LOS ANGELES—For a man who grew up in Montreal, Ricky Greenwood’s fandom for a particular NFL team seems like an odd choice. And for the gay men on his sets, it also proves to be a confusing one.
“I’m a huge Bears fan,” he says, before quickly clarifying, “the Chicago Bears. I have that app on my phone, and of course I have my big beard. And I had a guy say to me on set, ‘Oh, I like bears, too!’ And I said, ‘Yeah, they don’t have a good team this year, but they can get better.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, I’m not talking about the football team.’ There’s a lot of that kind of stuff. My brain didn’t compute that he was talking about bear men. It just makes it fun. I think they make fun of me because of that. We’re laughing a lot on set.”
Greenwood insists he isn’t intentionally trying to mess with them, but given how he looks, the confusion is understandable.
“I would be considered a bear, yes,” he laughs. “And I’m a red head, so they gave me a nickname and call me ‘ginger bear.’ There are a lot of terms that I’m not aware of, so I’m learning. It’s funny.”
Already an acclaimed director at Mile High, Greenwood had established himself with straight, lesbian and trans films when a new opportunity arrived last year: to direct for gay line Icon Male. It’s an opportunity he had long been hoping for, one that allowed him to further hone his love for story-based porn—and that opened up his work to a brand-new audience.
The Reluctant Pornographer
Before he entered the industry, Greenwood longed to escape Montreal (“It’s a nice place to grow up, but the movie business is not big there”). He worked on more mainstream entertainment endeavors, including short films and documentaries for film, television and the web.
He was also a programmer for the Fantasia Film Festival for a decade, which helped shape his love for horror and exploitation movies (he’ll enthusiastically talk about the giallo genre, The Exorcist, The Omen and any number of other old-school horrors).
“It’s hard for me to jump in with the new generation because I feel that it’s a gimmick with cheapo scares and all the gory stuff that disgusts you more than scares you. I like it more when it’s the ambience and it’s intense and you don’t know what’s happening,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s because kids now need more to be impressed, because you see horror every day on TV. Maybe they need to have that same type of horror in the movies, I don’t know. For me, it doesn’t work.”
And that philosophy was about to influence a new part of his career. A good friend of Greenwood’s was working as an editor at Mile High and mentioned the company was looking for someone to bring on board. Greenwood was introduced to Jon Blitt—and soon faced a decision that would change the course of his life.
“In the beginning, I was not really sure that I wanted to do porn. It’s always the conflict between mainstream and porn,” Greenwood recalls. “I had done a couple of documentaries and stuff on the industry in the past, and I didn’t really like the scene in Montreal, the way they were doing stuff.”
Initially, he told Blitt no.
“We had a first meeting at that time, and I was not really interested in any job. I was just like, ‘I’ll go talk to him just to talk.’ At that point I had another job—I had a contract until August, so I wasn’t able to anyway. I told him, ‘If you don’t have any other people by then, you can call me back and I will see what I can do.’ So he called me back in August, and I went for a second interview,” Greenwood says.
“And Jon told me that (Mile High) was completely different that what I had seen in the industry—it’s very professional, it’s like the same as a mainstream set. So I jumped in, and he was right. It was a completely different experience—it was very professional and well done. So I said, ‘OK, let’s do it!’”
Greenwood started as a production manager, working on scripts, casting and other tasks.
“As I was getting the stuff, I was like, ‘I feel like we can do better.’ And at some point, he said, ‘OK, you think you can do better, just go for it.’”
To Greenwood’s surprise, Blitt gave him the green light to work on a unique project that allowed him to show off his love of nunsploitation films—leading to the hit Confessions of a Sinful Nun at Sweetheart Video. Greenwood’s 2017 directorial debut earned a whopping seven AVN Award nominations—and had him working with porn icon Nina Hartley.
“I didn’t know people would react that much to that movie, and so I was surprised a little bit that it got so many nominations and so much reaction to it.”
With two more hits soon under his belt, Greenwood was asked by Blitt to move to California and work full time.
“He asked me, ‘What do you want to do? Which studio do you want to help us with?’ And I was like, ‘I’ll take lesbian and trans.’ For me, trans is the genre where not enough was done, so you can do so many things. You don’t have the feeling that it’s overdone. A lot of people are doing it now because more studios are jumping in, but I had the feeling three years ago that there wasn’t a high-end product for that.”
And soon, Greenwood had another request.
