PORN VALLEY—Red-headed Lily Cade is entering her sixth year in adult, and she's finally getting to do what she's been trained for: making high-end all-girl features.
"I want to make porn's better movies," Cade told AVN. "I came from film school; I came from a cinema background. That's what I got into porn to do, is to direct porno movies. I like gonzo sex; I like everything, and there's a time and a place for that sort of thing, but what I want to do is make movies where the sex scenes serve the story and the story serves the sex scenes, and it's a complete piece and doesn't just feel like, 'Okay, we put a story in here because we needed to have 20 minutes of stuff that isn't fucking.' I want to make movies that work both as a film and as a porno."
In the modern age where the business plan of some companies is to shoot a lot of scenes, put them online behind a pay wall, and eventually compile five or six of them into a saleable DVD, Cade's got her work cut out for her.
Still, she counts two of her recent movies, Between the Headlines: A Lesbian Porn Parody and the upcoming Fuck the Police, both for Filly Films, as examples of having fulfilled her mission—at least for the moment.
"In Fuck the Police, I have this 'Officer Cade' character that I think first showed up in Lesbian Lock-Up, and then I just started doing it as a cop or a prison guard or whatever Officer Cade is needed for at the time," Cade explained. "So I wanted to make a feature about this character, and considering what's all over the news right now, I have Officer Cade as a dirty cop who has a new partner, Jessica Ryan, and she doesn't like that Officer Cade is really only a cop to fuck chicks. So the first scene in the movie is me and Jenna Sativa. I pull Jenna aside for jaywalking, don't arrest her for the kilo of drugs in her purse, and fuck her on a bench, while my partner's in the car, going through the drugs, realizing what's going on, so she comes over and arrests the girl anyway, which gets the gang that she's involved in angry. So that's the catalyst for the story, is that it's these two cops versus Missy Martinez as a lesbian drug lord."
One of the things that girl/girl fans, and particularly fans of Cade herself, will enjoy in Fuck the Police is what Cade describes as her "boi/girl" scene with Jess Gatsby.
"You have to understand, it's a joke," Cade said. "'Boi' is like a butch lesbian or a boyish girl. It's a word used in the gay community to mean something different than just, like, a man. The joke is that I've never done a scene where somebody fucked me with a strap-on; I've always been the top, so in this movie, I have this very butch woman, Jess Gatsby, who's the enforcer for the drug lord Mama, and they leave me in the warehouse for her to rough me up. It's Jess's first real scene, but I also shot a sex tape with her for [Cindy Gallop's website] MakeLoveNotPorn, mostly because I didn't want this to be literally her first time on camera. And making me oink like a pig and shoving my throat down on this strap-on is definitely not like your usual first girl/girl."
Technically speaking, Cade's also being something of a pioneer, putting aside the current adult movie standard, the Canon 5D camera, instead selecting not only to use a digital Bolex D16, but also shooting all the footage in RAW format, which unlike JPG provides no compression of the image and allows for greater image manipulation in post-production.
"Shooting in RAW has a lot to do with the look of this movie, because right now we're finishing up color-grading it," she said. "My wife Sten is doing this, and Max Murder is writing the score, so that's where we're at in the editing process right now. But it's gonna be awesome, it looks great; all five sex scenes are great."
In all, Cade's shot 16 movies for Filly Films, though besides Fuck the Police and Between the Headlines, only three have been storyline features: The Muse, Infidelity: A Love Story, and SugarMamas.
This [Fuck the Police] and Between the Headlines are the ones that are closest to what I want to do," she stated. "In Between the Headlines, Hillary Clinton, played by Nina Hartley, hooks up with Michelle Obama, played by Lotus Lain, and Vanessa Veracruz is the staffer that walks in on them, and that movie is about what Vanessa is going to do now that she has this dirty secret. It also features myself as Rachel Maddow and Aaliyah Love as Megyn Kelly. We have green-screen sequences of Megyn Kelly's and Rachel Maddow's TV shows, and my wife did all of that; she constructed all the backgrounds that are supposed to parody those shows, including a Fox News scroll where we put a lot of joke stories. That movie is fucking great, also shot on the Bolex, and it's out now."
Between the Headlines also features Ela Darling, Aiden Starr and Zoey Monroe.
Though a veteran of roughly 50 performances besides the ones she directed herself in, Cade still seems unsure about her position in the porn universe—but that hasn't affected her vision of what "good porn" is.
"I've always been outside the system to some extent," she admitted. "I never really had an agent. I'm in this weird place: I'm gay and I'm always a little bit alternative-looking, but I'm not really a part of queer porn; I'm not up in San Francisco making insider content for other gay people. I'm in Porn Valley, and I like pretty girls, and I like good camera, high production values—I like stuff that works and is pretty, but I like intense sex. I don't want to see two disinterested pretty girls paw at each other; I want to see girls fuck, so I'm going for something in-between: Energy, intensity and the authenticity that you would find in queer porn, but with the kind of models and the kinds of work that you would see in mainstream straight porn."
It's a formula that's stood her in good stead so far, with Infidelity nabbing four stars (as did gonzo offering Red Hot Lesbians) from AdultDVDTalk reviewer Captain Jack, who also gave The Muse three-and-a-half.
Cade is currently in talks to offer her shooting style and sensibilities to two other prominent production companies—and with her current body of work as a résumé, we're likely going to be seeing big things from this talented director.
