The Girlfriend Experience

[modage]

watch it now for 9.99

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00284GCEE/

[Stefen]

Someone needs to rip that shit.

[Convael]

Alright well... I saw the movie last night.  It was decent.  A lot of it seemed like Soderbergh just fucking around and doing weird things with the camera.  It was shot on Red One if I'm not mistaken?  This film looks a lot more "digital" than Che did.  The pacing was very strange... Sasha Grey said that the original cut (which showed at Sundance) had a lot different pacing than this one.  The acting was wonderful I thought all around, except for Sasha Grey.  She has this thing with her eyebrows... they're just always always up and she always has this kinda tongue-in-cheek look going on for her, like she's sitting there going "Hey look at me, I'm acting, look at me act, can't I act so well?" 

The Q&A was kinda awkward honestly because any little thing ("I don't wanna shove information down peoples' throats", "Let's bang out some rapid-fire questions") that could be construed as sexual innuendo got about a two minute long laugh from the audience and it just got old after a while.  One of the funnier parts of the night where was she said that she wants to change porn and, "I hate quoting Jack Horner from Boogie Nights, but I wanna keep them watching after they've cum."  That only got a laugh from me and one of my good friends sitting next to me which seemed to bother Grey.  Then she said that she likes to psych herself up before a porn shoot a-la Raging Bull and when no one except me and my friend laughed again she called out the audience for not having seen any movies.  It was a fun night in all.

[Stefen]

You probably could have fucked her.

[Convael]

What?

[MacGuffin]

Clip:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810066471/video/13242808

[Stefen]

What?

She was into you, bro. You should have slam dunked that.

[Pozer]

she always has this kinda tongue-in-cheek look going on for her

that wasn't a tongue.....bro.

[Convael]

I don't understand this place at all.

[martinthewarrior]

I guess I understand a knee jerk reaction to Sasha's acting. However, I think it worked incredibly well. I was impressed by her performance in this movie. I personally don't care if someone sucks dicks for a living. I thought she did a really good job, but I'd like to watch it again. Her boogie nights reference might read utterly naive, but I have no problem with the sentiment she conveyed. Do I feel like it's possible for porno to become a truly viable "art form"? Probably not. But if that's the profession she chooses to take part in, I don't mind her wide eyed optimism concerning it's potential, however misguided I feel it might be.

[SiliasRuby]

I don't understand this place at all.

Me neither but I stay for the dick and fart jokes.

[Gold Trumpet]

Do I feel like it's possible for porno to become a truly viable "art form"? Probably not.

Porn has played at Cannes before and relative to other arts, artists that could be called pornographic in today's conservative age have competed at a high level.

An artistic porn can be made if the aesthetic interest isn't just getting someone off. The main difference between most porns and films is that basic idea, but both mediums play with extreme content in their own ways.

[MacGuffin]

One-on-One with Steven Soderbergh
Source: Edward Douglas; ComingSoon

Ever since he received two Oscar nominations in the same year, director Steven Soderbergh was a filmmaker who needed no introduction, and its somewhat surprising that was just eight years ago, considering how prolific he's been, often cranking out two movies a year, whether it's the three big-budget "Danny Ocean" movies he did with pals George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon or more art-driven films like The Good German and Solaris.

His latest, The Girlfriend Experience, continues the tradition of indie filmmaking he's frequently revisited in the 20 years since Sex, Lies, and Videotape. It's the second film in Soderbergh's deal with HDNet, starring adult film star Sasha Grey as high-priced New York escort Chelsea, who balances her demanding job with spending time with her personal trainer boyfriend (Chris Santos) until she connects with a client, threatening her existing relationship. Mostly improvised, it follows Grey as she interacts with various people who might be able to help her career, including the creepy owner of an adult entertainment website, played by film critic Glenn Kenny, who hopes to get a "review copy" of Chelsea's services.

While it's already been playing on video-in-demand for a few weeks, having seen the film twice on the big screen, it's an amazing looking film that really deserves to be seen in that environment.

ComingSoon.net had a rare chance to spend a half hour with the prolific filmmaker talking about the process of making The Girlfriend Experience. We'd been wanting to do longer interviews with filmmakers for a while now, and we were thrilled to learn Soderbergh felt the same way, so it was great to have an opportunity to talk to him at length about a New York-based film we genuinely love, as well as other aspects of his career.

ComingSoon.net: We spoke a few years ago when you were promoting "Bubble" and you had signed a deal with HDNet to do five more movies using this process, so at what point did this project come about?
Steven Soderbergh: This is like spring of '06 we wrote the outline for this, so it's only a couple months after "Bubble" came out. It seemed to be a story that could fit within this methodology that I'm hoping to employ on all six of these. David (Levien) and Brian (Koppelman) and I kind of knocked this outline out and then kinda stuck it in a drawer 'cause I wasn't sure when I was gonna get to it. Then of course the (Elliot) Spitzer thing broke a year ago and I actually felt like, "Oh, maybe we want a little bit of distance from that." As it turned out, it wasn't really a factor, so we'd been percolating on it for a while. We did a lot of interviews in the spring of '06 and then we did a second round just before we started shooting like last fall. That's where the hobbyist idea came in. It wasn't in the original outline. In the intervening two years, the escorts we talked to said that this was becoming more of an issue for them, these reviewers that were getting kinda increasingly just snarky, you know? Just how frustrating it was for them.

