LOS ANGELES — Gianna Dior found ways to process complicated emotions during the making of Psychosexual—her new star vehicle from Vixen Media Group directed by Kayden Kross.
In what became the most personal project of her three-plus year career, Dior tells AVN that bringing her character to life in a story that was inspired by true events was a departure from anything she’s ever done.
“I think the craziest part about that is all of the traumatic shit that’s happened to me that I kind of pushed to the back of my brain and I never really think about it—I just push it down—this kind of forced me to bring it back,” Dior says.
“It really made the acting not even acting. It was me bringing myself back to those experiences.”
In the movie—which was released as a five-part feature on Aug. 20 across multiple sites in the Vixen Media Group orbit—Dior plays a beautiful sex therapist with a penchant for indulging in her own extra-marital escapades as a coping mechanism.
Gianna takes what she wants, when she wants in Psychosexual, pushing her limits in four of the five sex scenes and reminding fans why she won the 2020 AVN Awards for Best New Starlet and Best Boy/Girl Sex Scene.
“I’ve been told by people in my personal life that I should write a book about my life or create something because I attract chaos, I guess—my whole life has been crazy story after crazy story,” Dior admits.
“This was a very a personal experience and it’s definitely totally different than any other thing I’ve done in porn. This one is a sentimental favorite.”
Dior says around the beginning of the pandemic last year that she and the guy she was dating decided to try couples therapy. But she didn’t just go to a random therapist; first she did some research.
“I wanted to find a therapist who was sex-worker positive and I found her online and got to know her very personally,” Gianna explains. “I talked to her multiple times a week and she started sharing a lot of details about her life.
“The man she was dating at the time just really intrigued me. I’ve never met anybody who was in that type of relationship and the way she was so open and just shared everything about it.”
The therapist told Gianna that she had been cuckolding her husband—and that became the foundation on which she and Kayden Kross built the twisted narrative of Psychosexual.
Dior says she and Kross began outlining the plot during quarantine and then “at some point I went to her house and just told her my entire my life story.”
“And she just started to create this like the genius mastermind she is,” Dior says, revealing that the reigning three-time AVN Director of the Year gave her a homework assignment during the development stage. “She wanted me to put together a mood board of my favorite quotes—like a Pinterest board type of thing.
“So I sent her my favorite Bukowski book and we got a lot of quotes out of that. I’m also a big Hemingway fan, so I have some Ernest Hemingway in there, just things that are very personal to me and things I really like.”
Mike Miller, who is the co-founder of Vixen Media Group and executive producer of Psychosexual, tells AVN it was evident there was chemistry between Dior, Kross and himself from their first group call that carried over to the cast and crew as the principal photography unfolded.
That private sit-down between Kross and Dior, however, proved instrumental in crafting the screenplay.
“I think we wanted to do a feature and Kayden’s method is a bit of a deep dive into the life of the performer,” Miller says. “I think from there what happens is the extraction phase to where it’s familiar and comfortable to the performer, so you get to the place where it’s not really acting. It’s more of a familiar method of performance.”
Miller continues, “In terms of a green light, we knew we wanted to make something with Gianna, so this almost started with a green light—there was never really a point where we said, ‘OK, this script is good enough.’
“We knew intuitively there was a high probability we would get something incredible.”
Even though Psychosexual contains the elements of a star showcase, Miller says from the outset the plan was to shoot a traditional feature.
“We wanted to be very firm in that,” he adds. “We wanted it to have the story arc and have enough production value to it to make a big splash with it.”
During quarantine VMG introduced a network package deal for fans to gain access to six of the sites in their portfolio including Blacked, Tushy, Vixen, BlackedRaw, TushyRaw and Deeper. The breadth of that package makes for the most seamless viewing experience for Psychosexual, which has been rolled out with scenes on BlackedRaw, Tushy, Vixen, Blacked and then Deeper.
“So we wanted to do something special for the people that had these memberships,” Miller explains.
“With past showcases on one brand it would’ve been five updates—four Gianna’s and one [Avery Cristy]—and sometimes that creates its own set of issues with the member base in terms of the talent.
“In this case we have the six-site package and we put it all out on the same day across five brands. So if you’re already a member of the network you don’t need to buy any upgrades to watch it all.
“So that strategy played out well. We’re always going to have people who criticize one way or another but we’ll probably be moving forward this way with our big features.
“It makes a lot of sense and there is more diversity to the feature. It’s not as focused as a Tushy showcase. This came out and it hits all the brands really well.”
