LAS VEGAS—One of the highlights of Day One of the 2025 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo without question was the panel discussion featuring Ricky Greenwood, Casey Calvert, Romero, Lea Lexis, and Seth Gamble—all nominees for directing at the 42nd annual AVN Awards Show.
AVN Managing Editor Peter Warren moderated the session titled "The Director's Lens: Porn Cinema in the Content Age" at The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas.
The group focused on the viability of plot-driven features in the face of the popularity of online scene content, among numerous other topics.
"We've gathered some of the top directors of the business to talk about their craft," Warren said, introducing the participants. "Everybody here on this panel has a cinematic aesthetic—we're all cinephiles here—but we live in the age of quick-bite OnlyFans pop-pop-pop content. How do you approach what you do within that atmosphere?"
Gamble said, "I'm very conscious of [separation of a production into chapters]. When I directed my first feature, I realized that I had to think about what I wanted to do, but also think about it from a viewer's perspective: How do we make it digestible? It's a lot about telling the story before the sex scene, giving enough of a story to make them want to see the next part of it. I call a lot of my movies 'series' because we release them like episodic television, but when you add it all together it becomes a film."
"I have two very different opinions on this topic," Calvert said. "Most of the features I direct are technically series, they get released in sections on the website, but the sections are narrative-based as if it is episodic TV. For click-based sex scenes, I don’t think about that at all. Maybe I should. For features, for me it's about trying to incorporate the narrative through the sex scene, so it doesn’t go narrative, then let's pause while we fuck, then narrative. For me, it's important to continue the story through the sex, and have the sex inform the story."
"In my case, it depends on the studio," Greenwood pointed out. "If I wrote the script, I don’t think about it. I tell a story from beginning to end. It's problematic when you break it up into a series. In The Holdup, which I did for Digital Playground, the first episode is just a sex scene, the second one has a little bit of story, and the last episode is an hour and a half of action with one sex scene. It's hard for a studio to cut when I wrote the script because I write it like a mainstream movie." After pointing out that Brazzers and Romero send him scripts that are divided into episodes, Greenwood said, "Dorcel doesn’t really cut their movies into series, I think they're the last company that really wants to have a movie. They don’t care about the time a sex scene is taking. They get mad at me if a movie is more than two-and-a-half hours. They still have the old-school way of doing things. I need to have five sex scenes, but they don’t give me a time."
Romero, who is just starting to make features at his Hentaied studio, said, "I'm the owner of the company, so I don’t have a boss who says, 'You have to do this,' but you need to be conscious as a director of what's the interest, and what's it for. We are in this place where porn movies are one thing and porn clips are another thing, and it's really interesting to distinguish the two things. One is for fast consuming, and the other one needs to be interesting as a movie. It's really important to be conscious about those things."
Late arrival Lea Lexis ("Sorry, everybody. I apologize. I'm hard on people that are late, myself.") said, "We have to approach it by understanding the attention span of the customer. Something Brazzers understands is having a punch—an exciting thing that captures you—but do we have interest enough for you to want to commit to the rest of the story?"
When Warren asked about the construction of individual segments, Gamble said, "I think people want to feel like there's a reason for [sex] happening, but I when I capture sex, I also want to capture my performers having that chemistry, having that passion. That's what I've always found interesting. If something drags too much, people are like, 'Goddamn, I just wanna jerk off already.' How do we tell the stories we want to tell, but still make it digestible for people to watch and lead up to it?"
Calvert concurred with Warren's description of her sex scenes as "naturalistic and organic."
"Those are very important to me," she said. "The sex I like to shoot is very connected, very intimate. I want to show as much genuine chemistry as possible because I think that's fun to shoot. I think there are different kinds of porn fans: there are fans who want to watch Brazzers scenes; there are fans who want to watch amateur OnlyFans content of girls who don’t show their face at all; and there are fans who look for a narrative and a story, and they want to know these characters before watching them have sex."
Greenwood emphasized the different approaches of studios: Romero's studio, he said, is more interested in what leads to the sex scene than the sex itself. "If I get 10 minutes of that and five minutes of sex, my customers are happy. They want to see what's happening before the sex scene." For Digital Playground, "The energy, the angle for a sex scene is very important, so I shoot a sex scene with a more gonzo angle, because that's what the brand requires. For Dorcel, I try to be more cinematic. I haven't mastered that yet. I'm still searching for it. In my case, if you look at one of my movies, if you don’t like stories, you won’t like my movies."
Romero said his sex scenes are "way more fucked up, by far. You see a monster, and at first you are scared by the monster, like Beauty and the Beast, but as soon as the monster comes closer, you enter into this vision. The sex is the integrating part of it. The story should be integrated into getting into the sensuality, and the whole porn movie should be a part of it."