CS: I wasn't even aware there were sites in the adult entertainment industry that reviewed escort services. The most surprising thing to me was that you only shot this last October and November and how much of this stuff is just so recent and timely. Once you started shooting, was this a faster process to finish it than normal?
Soderbergh: Yeah, by design the shoot's very quick and the edit's very quick and they're designed to be churned out in a way. I don't mean that in the sense that nobody cares, but the design of them in terms of how much money we're spending. In this case, we have an element of topicality that we want to maintain, so we were trying to turn it around quickly. Initially I wanted it to come out Valentines Day, but as it turned out, Magnolia felt like we couldn't get the machine up and running in time, so we bagged that. The good news is that the economic stuff is still going on, and I think the thing that saves it from being harmed by the topicality is the fact that it's not the core of the movie. The narrative doesn't turn on some topical event, it's just this filigree that's going on around the edges that makes it feel specific.

CS: Were all the actors sitting down together and all of the economic stuff just came up in their improvised conversations?
Soderbergh: Yeah, that's where everybody ended up going which to me was sort of telling in a way that may not be apparent at first blush. For instance, in "Bubble" when we would do some sort of structured or extended improvisation, invariably the characters would end up discussing something personal that happened to them. They would bring their personal history into the conversation. People in this movie could've done the same thing. They chose to talk about money, like every one of them, and that tells you something both about this specific slice of people in Manhattan and then also something about Manhattan and then also something about the country. I mean, not that anybody would know that that's how it all ended up here, but it was certainly interesting to me, given that they could talk about anything they wanted that everybody basically wanted to talk about money.

CS: That's one of the many layers of the film, the fact that despite the economic problems, people still have money to pay for company and sex from these women. There's also its explorations of being a real girlfriend vs. fake girlfriend - Christine vs. Chelsea. When you went into this, did you have any idea that so many different things would come out of it?
Soderbergh: Well, you're hoping. What's fun about it is you've created a net of a certain size and a certain shape that's designed to catch certain things, but you never know until you're rolling whether you're gonna get what you want or not. What you have to do in a way is let go of the idea of what you want and release yourself to what you get and sort of let it move where it's gonna move and then, the trick is you're collecting this material and then you sit down and you break it all down into pieces and build bins that have different subject matter headings and then I'll start to connect things like, "Oh, that reference in this scene is connected to a reference in this scene. This section of the film is gonna revolve around this idea." Then I'll move them and you sort of just begin to mold it out of what you've got.

The key is to have this sort of basic structure so that people kind of feel like they're moving in a direction and it's not just a free-for-all. At the same time, I'm literally encouraging as we're getting ready to shoot something and I'm saying, for instance, Sasha and Chris Santos, the breakup scene where she comes in and says, "I'm going away." I'll have a conversation with Sasha where I'll say to her, "Under no circumstances are you staying in this apartment tonight and going on this trip. No matter what happens you are leaving this apartment to go on this trip." Then I take Chris aside and I say, "Under no circumstances should you let her go on this trip. Like, do whatever you have to do to keep her from going on this trip." So you've given them their goals. They're in opposition and then in that case, I'm watching to see how long it's gonna take one of them to pop because that's a very polarizing scene for people because it goes on so long. What I like about it is, it sounds real to me. It feels like that circumstance in the sense that it's repetitive. Both of them keep thinking. "If I frame my position in a sentence that's slightly different I'm gonna get a different result." They both keep thinking that and they keep coming back and back and back. They're both sort of using language that you can tell they've heard somewhere else that they've incorporating from a movie or something that somebody said somewhere. Again, they're trying to find a way to unlock this. They're convinced, "I'm gonna say this thing and it's gonna make everything okay." It's just not happening. Eventually, it implodes.

CS: With that scene in particular, was that 20 minutes of straight shooting and then just grabbing a chunk that worked as a whole?
Soderbergh: I think the shot ended up being like five and a half minutes. I think the whole take was probably 10, it continued on from there and then she finally just gets up and goes to the back and says, "I'm going to pack and then I'm leaving." So like I said, I shot it and I thought, "Okay, I know I can make something out of that. I don't know how I'm going to use it, I may fragment it, I may whatever, but I've got enough to build something with."

CS: A lot of people try to make naturalistic movies using improvisation and non-actors rather than a written script. This seems natural but it also seems like every single line could have been written by a good writer. Even so, it's somewhat strange to see two writers credited for a movie that's largely improvised. Did they help work out the structure after you'd finished shooting?
Soderbergh: No, it was really just the three of us kind of sitting down and generating this detailed scene-by-scene breakdown of what we were gonna shoot and what the subjects are in each of the scenes that we want the people to hit. But from that point on, yeah, you're fishing.

CS: Was all of that figured out before you started shooting, or was some of it done while shooting when you realized you had to tie things together?
Soderbergh: No, while we were shooting we didn't add any. We stuck to the outline and we shot in sequence 'cause that's very helpful for the performers to sort of be moving even though I knew when we were shooting it that I was gonna fragment it, which is why I was very conscious before shooting a scene somewhere that I know it's gonna be part of a kind of memory sequence. I'm trying to pick up images that I can use as recurring keystone images that I layer in that you realize, "Oh, she's going upstate. Now I know why in seeing that." You know, stuff like that.

