Podcast: Axel Braun Talks ‘Compulsion’ Director’s Cut

I am very emotionally attached to this movie. This movie was the movie that took my career to a whole different level. I’ve been shooting since 1990. Working with my father since 1988. And I was working consistently. I was always seen as the son of Lasse Braun, and people could see that there was some some talent, but I was living under this this long shadow of my dad, which was a great, great place to start because it opened a lot of doors.

At the same time I’ve been itching to prove to people that I had something to offer that I could do something that was like on a larger scale. And the opportunity presented itself after a year and a half of being under contract with Elegant Angel as a director when [owner] Patrick Collins offered me to become general manager of the company. And when I did that we we worked very closely together on what direction that company should take. It was a studio only known for gonzo productions, very successful in that aspect, the genre.

Patrick was at a point in his life when he wanted to challenge himself with something different, and he loved movies, and was fascinated by the process of filmmaking and doing something of high quality. I think that was the motivator. He wanted to do something that had more quality than what was expected by the construction of his genre.

And so, along the way, I became general manager in January, a lot of changes were made within the company. And at some point, had this crazy idea — how about we take the studio that just does gonzo, and we should a huge feature, and we shoot it on film? And it was so absurd, right? Normally you try to give people what they expect. You know, Tom Cruise makes a movie — you want to play that character, it’s got to be the same character, because that’s what sells. And he was so intrigued by the idea that he just like, you know, without even a thought it goes, let’s do it.

And so I wrote this movie. And the scene of this came from my relationship with Patrick. He was really the biggest father figure I’d had after my father at that point. Our office was a very large office with two desks. So we worked together. And I learned so much from him on so many levels. It’s crazy. And so I started seeing this, this almost a fictionalized version of him as a gangster, not that he was a gangster in real life. But I just saw this character, you know, from the way he talked, and from the way he told stories. He was a great storyteller.

And from his life experiences — Patrick Collins, not many people know this, but up until a year and a half, before he started Elegant Angel, he was homeless. And he was eating out of trash cans. And in San Francisco, I mean, it’s a crazy story. And then, you know, this guy, saw him on the streets and offered to help. His name was Parker Sherman, and he ended up becoming a director named Jake Malone. He has since passed away.

But there’s a crazy crazy amount of stories and crazy amount of experiences that came with Patrick, and I just started having this idea, you know, this relationship with the father and a son and this conflict and the son that wants to be like his father, but at the same time, he wants to be his own person. A lot of my autobiographical themes, of course, for me, and a lot of things that had to do with Patrick. And I just felt the urge to write the script.

And as soon as he gave me the green light to tackle this, this was this humongous project. I mean, it was an extremely expensive movie. Not only because it was a long script, but but shot on film. And then over a long period of time, film equipment was expensive, crew was expensive, everything was supposed to have a scene. It was expensive. And so I went and locked myself in, I drove drove a motorcycle, downtown Los Angeles, and I randomly found the cheapest shittiest hotel that I could find, which was on the third floor or some building, and it was so bad. I mean, there was of course, no internet, there was no phone, there was no nothing, and no bathroom. And a bed that you would not even want to sit on for a minute. And I went there with with my laptop, and I spent 48 hours there. It has to be for me in a place where the greediness — I have to feel, I have to smell that type of life, that type of environment, you know. And I wrote the script and after I was done with the first draft, I showed the Patrick and he loved it.

And then together we worked on it for I want to say like two or three weeks every every day. I would show up at his house in Hidden Hills at seven in the morning. And from seven to eight, we worked on it together just working on, you know, fine tuning the dialogue or figuring out like, what if we did this? Or what if he actually says this?

For me, the process is something that I always say — look, I’ve directed over 600 movies in my career. And aside from the success that a movie might or might not have, what’s really left with me is the experience and there are movies that have been insanely successful that I am not attached to at all. Or then you know, because of everything that happens during that production, and there are movies that I am extremely, extremely invested in still, and it doesn’t get any better than Compulsion. This was such a turning point for me. It was also like challenging myself with something that was so big, you know, and by big, you don’t have a big crew, you have film, you can fuck it up, you know what I mean? There’s no room for error.