Miller tells AVN that VMG set out to make “something as close to a real movie as we had ever done.”
They ramped up pre-production in late summer of 2020 and shot all the footage over the course of three months, wrapping in November.
“We put a lot into this,” Miller says. “We didn’t really look at this from any real budgetary restraints. We had everything we needed. It was a very high mode of production, having come out of the summer and come back from the shutdown—the longest one we’ve ever experienced.
“We had all the right people in place and Gianna and Kayden just created fireworks. There was a lot of Gianna’s and a lot of Kayden’s touches, but there was a whole team behind making this movie.
“Like the car shots … just the party scene alone and seeing how that went down, with mainstream assistant directors, extras, lighting crews, everything we put into it. It was a good exercise and it was great working with everybody.”
Dior not only led the all-star cast in her most elaborate acting role to date, she also went toe-to-toe with a parade of heavy-packing male performers in what arguably were four of the most electric sex scenes of her career.
She threw down with Troy Francisco in her first scene, spotting him at a glitzy party and pulling him into the bathroom.
“The Troy scene was pretty crazy,” Dior says, adding that the scene took on a whole other dynamic because of the party-goers that were involved as extras during the action.
“Usually there are no extras to see the porn part of it, so to have the two girls filming right when me and Troy were starting to fuck was exciting."
Dior continues, “I fucking love Troy. For some reason I didn’t really know him before this, so I was a little skeptical because I had never worked with him before, but he’s a very strong performer. I’m really surprised that I don’t see him more places and in more projects. He was amazing and he knew exactly what he was doing, too.”
Speaking of knowing their way around a porn set, Rob Piper and Jax Slayher did the honors in another scene with Dior—a ball-draining three-way that also broke out during a party.
“That one was really interesting because at the time we started filming it, it was literally 2 or 3 in the morning and you know how things start getting weird after 1 or 2 a.m.—it was that kind of vibe,” Gianna says.
“We just forgot about the cameras and angles and were just fucking. We were like ‘fuck the cameras, we just want to have sex.’ It was super raw.”
So was her straight-to-the-A scene with three-time AVN Male Performer of the Year Mick Blue—with whom she won Best Boy/Girl Sex Scene in 2020—in a thrilling session for Deeper, no less.
Then she took on the six-time AVN Male Performer of the Year Manuel Ferrara, with Mick in the room, in the finale.
“It was kind of different because me and Manuel do scenes where’s it’s only me and Manuel and there’s tons of chemistry,” says Dior. “But this was just focused on me and Mick. Manuel was just the dick in the scene; he was just the person I was fucking. So it’s not really a Gianna and Manuel scene.”
Indeed, Dior went big on every sex scene, delivering what was called for in the hardcore department, but she also outdid herself when it came to the drama.
In particular, Dior shared some intense moments with Oliver Flynn, who rose to the occasion in a pivotal role of one of her therapy clients.
“I thought Oliver was fucking amazing in the therapy sessions we did,” Gianna says. “I kind of tuned into my own personal therapy sessions, like how I would feel and how I would be talking and reacting. I kind of went to that place in my mind, so the acting seemed like real life.”
In one of the movie’s most explosive sequences, Dior had to go into full mental breakdown mode.
“It actually was not challenging at all,” she says. “That was my favorite part of the entire movie. Kayden actually put me in a room by myself and told me, ‘Whatever you need to do to get yourself to that point where you’re so upset…
“So I just put myself in a room and sat there with my eyes closed and didn’t pay attention to anything else and thought about all the shitty things in my life and put them all together.”
She calls that scene “a one-take wonder.”
“I could only do it one time,” Gianna says. “That part was absolutely no acting whatsoever.”
Miller recalls being on set that day, watching her performance up close.
“I was hiding behind the monitors,” he jokes.
In all, the movie took parts of 15 days to shoot, Miller says.
“The level of complexity of this production was greater than anything we’ve ever put our minds to before and that made it a really fun experience,” he says.
“But there was never a time when we were unsure whether this was gonna make it or come in on time.”
Miller says the DVD release later this month would likely be branded as a Vixen x Deeper collaboration.
“Kayden Kross can create anything out of nothing,” Gianna says. “She can create something out of just like one word.”
Perhaps what Dior is most proud of with Psychosexual is “just letting myself be vulnerable.”
“It was definitely a very emotionally difficult project to do,” she says. “I had to really dig into personal feelings and grief and pain that I’ve experienced. And I feel that was the most difficult part. But I allowed myself to feel it and that I think everybody can relate to—not letting themselves feel things because it’s so difficult.”