CS: Shooting chronologically probably was important to working with Sasha, but how does that work as far as locations? Except for the UN scenes in "Che," I couldn't think of another movie where you actually shot on location in New York City.
Soderbergh: I did three shots at the beginning of "Full Frontal." (This) was the first time I've really made a New York movie.

CS: So you did it chronologically, shooting at specific locations but without the budget to really block off streets and sidewalks?
Soderbergh: Well, that's the good news and that's why I'm so happy with all the street stuff. The Red camera is so small and really doesn't present like a movie camera, so I could set it up on a tripod and it would be me and somebody sort of standing next to it to kind of block it and then we'd tell Sasha, "Go across the street and walk toward us." Nobody would know this was happening and you'd get a much – first of all, we got this free production value, like these giant street shots, but also, the way people are moving doesn't look like that typical, "Background action!" It has a more naturalistic feel and that's because of our totally stealth, low impact working method. All in, it's about ten people.

CS: So in New York, you can get away with ten people standing around making a movie.
Soderbergh: Oh yeah, and if we'd go out on the street, it'd be just me and two other people and we'd keep everybody else away. Most people, if you saw us on the street you'd go, "Oh, that's a news crew," 'cause we looked like a news crew. The camera looked like a news camera, small tripod and two people standing next to it. You just felt like, "Oh, they must be shooting some exterior shots or something for some news story." It just didn't feel like that. There's no trucks, there's no lights, there's nothing.

CS: A lot of attention has been paid to Sasha's performance and deservedly so, but I want to talk about Chris because he really is in the movie quite a bit, probably 30-40% of the movie. I want to ask how you found and cast him and the decision to spend so much time showing his everyday life as a personal trainer.
Soderbergh: He was a friend. He was training David Levien, the writer who plays David in the movie. So when we were talking about the movie and I said, "I want the character to be a personal trainer. I want them both in the personal service business." He said, "Oh, you should meet Chris. He's that guy." So, I met with Chris in Los Angeles and sort of walked him through what we were gonna do. I mean, that's sort of him. He's a very open, verbal, energetic guy and I thought he'd be great for this.

The trickier part was what in the outline was called Client F, which is David, that was how he was referred to at the time. I was talking to Carmen, the casting director and Greg the producer 'cause I wanted him to be somebody that worked in the entertainment industry. "How do you picture this guy?" I said, "He's like David a little," and both of them said, "Well, why don't we just get David Levien?" I wanted a contrast between the two of them. I wanted there to be something, I wanted him to be a little older, I wanted him to have a certain sense of gravitas. I didn't want him to be a caricature of a Hollywood person. David's a very genuine, sincere person, but also, nothing escapes him. He has a very sort of detailed vision of what's going on around him. You cannot throw bullsh*t past this guy. So I wanted someone that Chelsea would meet and feel like, "Wow, he's so different than Chris." It took a little bit of strong arming to get him to commit to doing it, but in the last scene they have together which is the first scene they meet in the hotel room, when she comes in and is upset, he's so good, he's so still. The way he looks at her and the way he listens to her, I'm telling you, there are a lot of actors it would take you half a day to get them to strip it down to that, the way he's just looking at her and listening. I think she's really good in that scene too where she gets upset. You finally get the sense that there's something going on, that you really see, "Oh, she does have to work to keep this stuff pressed down." So those are the pleasures of working in this way. You see things happen like that in front of you that are unexpected.

CS: I didn't realize that was David, the co-writer of the film, until Sasha told me; I watched the movie twice without realizing it. This is such a strange cast because Brian found Sasha, David found Chris and you have a real critic playing an exaggerated version of a critic.
Soderbergh: Exaggerated?

CS: Well, yeah, I'd say so. The character Glenn plays might be the creepiest movie character I've seen since Dennis Hopper in "Blue Velvet."
Soderbergh: Really? First of all, that location's fantastic. When Greg and Rob Striem the location manager said – 'cause that wasn't what was scripted at all, it's an apartment – and they said, "Look, this is a sort of left field idea, but we found this furniture store in Brooklyn and you gotta check it out." When I saw the pictures, I went, "That's spectacular." We didn't touch anything. The combination of that and what he's saying is really unnerving.

CS: It kind of reminded me of Philip Seymour Hoffman's character in "Punch Drunk Love," how he was running a phone sex operation from a furniture store. It also takes the idea of a casting couch to another level. Having directed Julia Roberts to an Oscar, how did you feel Sasha stood up as an actress? When I spoke to her, she was well aware of the stigma about coming from the adult film world. Do you feel she has what it takes to get past that and go up against other actresses who come from more traditional backgrounds for roles?
Soderbergh: Look, if I had something else that I thought she was good for I wouldn't hesitate to use her again. I think how she's used is really gonna determine whether or not her career moves in this other direction. I don't know how much of a conscious or unconscious stigma there is. I don't know that people care that much. I think it's really gonna depend on her and the choices she makes and how she performs. Porn has become so mainstream that I just don't think people are really thinking, "Oh, I don't want to see that because there's a porn actress in it." The level of traffic would indicate that people really don't have a problem with it. It'll just be interesting.

