To Die For, a Paul Thomas film, ships this week from Vivid Entertainment Group, and its director feels it’s one of the highpoints of his long and award-strewn career.
"It is a very emotional love story,” Thomas told AVN.com. “No special effects, no fancy costumes, it’s a stripped-down, very elemental love story, actually between five people. The story itself is very strong. The acting is wonderful. And it manages to incorporate all the sex in a meaningful way. The script helps the sex and the sex helps the script. One couldn’t exist without the other.”
He compared it to his Justine (Cal Vista, 1993, AVN Best Film Award), the story of a father and son who fall in love with the same girl. To Die For, he said, is also “very intense emotionally — a story of falling in love with someone you shouldn’t but you can’t help yourself, a story of betrayal and obsession.”
The movie, he added, is not at all like some of his other Best Film winners, such as The New Devil in Miss Jones or Bad Wives, which he called “fancy motion pictures with alternate realities and alternated time lines. This is straight-ahead, a very simple story that anyone can understand.”
And he was quick to point out that the sex is “very hot. There’s a lot of it and I don’t pull many punches; some of it’s very nasty, but it’s not extreme. Because it’s not Rob Black, or even Rocco Siffredi, the sex sometimes gets the reputation of being more vanilla than it is. It’s not vanilla by any means.”
Thomas, his actors, and a crew that included cameramen Ralph Parfait and Jane Waters, shot for eight days on Los Angeles locations, including a houseboat in Marina Del Rey.
“Whenever I shoot on film I shoot for a week or more, the budget’s always $150,000 or more. That’s the market we [at Vivid] created for ourselves.” He said he shoots on film five times a year.
He had nothing but praise for the actors, starting with Vivid Girl Monique Alexander who plays the lead. Thomas said she was “very good, as was Austin Kincaid — surprisingly good, I didn’t expect as much out of her. As was Manuel [Ferrara], our Performer of the Year, he is also a good actor. Tommy Gunn also was very good.
“These people are in touch with their emotions; they bring their emotions to the screen, and it makes their characters more believable, and it makes the sex better.”
He was especially enthusiastic about French-born Liza Harper, who has a crucial supporting role. “She stood out above everyone. The other people did a great job — award-winning porn acting. Liza did wonderful, emotive acting on another level, the level that Savanna [Samson] did in Devil. It would have stood up in any mainstream motion picture.”
An experienced actor himself, Thomas has made his work with untrained performers something of a trademark.
“With people who don’t have much [acting] craft to fall back on,” he said, “I sort of developed a technique to almost trick them into being spontaneous. I’ll often turn the cameras on with no warning, no rehearsal, and say Go! Suddenly they’re giving spontaneous performances despite themselves. They’re coming up with original, intuitive behavior because they haven’t had a chance to think about it too much.
“If I’m not able to do that, if I start rehearsing, I usually need to do quite a bit of rehearsing. In other words I find it best to do almost no rehearsal or a lot of rehearsal. When I get in between I get in trouble.”
Thomas often pulls ideas from mainstream movies (“I’m watching films all the time”), always looking for a story framework that will accommodate well-motivated sex scenes. The idea for To Die For came from three French movies, primarily Francois Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door. Once he has the concept he turns it over to writers (in this case three of them) for a script.
The movie, he said, is aimed at “people who like to see an erotic film that’s like a real motion picture experience.”
He added, “What a pleasure it is to be able to deal on this level of filmmaking and be in the X-rated business.”