And also dealing with all this, you know, everything was so awesome. The process was awesome. Extremely taxing — it was like crazy long days. But it was something that, you know, I put so much of me in it. And it’s so much of what my relationship with Patrick was and then ended up you know, winning a ton of awards and putting my name on the map and people from that day on referred to me as Axel Braun and then refer to Lasse Braun as my father, as opposed to the other way around.

And that was a big moment for me, because it allowed me to go and forge my path and leaving my mark something that was the the sole guiding force of my career. I wanted to become more successful than my father, to win more awards than anybody else. I mean, I really set myself up to do that. And without the movie, I don’t know, if it would have ever happened, you know, I needed something, it was such a big deal. And at the time, that was a huge deal. The fact that Elegant Angel was coming out with a feature shot on film, everybody was like remember these are the days before the internet, before social media. So the way you promoted something, the way you put out your press releases, you know, everything was coordinated in a way that it just created a big impact. And it was instrumental in me having the career that I’ve had, so after 10 years from from the release, I wanted to do a 10 years director’s cut.

Because in 2003 the highest resolution you could achieve on telecine was 720[p]. So if you can imagine that’s the movie that came up was in 720 and, and now we can have it in 4k, so completely different animal. And you know, we were under the gun because I mean, we shot this movie in July. And aside from being the hottest time of the year to shoot, but July and have to be out by September 30. So we were in a rush to do a lot of stuff. And I thought I could have picked better music. Finding music or creating music, it’s very time consuming. It takes a long time. And you know the music and then the editing you know, there’s some things that would have changed, some things that would have shortened. Back then you wanted to have the longest movie possible. That was a big deal. We wanted to give customers more bang for the buck. So it was important that the movie was longer than two hours. And there’s a lot of stuff that like you know, the sex scene doesn’t need to be that long.

And the 10th anniversary by then Patrick had sold the company to a guy that disliked me. And I asked him if I if I could just do a director’s cut for free. I said I’ll do it. I just want to do it. You can have it and I just I just want to put out my director’s cut. Not that the first one wasn’t my cut, but I just wanted to do a revised version. And they just never answered. And I tried a few times and he never answered, never answered them. And that was it.

Fast forward to 10 years later. Adult Empire buys them. So I’m like, Oh my God, and I love the guys at Adult Empire. So I’m like, oh, my god, let me ask them if they’re willing to let me do it. And of course, they said absolutely. And that started something a lot more complicated than I’d expect because, you know, we went back, they found the original 16 millimeter reels, had to be transcoded again, but the amount of footage  — it was intense, re-editing, all that was was very, very intense. And they had to rethink the audio. There’s a lot of stuff that was in there. That was a long long process, but so incredible, so, so fulfilling.

And you know, what’s interesting, I went through, I don’t know, I think had like 18 hours of BTS. And I just tried to select, but just watching all this, all this, all this footage and being transported again, in what my experience was while making the movie and seeing things with a different perspective. Now, as you know, it’s a trip down memory lane. That is, I think, is the perfect final chapter.

Now, I retired a year ago, basically retired June 23 of 2023. And the 20th anniversary Director’s Cut of Compulsion is going to come out [around] June 21. So it’s really the year after my retirement, and I think it’s a perfect way to cap my career and to be conscious of my past and where everything kind of started in a way. So yeah, you know, it’s a movie that not only I’m very attached emotionally, but it does stand the test of time. To me, I’m very critical of myself. But he’s just like some of the staff, some of the performances, the acting, that it’s very, it’s very, very good. And I’m not saying it as the guy who wrote it and directed it. Just seeing objectively I’m very happy with it. It’s just like it’s just a fucking great movie. That’s about it.

You know, if you only knew! I’m telling you at some point, I was counting how many things I changed and I think after 320, I lost track. I changed so much and that doesn’t mean necessarily you watch the new [cut] and you notice, but it’s so much. I mean, obviously the beginning is different. It started from a different place that goes back but there’s so many things that you wouldn’t see that I’d cut like you know, two seconds from the story or an entire position from the sex scene. There’s a ton of stuff. It took me months to work through this and aside from you know, when you see the footage, the 4k footage is like wow.