CS: It's really something you almost can't avoid talking about when interviewing her, which is unfortunate. With other actresses, you don't really ask about their previous jobs of being a waitress or whatever they were before. It never really comes up. But with Sasha, I feel like it will always come up.
Soderbergh: Yeah, but the thing about her--the reason she's such a mold breaker--is her back story and her attitude about the adult industry is just very atypical. She's not the kind of person that normally ends up in that business. The fact that she did it by choice because she felt like, "I have this part of me that's gonna speak. Well, I have two options, I could go work in an office somewhere and then on the weekends go out and try and find somebody who's into the same sh*t I'm into, or I can turn this thing that's inside of me into a business and make money off of it." Those are two choices.

CS: It's pretty amazing actually, even the fact that she's been working on a documentary about her three years in the adult entertainment industry, and she's only 21-years-old.
Soderbergh: Yeah, she's 21. She has a lot of very formative years in front of her. The years of 21 to 24 for me, a lot of stuff happened to me personally that ended up generating a lot of material. It's a crucial period in your life.

CS: Obviously you're very comfortable both working in the studio system and making films independently, you do jump around a lot. The advantages and disadvantages to both are very obvious. I was curious about that because you don't really see a lot of filmmakers who can do that, who can easily jump back and forth from one movie to the next. Is it just something in way your brain works and you can do that?
Soderbergh: Well, I think it's about understanding the business and understanding the place for art in the business. I mean, it's really about analyzing, let's say there's an idea that you're attracted to and you feel could be a movie. Then you've gotta analyze, "Well, what is the audience for this? Who's gonna go see this thing potentially? On what scale should it be executed? If the appropriate scale of execution is disproportionate to how big you think the audience is, can you do it another way? If you can't, should you continue to try and talk someone into doing it or not?" Now, I make mistakes. "The Good German" lost every penny - Warner's lost every penny they spent on that movie. There was a sort of calculated risk. In retrospect, we made an assumption that we would get enough critical support to sort of build the movie out through a platform release. It didn't happen, it just didn't happen. We got crushed and we couldn't get any traction because nobody like it.

CS: But can you separate the artist who wants to make a certain type of movie from the producer/businessman who knows that you have a certain amount a movie needs to make back?
Soderbergh: Well, I look back on that and as a piece of art, that's as close as I've ever gotten to getting what I had in my head. The problem is, look, with $32 million, me, George, Cate, and Toby all working for very, very, very low money to pull it off. I look at it now and if I had a similar thing now, I would say, "If I can't figure out how to make it for $15 million I'm not gonna do it." You can't just keep losing people money. There's sort of an inverse thing happening on the "Ocean's" movies, which is: within the parameters of a big budget movie with stars in it, how weird can I get? What sort of stylistic tricks and loops can I inject in it without totally pissing everybody off? It's fun to see how much of a piece of crazy pop art can I put into this? So that's a long way of saying I think you've just gotta be smart about. What is the idea? Who's it for? How much is it gonna cost to do it properly? On a gut level, do you feel like this has the possibility of returning its investment? You've gotta find this balance of doing stuff that you want to do and acknowledging that this is a very expensive hobby.

CS: The next two movies you're doing are book adaptations, "The Informant" and "Moneyball," working with two actors you've worked with before (Matt Damon and Brad Pitt) albeit as part of an ensemble. Can you talk about those two movies and how you read those books and decided those would be movies you'd want to make?
Soderbergh: We heard the story (for "The Informant") on NPR, got the rights to the book, started working on it - this is 2001, and this would've been Jennifer Foss and Ben Cosgrove, who were running Section A. We picked up the book, I sent it to Mattie, Mattie said, "I'm in." We hired Scott Burns to write the script. It was sitting there waiting for a long time, waiting for a slot for me and for Matt. Again, that's a $22 million movie and we decided at a certain point to make it a comedy, which I think was the best move. It's not "The Insider," it's more like "Citizen Ruth." I think Matt's genuinely hilarious in it, playing a kind of... sort of Willy Loman on acid.

CS: So I'd guess that "Moneyball" is more serious?
Soderbergh: No, it's gonna be funny. I think it's gonna be dramatic, but I think it's gonna be funnier than people expect. That's another situation where I'm injecting a lot of real people playing the roles.

CS: Yeah, I was reading that you were doing some documentary-type stuff for that movie. You mentioned that "Informant" started in 2001, and you seem to be attached to so many different projects that you're working on at any given time.
Soderbergh: Well, I try, as a director... there's only like two movies that I've developed that I haven't made. I like to have a lot of plates spinning, but at a certain point I want to grab that plate and put some food on it. So yeah, I think "A Confederacy of Dunces" and "Human Nature" are the only things that I tried to get going and couldn't.

CS: But in general when you're making a movie, you're always prepping something else?
Soderbergh: Always prepping, yeah.

CS: I wanted to ask about how "Che" did internationally, because I thought it would be a home run in Spanish markets, but I couldn't find any international box office information.
Soderbergh: Yeah, sometimes they don't. I don't know why they're not tracking that. Yeah, we got killed by piracy. We did really, really well in Spain when we opened in September, then after that every Spanish speaking country we went to we got crushed because the DVD had been out for months. It did well in Japan, and it did well in the UK. It hasn't come out in Germany yet. We did so-so in France; France we were disappointed; we thought we'd do better. Yeah, like I said, in Mexico and South America we just got killed. At some point I'm gonna sit down and collect all of it and find out exactly what we did.