Lexis observed that the average porn viewer is "very loyal to their niche, and they rarely jump out of it. We can count on those BDSM fans to stick with that genre of porn. The viewer, when they watch porn, they have an urge. A desire of satisfaction. If you don’t lead into that niche right away, you might lose them. I shoot for multiple brands and all of them have different views on how we look at sex. For Twistys, it's very romantic, sensual, erotic. You focus on the beauty of the female. On Brazzers, it’s the satisfaction of an urge. It needs to be right away. The Brazzers customer doesn’t sit through a story. It's understanding who you're shooting for. I can gonzo-sneak under a dress, and there's pretty in the sneakiness of it all, or I can backlight it, and shine on it, and do a tease and a pan, a little bit of slo-mo, and there's beauty in that, too. It's knowing who you're shooting for, and who your customer is, and brand loyalty. There's a psychology to it: I think the porn viewer is pretty interesting."
Calvert said she approaches material "from a couple of different perspectives."
"Sometimes I am inspired by casting, and I come up with a story and a character that would suit that person; sometimes I am inspired by a mainstream film and I think, 'How can I take something that I thought was really cool in this movie and turn it into an entire porn movie?'" Casey continued. "I was told by Lust Cinema to make a summer pool party movie and that was all they gave me: summer pool party movie. How do I tell a story that I want to tell? For Spun, which I directed for Adult Time, they said they wanted an all-girl sleepover movie. How do I write a script that I'm excited to shoot? Figuring that out is fun for me."
Romero said he gets ideas from his fan forums, and "my fans are nuts. The comment I receive most is 'You can't do penetration from vagina to mouth, because the girl will die. But if you do it from the ass... that would work.' I've heard that more than 200 times. They tell me what they want to see and I have to figure out how to do it."
When Warren asked the panel about passion projects, Gamble said he had two in the last year: "Iris. I got that idea when talking with an Uber driver. I love telling stories about real-life situations in a more metaphorical way. The idea behind Iris was, 'Be careful how you treat people. You never know who you're fucking with.' And I launched an entire brand, LucidFlix, this year: A labor of love, something I really wanted to do. That's been amazing, to take what I've always loved about porn, mix things together and make it something I find enjoyable. It's been amazing for me."
Calvert said her passion project was shot for Erika Lust and hasn’t come out yet: "I took some friends, we went out to Joshua Tree, we shot them rock climbing, they had some sex on the rocks. It's a narrative featurette. Everyone held the camera, everyone was involved in the production including the cast. It was a little group of us in the desert making a piece of art. Kind of a docu-style featurette. I'm very, very excited for it to come out next year."
Greenwood remarked, "A feature is so much work that I don’t want to jump into a project that I don't want to do. It would be very painful. I did that in the past and it was not fun. It's hard to do, plus you're doing something you don’t want to do. This year, Dirty Cops was a fun movie because I like action movies and Digital Playground let me do an action film with stunts and fights." Romero said he was proud of a cosplay of Lord of the Rings in a forest he created in-studio with Valentina Nappi "and you have this giant tree, just fucking her ass. She was really up for it. It's up for Most Outrageous Scene."
Lexis was proud that she was actively directing a production while pregnant: "I wanted to prove that there can be women pornographers in this industry that could be successful and passionate regardless of stage of life. I directed Wasteland Ultra five months pregnant, 16-hour days, and when we finished I was seven months pregnant. I got more from my talent because they understood there was a mission here. They’ll do 18 hours if they believe in your mission."
When the floor was opened to questions, an audience member asked how the panel members dealt with burnout, leading Gamble to ask, "What is not-burnout?" before advocating "taking time for yourself, going to the gym, communicating with people who are outside the industry, getting perspective on life. I also have been sober almost eight years: that keeps me grounded a lot."
Calvert also expressed wonder about this not-burnout phenomenon before saying what worked for her was "saying no to a lot of things I don’t want to do, as a performer and as a director, and trying to only put my directing energy into something I'm really, really excited to make."
After jokingly crediting "drugs," Romero said he has directed more than 5000 scenes—"Not features, but scenes"—and when he deals with burnout, "I think facing stress is normal as a director, but sometimes we have to be the adult in the situation. If you don’t like what's around you, change it."
Lexis said she doesn't think it's about finding balance, "it's about balancing the extremes."
"On our job, you cannot go halfway," Lea reasoned. "I can't have only a six-hour, eight-hour schedule. When we're shooting a movie, we're there extremely long hours, you have to be one-thousand-percent immersed into it. In order to be on point, you have to have the other extreme: in your space, working on what you need to do away from the madness. Balancing those extremes will give you longevity: We all have to go hard at the same time, but not on multiple items at the same time. Learn to delegate. Learn to set aside the things that don’t require your attention, your expertise. Put the little things into delegation. Let go of the things you don't need to do personally."
Greenwood said he didn’t have a burnout problem: "I'm a workaholic. I would burn out if I don’t work. Alive was a nightmare: we had live performance, we had to record music, it was super-hard and I gave all my energy into finish it. Then we had to jump on Gold Diggers the next week. My production manager said, 'Dude, kill the shoot. Push it for a month. You will never be able to do it.'
"Just because you said that, I will prove you wrong. We did it. I'll tell you, it was hell. When you do a feature, you get into a place where 'no matter what happens, we're going.' You have to get that into your brain. We'll figure it out when we get there. The key is, the crew that I have is the best people in the business. If you trip, they'll catch you. That's the key: finding people who want to do the trip with you."
