break down first, you don't know how to behave with the person in front of you, you don't know them yet and so I'm always a bit reluctant to start.” That's why right before the shoots, the performers gather with the intimacy coordinator (whose role we'll return to shortly) to have the so-called “sex talk” in which they freely discuss what they want to do or not. “Once that barrier is overcome, for me it's a matter of mood, of sensations.” Which is essential because “it's beautiful if you feel like you've satisfied your partner and the rest of the crew and everyone else. A beautiful feeling.”
On Erika Lust's sets the priority is the pleasure of the performers themselves: the ethical aspect of production lies precisely in not imposing conditions or obligations. “I do it for my pleasure,” Segreti explained, “it's not just a matter of money.” A focus on the human aspect of production that ensures “the product is completely different, the aesthetics are different. There's an artistic touch but, beyond the image, the same care for the person and therefore for the performances within the films is totally different.” The basic idea is that “if you take great care of this aspect of the person, not only do you create a product that is authentic, but everyone feels better,” Segreti concludes, for whom it's very important not to be “just the object of pleasure for the people who will watch us” but a protagonist of that pleasure and not just in a scenic sense. But to ensure all this happens, another role on set is essential: the intimacy coordinator.
The job of an intimacy coordinator
“My job,” jokes Anarella Martinez, intimacy coordinator on ERIKALUST sets, “is to make everyone happy.” Martinez has just spent an intense morning: after assisting with the more narrative shoots of the film, she gathered the performers and the director for a final discussion on their preferences for the film's climactic scene and, finally, during the shoots themselves she went back and forth between the director's station and the actual scene to consult with the performers and relay directions from the director. What's the secret to her job? “Communication,” she replies without hesitation. “Creating a safe space and an atmosphere of trust.”
Martinez has considerable experience. She works as an intimacy coordinator and producer for ERIKALUST, founded the Sex School Hub platform to promote sexual education for performers, creatives, and sex workers, and has a background in festival organization. Her specialty is mediation, in every form. “Being an intimacy coordinator is a matter of sex education,” she explains during a break between shoots. “You need to know how to understand trauma. But also to read people. You have to be empathetic, present. You have to be able to put others and their feelings first.”
On Erika Lust's sets, as we said, there are no pre-established scripts for the sex scenes: only the beginning and the need for a certain footage for the most explicit shots are outlined. Martinez told us that performers coming from mainstream porn are often confused by the absence of detailed scripts. But in the world of ethical porn everything can always be renegotiated: “In the end, consent is fluid,” Martinez explains. “I think desires change: sometimes you want something, sometimes not — sometimes you never want it, sometimes yes.”
When the sex scene begins, the entire staff withdraws, leaving only the cameramen and sound technicians on set. “Before arriving on set, we meet online,” Martinez explains. “Then we consult with them. The director explains what the tone of the film is and what the sex scene will be. Then we reconnect to check that everything is okay. They can confirm or not their availability. From there we ask what they feel like doing and what their big “no's” and big “yes's” are. Then, when we arrive on set, we review everything again: we assess the atmosphere, because we've already worked a bit together, so something might have changed.”
The actresses have previously discussed, but once the camera is on during the shoot, they can define and agree on actions in real time. These sequences where they talk as they would in real life are usually kept in the final edit, since they organically integrate consent and entertainment. “Before shooting, we also plan some movements,” Martinez explains. “You know, like: “this might look good on camera”, or “we could use this position”, or we just talk about it. But we leave them freedom. It's like saying: we want you to feel pleasure, we want the scene to be as authentic as possible.” The moments shared between the actresses, from laughs to exchanged words, constitute an integral part of the show themselves.
The director and the intimacy coordinator follow the operations from a monitor positioned at the director's station, staying at a greater distance from the line of sight to avoid “crowding” the scene with an excess of presences and to give the actresses the necessary space. From the station, the director gives directions to the cameraman via earpiece. “The difference is in how we work. We follow a story relatively but the performers are free,” Martinez explains. “We're here to guide them. In mainstream productions, instead, they tell you what to do.” This leaves room for improvisation: at one point, the director intended to approach to give a direction to the performers, but an particularly intriguing dynamic had arisen, so she decided to let them do it themselves. This brings us to the last aspect of our visit to the set: how do you direct a porn that has not only ethical ambitions but also aesthetic ones?
How do you become a porn film director?
“I didn't want to intervene too much in the sex scene,” director Gianna Mazzeo told us, right after concluding the shoots of her first porn. “You can set the tone, you can indicate certain moments you want to include in the scene. But I want the performers to do what they feel like doing, for pleasure to guide them.” In fact, she continues to tell us, “the hardest part is figuring out how much I can direct and how much to entrust to them.” During the sex scene that was shot in the morning, Mazzeo wondered “when should I intervene? When am I interrupting them and when am I instead contributing to shaping the scene?”
All honest questions and we can say, having seen it with our own eyes, that after discussing with the performers and the intimacy coordinator during the sex talk, Mazzeo truly let the performers get carried away, “interrupting” little or nothing in the course of the shoots. “The most important part for me,” Mazzeo said, “was discovering what the cast liked. Rather than inventing all these ideas about what pleasure means to me or trying to impose my gaze, I think the right way to capture pleasure is to create a safe and comfortable situation where people can enjoy the moment and find their chemistry.”
This doesn't mean, of course, that Mazzeo didn't imprint her own mark on the story, quite the contrary. Half Italian, the director indeed “recreated a moment from an old Italian film for each scene” and the film's subject itself was inspired by Parthenope by Sorrentino. There's a shot reminiscent of the fountain bath in La Dolce Vita, another scene where the protagonist hangs laundry is shot like Malena while the Sophia Loren of Ieri, oggi e domani. “I wanted Beatrice to start the sex scene, because I wanted the woman who is usually observed from afar and who is passive in Italian films to emerge and be dominant. That's the only part I modeled. Also, there was the shot during the sex scene where Beatrice rests her leg on the chair, licks the palm of her hand, and pulls down the stocking,” she explained.
And when we asked her what the goal she had set for herself with this film was, Mazzeo said she wanted to “seek a story.” The search for a narrative, a psychological dynamic whose purpose, beyond individual artistic choices, would succeed in “inverting or throwing away the male gaze that's always seen in old Italian cinema, those men who watch women from afar, often in domestic situations.” Here, instead, “these stereotypes and these images, like a woman hanging laundry, one picking tomatoes” were repurposed “in a lesbian context.” The story is essentially about the creation of a fantasy in which the protagonist “takes responsibility for her pleasure, goes and seeks whatever it is she wants. That's why I wanted wide shots, to see both the action and the response, the facial expressions, the enjoyment. That's where the eroticism lies, in the background and in the story. Not in the close-up of a vagina.”