CS: At Sundance this year, they were celebrating the 20th anniversary of "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" which to me seems surreal. I'm not sure how it feels to you. Filmmakers, critics and moviegoers often reference Fellini and Cassavetes and movies that generally came out over 20 years ago, but you don't really hear people doing the same thing for movies from the last five years. For instance, "Good Night, And Good Luck" was a great movie, but you don't really hear people today talking about it. I was curious about how you feel about that?
Soderbergh: Yeah, there's so many more movies being made that the burn rate is faster and like you said, things don't stick culturally. They don't stick the way they used to. When people made "Chinatown" that sort of lodged itself into people's consciousness and never went away and I don't know that movies function that way anymore just because of the volume of stuff that's coming at people. You just don't have those kind of benchmarks anymore. There's a benchmark every six days it feels like.

CS: As a critic obviously I see way too many movies, but I was thinking that as someone who studies a lot of older films, I wondered why you thought movies made these days just don't stick with people as much as the films of the '80s, '70s and earlier.
Soderbergh: Yeah, I mean, it doesn't hurt my life, but it's frustrating to think that, like I said, even movies that hit don't have the kind of influence that "The Godfather" had. Like the equivalent big box office hit, it becomes a big box office hit and people talk about the fact that it made all this money, but it doesn't have this cultural impact of something like "The Godfather." Although "Avatar"... Holy sh*t.

CS: Have you actually seen some stuff?
Soderbergh: I've seen some stuff. It's the craziest sh*t ever.

CS: Wow, that's a big recommendation.
Soderbergh: Yeah, that could just negate everything I just said.

The Girlfriend Experience opens in New York and L.A. on Friday, May 22, while continuing its run on HDNet's Video-on-Demand. Look for our exclusive interview with Soderbergh's leading lady, Sasha Grey, sometime next week.

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive: Sasha Grey Talks about The Girlfriend Experience
Source: Edward Douglas; ComingSoon

Before this year, your awareness of adult film star Sasha Grey would likely have outed you as a porn-loving pervert, but thankfully, Steven Soderbergh has made it okay to admire the self-made film star by casting her as the lead in his new movie The Girlfriend Experience. In the movie, Grey plays Chelsea, a high-priced Manhattan escort trying to balance her everyday life with a real boyfriend (Chris Stamos) with her job, which is essentially being paid by various men to be their girlfriend for a limited time.

Made via the same filmmaking techniques Soderbergh used for Bubble, working with non-actors, improvised dialogue and the newest in high-def digital cameras, the results are a far more layered effort than one might suspect. The film spends most of its time following Grey around both as Chelsea, being interviewed and having various lunch meetings, and as her "secret identity" Christine, trying to juggle the difficulties in maintaining a relationship with her desire to be the best in her business. Things get more confusing when she connects with one of her clients and agrees to go away with him for the weekend, something that doesn't bode well with her previously patient and understanding boyfriend. Soderbergh and his cast use this environment to explore diverse subjects, such as the current economical issues, take a couple shots at criticism via the use of real film critic Glenn Kenny as the sleazy "Erotic Connoiseur," as well as capture New York City from a very different perspective, one we rarely get to see.

It's a great role for Grey, who comes across as incredibly mature for someone who only just turned 21 a few months back. Then again, she had already been a huge star in the adult film business since entering it at the age of 18. Considering how few adult film actresses are able to make the transition to real dramatic acting, it's quite a breakthrough, and we're convinced that if anyone will break down the wall between mainstream filmmaking and the world of porn, it'll be Grey. (Bridging that gap, Grey co-starred with James Gunn earlier this year in the funniest episode of his Spike webseries "PG Porn," which you can watch here.)

ComingSoon.net was slightly nervous about sitting down with Grey, because we'd heard how feisty she can be with journalists, having been rather vocal about her disdain towards past interviewers in the past. We actually had quite a pleasant conversation.

ComingSoon.net: I made sure to check your Twitter feed before coming here to make sure you hadn't tweeted "The next journalist to ask me about that, I'm going to kill."
Sasha Grey: (laughs)

CS: I've seen the movie twice including the preview at Sundance, so did Steven just call you directly or go through your agent?
Grey: Brian Koppelman, one of his writers, actually contacted me through MySpace 'cause he and Steven had read an article about me in Los Angeles Magazine, and he said, "Hey, Steven's casting for a new film and we're interested in talking to you about a role." (I said,) "Yeah, okay, I'm not just going to come in and meet you at a café. How am I supposed to really know? So have Steven leave me a voice mail when I get home" and lo and behold, there was a message from Steven and I flip out because I'm a fan, so it was really exciting for me. We didn't meet the same day but within that week's time frame, I met with him at the Warner Bros. studio and had about a 45-minute meeting, that was it. It was a really unorthodox way of casting.

CS: What did he tell you about the movie? Did Brian already have a script he could send you or did he just say that it was with Soderbergh?
Grey: Oh, no, no. I can't recall to the best of my memory, but I know he just left it up to the meeting. I don't think he really said what the movie was about in the Email.