But yeah, there’s a lot. The music, a lot of the dialogue is different. I use different takes of certain things and they say the same thing but it’s not the same shot. It’s a different decor. It’s a slightly different. Things that I would know because I know that when we inside and out. Which proves that I succeeded in what I set out to do. I didn’t want to like ever complete a different movie. I just wanted to have like a better version of it, which means eliminating the stuff that was superfluous.

That cameo was not for vanity purposes, but because I was cheap. I was available. And I played the killer that shoots Eli Cross, Brynn Pryor, whatever we want to call him. One of these 20 different names. And who was the production manager on this on this movie? And we were always bickering so it gave me great pleasure to be the one who shot him, right? [Laughs] And don’t ask me why, because I probably watched too many mafia movies growing up. I shot him and I’m wearing a glove. You know, which obviously makes you want to understand that that I’m trying to make it look like a suicide. So I shoot him in the chest with a gun with a silencer and I’m wearing a white glove. And then I carefully put the gun in his hand, remove my glove. And before I leave, I turn around and I spit on him. It’s just like, there was so absolutely nutty because I’m going to leave some DNA here. And and also somebody commits suicide by shooting himself in the chest? I mean, so I cut that down to where you just see the gunshot and nothing else.

Million things that happened there. Fixed a lot of stuff had to do with the with the car with the Lamborghini, a lot of stuff had to do with other stuff. So tons and tons of stuff. But yes, it is at the core is the same movie. It’s not like all of a sudden, oh, wait, there’s a different ending. But yeah, so it was it was a painstaking process. I’m proud of that I that I got through with it. But I survived it.

I think that the song was dated. Belladonna was my sister-in-law. I was married to her sister. And so obviously, we were close. And she came and recorded the song for free. And I sang on the song too. I think I disliked my voice in the song. I actually thought that Michelle did a great job with it. But I felt the song felt dated to me and I didn’t know where to put it. So I think I left an instrumental version of it throughout the movie here and there. But I took it out. If Belladonna was still around — she retired a long time ago. And I have no idea of her whereabouts. I would have called her and I would have recorded an updated version of something that sounded a little less like an Evanescence rip off. [ . . . ]

I mean, I tried to figure out a way because I am also obviously emotionally attached to the song with the recording with him. Just got it, it’s just like it’s one of the things that I didn’t want to use it in the trailer, because it was like to you know, I wanted to have a different type of trailer. And I didn’t know where to put it in the movie and I didn’t want to start the movie At the time, the formula was kind of that you start the movie with what because the trailer you see, you know all this stuff. And I wanted to do something different so yeah, the song ended up on the editing room floor.

So Bella Donna was supposed to be the star of the movie. When I wrote the movie, I wrote it with her in mind. And at the time she was the biggest star in adult. And she also had a lot of personal issues going on. And when we got really close to shooting day and remember, this is a production with you know, if you mess up a day, it’s a lot of money, and it’s a domino effect. And she was going through something and all of a sudden I felt like oh my god, I don’t know if I can hinge this movie on her because I knew her well. And she was a professional, but she was going through a lot.

And I talked to Patrick and we made the decision to to replace her and we had I want to say we had two days to find a replacement and sure enough, we find Ashley Long and she was fucking fantastic. The most professional, the most committed actress that could have found. I was really really, really happy with her. She won some awards. It was a good move for her career.

I’ve got to tell you  the final sex scene was was tough to revisit. It’s an intense scene. And obviously, when you if you watch the movie, if you see it by itself, it’s a little disturbing. More disturbing now that I have left the industry and then that I’m not constantly surrounded by pornography, right? I find it like, wow.