“I was asking for Icon, to see if I could jump into gay, because I have the same feeling with the gay stuff—I have so much that I can do, I have more freedom. I don’t feel like that everything was done when I do it. I feel like we can do new stuff and people would be like, ‘Oh, I didn’t think about that!’ So that’s why I like those fields, because they gave me a place to create more.”
Horse Play
Greenwood was anxious for the next phase of his career, but he had to be patient.
“At the beginning, it was very hard for me to get in because we didn’t know how people would react to a straight director doing gay. We were afraid people would like yell at us because I was straight. We wondered, ‘Will people accept it?’ We didn’t want to offend anybody, so we were very cautious about how the reaction could be.”
But last year, Greenwood got a shot—resulting in Icon’s hit Painful Love.
“People liked it. They don’t really care—at least not that I’m aware of—that I’m straight,” he says. “I’m in the point of my career where I just want to do movies, and for me that’s what it is. I don’t see it as straight, gay, trans…I just see it as doing movies. These are the stories I want to tell, and that’s what it is. I wish that more studios would be like that.”
The experience served as an orientation into how the gay side of the industry works.
“I learned a lot, and in a way it’s more technical putting it together. In gay, you have a bottom and top. Some guys don’t bottom, some guys don’t top, some people are versatile and can do both, so it’s all a puzzle. So I cannot just cast any two guys together.”
And that wasn’t the only thing Greenwood had to brush up on, with a whole new world of daddies, otters, twinks and more to navigate.
“I try to change the approach. I try to cast people who I think look good together, but some people might say that a daddy is always with a younger man, that we can’t put him with another daddy because it looks weird. I try to erase those boxes.”
With confidence in his technical skills not in doubt, Greenwood was able to focus on learning a new language.
“Lesbian is always geared toward a male audience anyway, so you just film what you think guys will want to see in a lesbian scene. And when you do straight, it’s basically what you like as a straight man. On the gay side, my problem is more with the fact that I don’t know half of the terms,” he laughs. “Sometimes they will tell me, ‘Oh, you want me to do this?’ And it’s a term I haven’t heard before, so I’m like, ‘OK, explain to me what exactly that is?’
“When I wrote Painful Love, I called (production assistant) Nick Fitt and I said, ‘You need to help me, because I don’t know how to flirt with another guy. What do you say to each other?’ So they laugh at me, and sometimes I ask questions and they find it cute. I think it was Zak Bishop on set who said to another guy, ‘Oh, are you a golden star?’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ Apparently, that’s when you’re gay and you never touched a vagina in your life—you were born from a C-section. They explain terms like that to me and my crew. It’s a very fun set; we’re all laughing a lot.”
And that atmosphere is something that Greenwood prides himself on regardless of what genre he is shooting.
“We take the job seriously, but we’re not saving lives—so there’s no point to yell, scream and freak out. I think we can find a solution to almost everything, and I think a loose atmosphere and making people laugh helps to create that camaraderie and that feeling that you’re not feeling pressure and stress. My crew is very open-minded and funny, so people like them. They became friends with everybody, and we don’t see any tension. I try to keep it very peaceful and funny,” he says.
“I want it to be fun to show up on set for everyone—that’s my goal. I want them to be happy from the whole process, from the beginning to the end when they leave—and most of the guys will text me back and say, ‘When can I come back?’”
That vibe was there on the Painful shoot, which was anything but—going (mostly) smooth from start to finish.
“I sent the script to a few of my gay friends to look at. I wanted to make sure I didn’t say anything offensive. The story is about a person who is not accepting the fact that he’s gay—he had a problem dealing with his homosexuality, and the way he was dealing with it was by fighting it. After sex, he likes to create drama so the guy would push him away. I want to have something with feeling and emotion, and I want to make sure that these feelings and emotions are not misinterpreted.”
Greenwood notes that they had to cut a scene due to time constraints—and he’s figuring out how to adapt to all that penis.
“It’s the same case that you have in any type of movie—the more dicks you have in a scene, the longer the sex scene takes. So for gay, you have at least two, so it’s longer. Sometimes it goes quick, sometimes it takes more time. When you do lesbian, it’s easy,” he laughs. “When you do gay or trans, you have to consider the two penises. And if you do a gangbang or anything else, you have worry about four or five dicks, so you plan more time. So that was more the type of issue that you have to take into consideration.”
And Greenwood had already planned an ambitious shoot given the involvement of a script, locations, costumes—and a pesky horse, which was symbolically meant to mirror the struggles the lead character was going through.