CS: Did Steven have any kind of script or treatment to show you or did he just tell you what he was going for?
Grey: There was no outline or script at the time. I'm sure they were working on one, but they didn't give me one. We just talked about the film and basically that the girl was in a relationship with a guy, but she was also an escort. Ultimately, she thinks she's in control, but at the end of the movie, we know that... (sorry, we're not going to spoil it for ya!)

CS: So he knew what he wanted to do but did he want you to do any research into the character or the escort business?
Grey: The day we met, I asked him "Are there any films on prostitution you want me to watch?" And he said (Godard's) "Vivre sa vie" but nothing else. He was like, "Don't cloud your mind with any other films, 'cause I don't want you to even subconsciously bring those characteristics into this film." He also said to watch "Pierrot le fou," not that it has anything to do with prostitution, it's more about the dynamic between the characters. I actually went home and started Googling "escorting" and "escorts." (laughs) Surprisingly, it's hard to find information, unless you want to buy one... but about two weeks before we shot the film, the casting director Carmen E-mailed Steven and I a bunch of links to escorting blogs and that really gave me an interesting insight into some of these women's lives.

CS: Is it very common for escort to keep a working journal of all their jobs like Chelsea does?
Grey: I think the way she did it was a bit different. The women who have the blogs, I think it's like an anonymous thing, and they just write about random stuff, where Chelsea or Christine went home and actually kept record of everything.

CS: How did Steven get you acclimated to the themes of the film of Christine being the real girlfriend vs. Chelsea as the fake girlfriend? Was a lot of the ways he wanted to differentiate the two characters in the script or outline?
Grey: Not so much. He kind of left that up to me and the rest of the cast, deciding how we wanted to take things and that was largely because the film was improvised. There would sometimes be key points we would have to hit, but whether or not that had to do with specific relationships, I wouldn't necessarily say that's the case.

CS: I was curious about the improv, because there are two writers credited to the screenplay in the end credits. Were they on set throwing out ideas before you started filming that you had to incorporate into your conversations?
Grey: We got an outline the day before we started shooting, so that was what they wrote. I know that Brian was on set a few times and so was David, because David is actually in the film. He played the guy I fall in love with.

CS: I guess he wrote that part of the script.
Grey: (laughs) Actually, Steven talked him into that, like right before we shot.

CS: Where did they find Chris? You only have a few scenes with him but were you aware of what was going on with his side of the story?
Grey: Chris was friends with David Levien, because at one point, maybe two years ago, Chris was actually a personal trainer in New York City, and he and David have known each other for ten years.

CS: Why do you think Chelsea falls for David? It seems like she has a very specific set of rules for the men she "dates" but she clearly throws out all her rules when she meets him.
Grey: Yeah, well I think that has to do with her personology. She sees that and thinks this is a perfect match and falsely translates that into their date, you know? She's hoping and she projects that she wants him to be everything that the book says he is.

CS: Do you know anything about that stuff personally or did Steven have you do any research into it?
Grey: There's like four or five books on this, and I took them home a couple weeks before we started shooting and I looked into it as much as I could and tried to have a general idea of what it was. But it's so dense and so involved because it's over 25 years of research, so I just tried to remember the things that were most important to the character.

CS: Do you know if there are a lot of escorts who use those methods to filter out their clients?
Grey: One of the women Steven and I met with does follow that. She does screen her clients like that. She asks for their birthday, and she says her personal safety has always been fine if she sticks to that, which is odd.

CS: It's especially odd when you see some of your clients over the course of the movie and some are fairly creepy, even if they're okay by the birthdays.
Grey: Yeah, exactly!

CS: Can you talk about some of the guys you ended up working with in those scenes? I saw Glenn Kenny earlier and he had shaved his beard so he looked more like his character.
Grey: Obviously Glenn and Mark Jacobson were two amazing characters just within themselves, not just within the context of the film. One of the guys was kind of creepy on set, and everyone was looking around like "Woah, he's kind of weird," the way he was looking at everybody, but he was the one exception. Everybody else was really personable and everybody got along.

CS: What did Steven tell the people who you did scenes with in terms of them knowing what was going on, since you'd obviously been involved in the process the whole time and they just came in for a day or two? Did Steven give Mark Jacobson questions to ask during your interview?
Grey: Yeah, there'd be a few keypoints that he'd want us to hit and be sure to put that in the scene, but everything else was kind of up to us, and that was a big challenge carrying the improvisation with non-actors, because they don't know how to keep that momentum going. But I think that's also what's unique about this style of shooting, that's why Steven wanted to approach it in this way. That's the beauty in it, but meeting some of these guys was so funny, because like the diaper guy, the conversation he's having on the phone is very similar to a conversation he was telling us he had earlier that morning.

CS: When you improvise a movie, it can go one of two ways. It can sound really natural but it could also sound forced. This sounds really natural, but I can definitely see a good writer writing this dialogue. Did he stop rolling at any point and feed you any lines?
Grey: No. We did maybe four takes tops per scene and that was it.

CS: Did Mark write the original New Yorker article about escorts that inspired Steven to explore this?
Grey: No, Mark wrote an article on... I don't think it was Ashlee Dupree but I think it was another girl right before Ashlee, around the same timeframe.