Obviously, in the context of the movie, there’s a whole explanation. It’s something that she wants to do to show him who she really is. But if you see the scene by itself you think wow, this is [disturbing], you know, and but again, remember, shooting all this on film. In the BTS, you see me operating — I don’t even know like, I mean today, I probably couldn’t do it. I mean, this camera was really heavy. And you’re like having to get these angles and you’re laying down. It’s like carrying this elephant of a camera. You’re not nimble, you’re not mobile to get all this stuff but yet still wanted to have that look — I didn’t want to be on a tripod. And you know, I’m doing this. So I think it’s a scene that is as intense as it gets. The acting also throughout the scene in the performance of the scene of the characters. It’s really funny when you see the behind the scenes because you see like this crazy intense stuff. And then we cut and everybody’s laughing and hugging everybody’s flying around. And then they go back into this. Actually, you would think like you see the scene and they go up. Oh my god, this was something that took the time it took and then she probably was traumatized for like any study, you keep seeing all this in betweens where they’re like joking around and laughing and it’s intense.

But it is a great scene. There’s a lot of really great scenes in the movie. I think that the chemistry between them was perfect. And it really carries the movie the way they the way you believe this. And to be honest probably Belladonna, not as much as again, she was the biggest performer. I don’t know if the two of them would have had that chemistry, you know that? I don’t know if he would have been believable. This is believable to me still now.

You know, it’s a good question. I really didn’t know at the time. It was a carefully planned strategy to get attention. It worked in the movie. It was not like “I’m gonna throw in something shocking.” But it was. It was there for that purpose, for the purpose of making people talk. Because at the time, conversations didn’t happen on social media. You didn’t have you know, three million people voicing their opinion there. You have to capture the attention of people that wrote on AVN,  that wrote on you know, at the time there was Adult DVD Talk is another platform where people exchanged opinions and was forums where people talked about this. So that’s what you wanted it to do, and that’s what we did.

Today that scene, I think that we’re going to see a bounce back. Look, there’s been so much you know, there’s been this wave of all of a sudden becoming, you know, we can call it woke or we can call it more in touch with — the world has evolved, our society has evolved, then you look at movies from 30 years ago and you go like, “Oh my God, no, they didn’t say this.” And it’s crazy, right? So I think we have that, that moment of like, okay, the world has changed, boom, and all of a sudden we see everything.

And I think that now we’re going to come down a little bit to where not everybody’s going to get offended that for every word that is said, not everybody’s gonna go back. Look, there are things that are important to preserve. Also, to understand the context, I attended times where this was done, you know, like every French movie, from the ’60s, in every movie, there’s a guy slapping people. I mean, these French people are insane, right? That was a mirror on those times. And pretending that didn’t happen– it’s tricky to handle it.

I’ll give you a perfect example. They are now taking out smoke cigarette smoke from a lot of our movies. Especially the most known is they’re doing it with the James Bond movies. And look, I quit smoking gun 20 years ago, actually this year. And I can tell that in me and so many of my friends — I mean, I’m gonna be 58, right? — so my generation, we started smoking because we watched movies. And you know, James Deen is smoking — it looks cool. And this guy smoking looks cool. And that’s what makes you want to do it so great that you don’t have that anymore. At the same time removing it from a movie, I don’t know how to see it. You know, I don’t know how to see it.

I can tell you that when I first saw Dr. No, the first James Bond movie, which I didn’t see [upon release] — I wasn’t born when it came out. I think I was 10 years old. And that’s when I stopped biting my nails. Because I was always chewing gum and I was a kid and I was trimmed on my nails down to the and all of a sudden I saw this guy. I mean, James Bond and Sean Connery like the most manly man you can see with this perfectly manicured hands. And that made something click. And I decided that you know, I mean, I was 11 and I was getting manicures. I mean, that might be an excess, but I was taking care of it, because I saw the movie. So at the same time when he was doing that he has a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth. So can they remove it without making it look [ridiculous]? [Laughs]

I think that we’re going to see a slightly more normal situation where things can be interpreted and understood instead of just arbitrarily deciding. Okay, if you see what’s happening now, I mean, the movie, the movie that one? What’s the name of won the Oscar this year for Best Actress, Emma Stone? I mean, have you seen the movie? It is like intense. I mean, it seems that’s an Oscar nominated movie where she won an Academy Award. I think three years ago, this could not have happened. That tells me that there’s a wave that is kind of like going back down to where all of a sudden there’s a need for a little controversial lead for a little, you know, push on the sex, you know? I will see. We’ll see.

But yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if that scene could work today. I can tell you that that scene could work today in a mainstream movie, meaning that without the constriction of well, this is porn. So you cannot do certain things. You cannot show certain things because it’s porn. So we know there’s going to be but in a mainstream movie that probably would be a scene that makes people talk and kind of like what they did when it came out.

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Look, here’s the thing — I was reluctant to do parodies. My friend Will Ryder became successful doing parodies for about a year. I was at Hustler at the time and he had done something with Hustler. I think it started with a parody of Britney Spears. And Will was my publicist. And then he started directing. I was under contract, New Sensations, so we knew each other from there. And then all of a sudden, he came up with this idea of apparently, which again, it’s something that — I mean, my father’s first movies in the 60s were parodies. You know, Vikings, Casanova. I mean, parody is something that has gone in waves through porn at some point in the ’90s. We had Edward Penishands and all this . . . Sperminator.

So, every few every decade, probably there was a wave of parodies, but will capture this new audience. And as soon as this stuff became successful — I think he did The Brady Bunch? And Larry Flynt, you know, asked me if I could make a parody. I was absolutely not interested. I think it was kind of a funny thing. But it was not what I wanted to do. I saw myself somebody who could write screenplays in original, you know. I just didn’t feel like feel like I’m ripping off something. And then he asked me again, and then he asked me again. And the third or fourth time you, it’s not a guy you say no to. And I was getting a lot of business at Hustler.

So I’m like, man, I’m forced to do this parody. And so my, my friend, Drew Rosenfeld, who was a creative director, Hustler. I talked to him and I was like, “Can I at least pick something that I want?” Because they were throwing ideas of things that were current things that were oh, you should do this, you should do that. Oh, my god, and I kept trying to, you know, and then I say, can I do it and like, you know, just do anything you want, I can do Happy Days. Sure, do Happy Days. And Happy Days is a show that I grew up watching. And of course, when you’re younger, and you fantasize, you imagine these characters that in different situations, and I got very, very invested in it. I got invested to the point where like, I had to find the exact costume and I had to use the same number of cameras that they use, and I wanted to recreate the look and feel of this TV show.

And that perfectionism doesn’t belong, necessarily, in porn. Because we have, you know, only this much time and we only have this much talent, we only have this many people. You want a gaffer? Great, there’s three. Which one do you want? Do you want a sound guy? There’s two. It’s a little better for now, but also back then it was more complicated. So I wanted I didn’t want to put wigs on anybody. I had the guy Alan Stafford to play Richie Cunningham. I had dyed his hair orange. Tommy Gunn, who played the Fonz, I had him shave his goatee, which he’d have since he was 17 years old and never shaved it.

So I just did these things and that accomplished several things — one is that I got my vision to come through. Two is that I was able to recreate something that I was so emotionally attached to that made it awesome for me. And three, I also I could gauge the level of commitment that these people would have in my project — “I had brown hair and I’m gonna dye to orange for this movie.” This is a guy that tomorrow has a blowjob scene at 5pm in 1000 Oaks. It’s not like I put you under contract for six months and you’ll do whatever to your appearance with this with this six months. You have three days. So I think Happy Days was shot in two days. So once that was done and you know, I’ve always edited my own movies and I’ve always done the music and and I was so like, Oh my god, this is so awesome because I’m just playing in a sandbox with these characters and having fun with them.

That was the beginning, but I always parodied things that I was really invested in and it was respectful of the source material so I had fun with it. I didn’t make fun of it in a disrespectful way. So that’s always been my thing. And I did Happy Days and I was bit that was like, oh my god, this is so cool. This is so cool. Because I did it a different way I managed to prepare and see it in a different way than what other people were doing. And not to take away from what they did. When the parody thing became huge, everybody was jumping on, but in the way I always did it is like it has to be perfect, whatever perfect means, but what it means for me is like I have to honor the source material and I have to you know, do things a certain way.