“The horse was not really receptive to everything we were trying to do,” laughs the director. “It was very difficult to deal with, but I was lucky—Casey Everett grew up on a ranch, so he knew how to take care of and manage a horse. So that helped a lot to make the movie believable.”
A Storybook Ending
In a podcast last year with straight adult star Stirling Cooper, the host said of his guest: “Every time you’re skipping through the dialogue, you’re breaking Ricky’s heart!”
And it’s true.
“We make that joke a lot on set,” Greenwood laughs. “We spend two or three hours doing dialogue, and we’re like, ‘We just finished the part that they fast-forward through. OK, move on!’ Some people don’t watch the story. But I know that with Mile High, people tell Jon that they come back to finish the movie. People who like your product and like that kind of stuff, they are very loyal and will come back to it, so that’s a good thing.”
At the heart of it all, it’s the story that’s most important to Greenwood.
“I don’t really feel like I direct sex. I set a mood, I tell a story, and I make sure they understand the character. My style is more like I let them have sex the way that feels right. Of course I can be like, ‘Five minutes doggie style, five minute missionary, five minute riding.’ But for me, that sex formula is boring; that’s why I let them do it, and on my side it’s the same job as normal. I look at the lighting, I make sure we don’t see the boom in the shot, and that if a guy is having fun, go to a closeup of his face,” the director says.
“I always joke around that I cannot do gonzo. For me, if I do gonzo, I will lose interest. I will be on my phone like, ‘OK, they come in, they fuck, bye.’ I will zone out not even paying attention because it’s not something that I watch, it’s not something that I consume, and it’s not something I have fun doing, so I will not be able to do it.”
Greenwood is fascinated with getting into the mind of the viewer and exploring what they look at when they watch porn.
“For me, when I’m watching porn, I’m the type of guy that’s watching it and thinking, ‘Who is this guy? Why is he there? Who is she having sex with? Is it her husband? Her stepson? The neighbor? Is it the pizza guy? Why is she having sex with him?’ I need to have something to tell me, and if I don’t, I lose interest.”
But Greenwood’s work still appeals to those that just want to jack off—even if he hopes you spend some time with it.
“For my stuff normally, I will have people that will watch it with their partner, and sometimes they want to be involved with the story—it’s like watching a movie,” Greenwood says. “You need to know your base. I think that with Icon Male and Noir Male, Mile High has a great base. Nica Noelle was great to create that for their fans, who really responded well to what she used to do in the past creating great stories. I remember when I was production manager for Mile High, we got letters from people who were saying that those stories helped them to accept their sexuality, coming out of the closet and stuff like that. It was a very positive influence on a lot of people, and sometimes that’s what you need.”
But with a culture increasingly geared toward instant gratification, Greenwood has had to work harder to realize his passion—and utilize his strengths.
“The market now is more geared toward a quick scene, and move on. Like if you look at a YouTube video on your phone, all those videos are two minutes because people just want to consume what they want and leave. We’re in a world where everything is fast, quick, and move on. So sitting for a story involves time, and some people don’t really want to do it. But you still have fans and people who like it, and porn goes up and down. So maybe in a few years, stories will be the biggest thing that people want, and after that we go back to the quickie. It moves very fast in porn.”
Thankfully for Greenwood and those fans, Icon has continued to commit to storytelling. Given the positive reaction to Painful Love, Mile High assigned Greenwood another project. And another. Sophomore effort Daddy’s Weekend was released late last year, and early this month Icon released the debut scene of Hot for My Teacher.
“I would love also with Icon to have the chance to sit with a gay writer and they can help me bring their story to life, learn what they want to see, or develop something together. That would be my goal for that brand—to help bring out those stories, because it’s not my story to tell. I’m limited in the writing; my skill as a director and my crew is filming and everything, and we’re very good at it. We’re very good at telling a story; I can tell any kind of story, it doesn’t matter what it is. I want to create a product that talks to the audience. I can write good stories that can speak to them, but I think it will be more fun if the community helps me and gives me stories that I can tell for them. I can bring their fantasies to life.”
Upcoming Greenwood films will feature scripts from Chris Crisco and Nick Fitt, and if Greenwood’s growing relationships with his cast and crew are any indication, fans will be in for an entertaining ride.
“Nick sends me pictures all the time for casting. And I’m like, ‘I’m eating right now! They don’t have clothes?’” Greenwood laughs. “He sends me pictures and weird stuff on purpose all the time, and we laugh a lot. Last year, I didn’t know some of the guys that he was mentioning, but now I know most of them so he doesn’t have to send me as many pictures anymore unless it’s a new guy. I’m learning fast.”
