LOS ANGELES—In and around a sprawling estate that resembles the sort of digs you might imagine Steve McQueen inhabited in the late '60s, full of new age furniture and ultra-haute appointments and offering a spectacular rear view looking out as far the eye can see across a suburban panorama, Dani Daniels and director Greg Lansky recently gathered the last remaining morsels of tease footage and pretty girl shots necessary to put the finishing touches on Dani Daniels Deeper, the star showcase for Lansky's new site Blacked.com that marks the interracial debut of its much acclaimed headliner.
Both director and star chatted with AVN about the project, now available on DVD through Jules Jordan Video, as the crew packed up the assorted gear strewn about numerous areas of the posh manor.
"It happened very organically," Lansky said. "I launched the site a few months ago, completely unrelated to this movie, and Dani and I, we've been working together since the beginning of her career. I actually shot her first girl/girl." (Daniels, as many will recall, began her career as a girl/girl-only performer.)
"So I've seen her evolve as a human being and as a performer," Lansky continued. "And I think she really wanted to do something special for [her interracial debut], and I just happened to launch that website a few months before, and her and I, we've got extremely similar tastes when it comes to anything—production, wardrobe, we like fashion a lot—so we just had a really open conversation. She's like, 'Well there's a lot of guys I want to work with, I want to work with Flash [Brown], I want to work with Prince [Yahshua]," and after speaking for awhile, we came up with that it would be nice to just showcase it in one movie, and that's what we did."
Daniels echoed Lansky's account, saying, "Me and Greg are friends and we have very similar styles and very similar tastes. He was just a really good fit, and when he did his new company, Blacked, it was just really elegant, well put together, well shot, and I just liked it. So when he asked me if I wanted to do it, I was like, 'Uh, yeah.'"
Lansky explained that his vision in creating Blacked was to "focus on the aesthetic part of IR. I'm a photographer at heart. It really is what my first craft was, and it'll always be my first love. So I'm always thinking like a photographer, and when I did Blacked, I said, well, I always personally liked interracial for many reasons, and one of the main ones is I thought the contrast between two skins is really beautiful. I just love contrast in general—between two skins, in photography, in fashion—I love all kinds of contrast. I think your art reflects how you mature and evolve as a person. So I think when I started [Blacked], all those tastes and maturity that I've accumulated over the years just kind of translated into one project."
From her point of view, Daniels opined that Blacked is setting a bar for the quality of its content that few others can match these days. "In the last few years, I feel like a lot of companies have been cutting corners and trying to save money, and the quality of work has gone down dramatically," she said. "I feel like Greg's stuff is so elegantly shot and so cinematic, and I feel beautiful all day, and he actually cares about the pairings and wants me to work with people that I have chemistry with, and the product is just so amazing."
In addition to the above mentioned pairings with Brown and Yahshua, Deeper's other two scenes respectively place Daniels in the center of a girl/girl/boy with Anikka Albrite and Rob Piper, and a boy/boy/girl with Yahshua and Jason Brown. Which one is Daniels' favorite? "They're all so good," she gushed. "I'm not just saying that to be like the Miss America approach. Like, every day I couldn't wipe the smile off my face because every scene partner I had, I was so excited to work with. Can I say all of them?"
"I'm very proud of it," Lansky said of Deeper as a whole. "I want to give a lot of due credit to Dani for being an amazing performer, and for collaborating on the movie with me. I think that it's going to show people a different outlook on Dani and on her performance. I've been pretty happy with the response that people have been giving so far."
Daniels' take was a little more straightforward: "This movie is a new door I decided to take, and just to be blunt and honest, it was freakin' awesome sex, and you should watch it for the bomb sex!"
See the trailer for Dani Daniels Deeper at Blacked.com.
