The California-based directing duo Will Hoffman and Julius Metoyer were greatly dissatisfied with how sex was 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 talking about love is supposed to be cheesy. Maybe that’s because of all the bad romantic comedies we grew up with. We associate love with stupid romantic gestures, sex with porn, success with money. Maybe we are a little bit too influenced by what we see on our screens, don’t you think?

Anyway, when I talk about adding feelings to porn, I sometimes get this really simplistic but to-be-expected response, like “oh that’s erotica” or “that’s for girls”.  No. It’s about showing the intimacy and the real connection that two people can have together, so it’s not at all gender-related. It doesn’t have to be great romantic love, but there has to be love nonetheless. And it can take many different forms, romantic love, sexual chemistry, friendship, a common excitement for the unknown…

For Lover, the directors picked actors from their circles of friends, as well as Craigslist, but they 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 makes you feel like walking on clouds. I like how they phrased 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 mutually exclusive. 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, but it doesn’t feel right to me.

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 as any other director would with a film, porn 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…

We need love, we need to be reminded of 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!