CS: He did mention at Sundance that one of the reasons he casts you was that he thought you'd be more comfortable with doing nudity, but in this movie, there's no sex in the movie at all, there's a little bit of nudity, but it's very innocuous. Was that him just preparing for doing that and then he decided not to have any of that in the movie?
Grey: I don't know. You'd have to ask him that, but going into the initial meeting with him, I just assumed I'd be naked, and then when we got the outline the day before we started shooting, it said "Sex Scene with Client So-and-So" and "Sex Scene with This" but I think that... just speaking off of my intuition, I think he decided he wasn't going to do that, at least a few weeks before we started shooting. But you'd have to ask him.

CS: There are obviously a number of shots at critics in this film including Glenn's review of Chelsea, which isn't very nice at all and it makes him seem much meaner than he really is. I was curious about some of the lines like the one about journalists being intrusive, was that all from you?
Grey: Part of it was from me and I think the intrusive part was more Chelsea. I've been asked all day, "So what are the similarities? You guys are a lot a like, right?" and I'm like, "No, not really."

CS: You mean that people who've just met you think that?
Grey: Yeah, like the one thing I would say was similar was the encounters with the journalists, because Chelsea or Christine is a very paranoid person. We see her buying pre-paid phones, she doesn't take her ID or any personal information on her dates, so that kind of translates into the meeting with the journalist where she's like, "Well, I dunno, you can give me up to the police." She doesn't know what is going on and she doesn't know what his true intentions are whereas me, I've just been burned by the media a few times (laughs) so sometimes I get defensive. So yeah, I definitely use a little bit of that frustration (laughs)... so it was a little cathartic for me.

CS: There's a lot in the movie about separating the real person (Christine) from the made-up one (Chelsea), so how do you feel about people seeing this movie and thinking, "Okay, she's just playing herself." Do you think that's just not the case?
Grey: Yeah, I think people think they know me from my adult films and they go in with a preconceived bias of "That's just Sasha Grey" because they can't forget watching me having sex, you know what I mean? (laughs) But the one thing I would say, if I was playing Devil's Advocate, is that Steven did want me to bring my personality and my confidence into the film, while at the same time creating this character. Trying to fuse the two together and being as natural as one can be in front of the camera, since it creates an interesting dynamic and for lack of a better word--interesting is an understatement--but it creates a very interesting film because it is so experimental.

CS: I think a lot of people who see this might not even be aware of your previous work or know that the Erotic Connoiseur is a real film critic, etc.
Grey: Going back to what you said. Robert De Niro has a thick New York accent, so are you going to watch him in "Goodfellas" and then watch him in "Casino" and say, "Oh, I'm just watching Robert De Niro"?

CS: The problem with that example is that Robert De Niro is one of those actors who just basically has this thing he does, and you can never separate his roles from being De Niro.
Grey: I think moreso now maybe. Okay, let's choose a more recent example of someone like Edward Norton, because his affect or the way he speaks may be the same in one film doesn't mean that he's just playing himself just because he sounds the same or looks the same.

CS: I'm really curious to ask Steven if he could ever imagine making this movie with someone like Julia Roberts, if it would even remotely be the same movie.
Grey: (laughs)

CS: I was also curious about shooting in New York, because Steven hasn't really shot here very much. Was he closing down streets and stuff like that?
Grey: No it was total Cassavetes style, just put up a sign "If you walk by here, you might be filmed" (laughs) so it was pretty cool.

CS: Did anyone see you on the street and recognize you while you were shooting?
Grey: Yeah, I actually saw a few friends like walking down the street and they were like, "Why are you in New York?" (laughs) in between takes, so that was pretty funny, but usually, I'd get the double take. People wouldn't actually say anything.

CS: Ultimately, what was the experience like going from doing adult movies to doing your first mainstream movie--I'm not sure what the proper term would be--with Steven Soderbergh, especially since he was working in a different style than he normally does? Are you going to look for other movie experiences like this one or do you want to go out and create a different character?
Grey: I would definitely love the opportunity to play another character maybe in more of a traditional sense whereas in "The Girlfriend Experience," it was very liberating as an actor to not having to hit your mark or worrying about running into a light when you're in the middle of a scene, but at the same time, having the opportunity to just do a traditional film would also be fun as well.

CS: I was reading something about you making a documentary about your life; is that true?
Grey: Yeah, I started it when I was 18 and I'm 21 now. I'm doing it with somebody else, and I'm actually trying to figure out if we're going to extend it past 21, because time flew, and I feel like there are a lot of moments that we kind of missed I would say, just because I don't have a camera with me all the time. That I'm still working on.

CS: Obviously, people write autobiographies when they're much older, but I don't think anyone's ever done a self-documentary at such a young age. Do you have a lot of footage right now that you'd eventually have to go through and edit together?
Grey: Yeah, we have an editor. The thing is I did this article... I was only in the industry for maybe about two months and I did this article for the Los Angeles Magazine--actually the one Steven and Brian read--and the guy followed me for three months, but he did a very piss-poor job and flaked out on me all the time, but it kind of gave me the inspiration to "Well, what if I did that and what if I started carrying a camera around?" I did get a lot of B-roll type stuff, which I think will fit pretty well in the documentary, because there are portions that are more relaxed in natural environments, more like a talking heads type scene where I'm just speaking to the camera or speaking to the person asking me the questions. I think finding a way to take in some of that B-roll footage that I took from very early on even up until now.

CS: Are you done in the adult entertainment industry now or still making movies?
Grey: I want to do both, I'm pretty optimistic.

CS: It's strange that there aren't more actresses from that realm who jump over. There are obviously a few who'll come over and do small roles in movies like Katie Morgan in Kevin Smith's latest, but you'd think they would be more interested in that. Why don't you think it happens more?
Grey: Well, I think you're either talented or you're not and people will see that. The second thing is that obviously the stigma that comes with being in the adult industry, that's always going to be a challenge for somebody coming from adult into the quote-unquote mainstream world.

CS: I don't know how hard it is to break into the adult industry, especially with anyone being able to get a camera and post stuff on the internet, but it seems a lot harder to make it in the regular film world. Have you gone through the process of going to auditions and trying to get work that way?
Grey: After I shot the film, I did a couple auditions, even films I knew that even if I got the part, I wouldn't want to do them (laughs) just for the sake of practice, you know? Because after the film comes out and everybody sees it, I'll probably try to get an agent after it.

CS: You'll have to have a separate agent to do that?
Grey: I am my own agent in adult. I have my own agency, but I'm the sole client right now, and then I have a wonderful manager sitting right behind you, so she kind of does it all right now.

CS: Do you have any idea if you'll be doing more PG Porn with James Gunn? He seems rather fixated with you, since he's had your picture as his Twitter avatar since doing that.
Grey: He's hilarious, man. Yeah, if they ask me to do it, of course I'll do another one. It was fun.

CS: Was that fully scripted?
Grey: Yeah, that was scripted, but it's funny because towards the end of the day, he would go off and just riff and he would say the end line a few different ways because they didn't know if Spike would allow them to say certain things. So he would go off and he'd just be riffing and that was actually a challenge for me since I feel my stronghold is in dramatic acting and comedy for me was a bit of a challenge, but it was fun, because he's so quick, he's so on point, and that's somebody you can definitely learn from.

You can see Grey in Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, opening in select cities on Friday, May 22.

[MacGuffin]

Director Soderbergh uses nonactors for latest film

NEW YORK (Reuters) - With a cast of nonactors led by a porn star, director Steven Soderbergh describes his new low-budget film "The Girlfriend Experience" as a "fictionalized documentary" -- a style he now plans to bring to Hollywood.

"The Girlfriend Experience," due for release in some U.S. theaters Friday, follows an upscale Manhattan call girl who provides more than just sex; she offers clients a complete romantic relationship experience, playing their girlfriend.

The call girl is played by Sasha Grey, 21, an award-winning actress who has appeared in more than 80 porn films, while the other 38 cast members are all nonactors, including personal trainer Chris Santos, who plays Grey's boyfriend in the film.

"It's kind of like a fictionalized documentary because all the people in the film do those jobs that they're doing in the film. Like the guy at the prepaid phone store is the guy at the prepaid phone store," Soderbergh told Reuters in an interview.

"It really makes you analyze how much we buy into this construct of what acting is because when you see someone who's obviously not acting, it's really different. It's kind of startling," he said.

The Oscar-winning director said he had a very detailed scene-by-scene treatment for the film, but no script. The cast were given a goal for each scene, which they then improvised.

Known for experimental methods with films like 2008's epic "Che" and his 1989 feature debut "Sex, Lies and Videotape," Soderbergh plans to cast up to 60 percent of his next Hollywood studio film "Moneyball," starring Brad Pitt, with nonactors.

"'Moneyball' for me is going to be the culmination of this thing that we've been messing with for 10 years of fusing real people into the world of a movie," said Soderbergh.

"I'm ... trying to do something that's just going to be different, that's going to feel more like life than a movie."

"SENSE OF COMMAND"

Soderbergh, who won a best director Oscar in 2001 for "Traffic," said he cast Grey after reading a profile of her in Los Angeles Magazine in 2006.

"I needed someone who, in sexual situations, felt a complete sense of command," he said. "That's hard to fake."

The director said the idea for the film came after he met with screenwriters Brian Koppelman and David Levien at a hotel in Midtown Manhattan in 2006 and his attention was drawn to a woman in the bar, who he was told was a "GfE" or "girlfriend experience" call girl.

"I didn't know what this acronym stood for so (Koppelman and Levien) explained to me this form of super high-end escort and I was really fascinated by this idea that there was a surcharge for intimacy," he said.

He said several escorts who offered this particular service were interviewed as research for the film.

The Magnolia Pictures movie, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, has received generally positive reviews with Variety calling it an "arthouse gem."

Made for $1.7 million, "The Girlfriend Experience" is the second of six low-budget films that Soderbergh signed a deal with Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's 2929 Entertainment to make. The first film made as part of the deal was 2005's "Bubble."

Soderbergh said he will begin filming "Moneyball," due for release in 2011, in the next few months. The film follows Oakland A's baseball team general manager Billy Beane and his bid to use a computer generated analysis to draft players.

The director said that among the nonactors in the film will be many of the real players from that team. "The reason I think it will work is that they are playing themselves and there's really no wrong answer there," he said.