I immediately was like, god, this is so cool. And I went back and I go, okay, can I do another one? They were like, yeah, of course. Back then it was like the hottest thing, parodies. I mean, it just became really hot. And oh, God, can I do Star Trek? And I thought it was great, you know, because I was a big fan of the original series, but also because of the fan base that was associated with that. The fan base of Happy Days, there’s no Happy Days conventions, but there’s Star Trek conventions. And I remember that, you know, I have a vision of what I want to accomplish right away with certain things, especially with with who can play whom. I have it in my head what that should be.

And when it came to figuring out who could play Captain Kirk, I only had one thing in mind, I wanted Evan Stone to do it because I thought he was perfect for it. But the hair, you know, I didn’t want to put a wig on him. And he had been offered $10,000 by Adam and Eve, I want to say like three or four months prior to cut his hair. And he turned it down. And you know, we were in a big meeting at the Hustler building on Wilshire, and a lot of people around the table. And we had one of those conference things in the middle, right where you put on speakerphone, and we’re talking we’re talking about options and options where you can play Kirk. It’s like, you know, like, God, Evan Stone, it’s just so perfect. It’s just so perfect. And I knew him, but I didn’t know him well at the time. Kind of like from awards shows. I don’t think that ever shot him. And it’s one of those things, right?

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But after especially after Happy Days, and of course after Compulsion came years before, so my name had some kind of some kind of clout, some kind of weight in the industry. And we weren’t there and Drew Rosenfeld knew him well and got like, you know, want to try call him? I’ll try calling him so we call him on speakerphone, probably 10 people on this the conference room. And Drew was like, “Hey, Evan, it’s Drew. Listen, I’m here with Axel. And it’s something that he wanted to talk to you about. everybody’s listening right?” And I go like, “Hey, man, what’s happening? Listen, I’m doing a I’m doing a Star Trek parody.” And he goes like, “Are you fucking kidding? Yeah, I want to play Kirk!” “See, the problem is –” “I’ll cut my hair.” And I didn’t even have to ask. You volunteered. It was like, wow, that is amazing. That was like at the time. I mean, these are things that today have no meaning, but at the time was huge. Somebody like Evan Stone is cutting his hair. It was crazy. And then it was fantastic. And it was like we became really good friends after that. We still are.

It was just, you know, the parody things started. I mean, if you could see my my home office I’m surrounded by memorabilia of movies, TV shows, things that have to do with my childhood. To me, it’s like, oh my god, I want to do this and I want to do this and this. And it became it became a big thing. I feel at some point like I wanted to do something else. I did. But not enough because there were still things that I wanted, parodies that I wanted to shoot. I was really wanting to shoot more of this stuff because there’s so many. When I started with the superheroes, there was no stopping because I was such a fan of the Bronze Age of Marvel and DC Comics.

So at some point, it became like, alright, this is like, I get through another period, I had years where I shot six or eight parodies in a year. It was a lot and  it’s not just that I felt the boxed in, but it was extremely taxing on me because the extent of research. Look when I did Batman XXX, a parody of the Adam West TV shows, I mean, I went to Argentina to find the fabric piece that they had leftover from the original because it the light bounced different.

Without the obsession, I wouldn’t have been it would have been a complete different thing for me like it made sense because I was obsessed with the details. You know, I you know, because Cesar Romero, a guy who played the Joker in the TV show, refused to shave his mustache. If you look at it — I mean, back then you didn’t notice but now in 4k, you can see that under the white makeup, there’s a mustache, so I made Randy Spears grow a mustache so you can put the makeup on it.

So these are things that I kept doing. I did it throughout my career. There was always little inside jokes for people like me and my strength was that I played for the fans because I made the movies for me. And I am the audience. So I cater to people like me so I knew what they wanted. I knew would make them take would make them like “Haha! This guy knows!” because I am the audience.

So when I got to the point where like, now I wanted to make an original feature, which I did in The Possession of Ms. Hyde in 2018. That was like a movie that I started writing with my father in 1988 as a mainstream movie, and then never, you know, went through a million different changes in their life and things and then I finished writing it with my son. So it was me, my father, my son writing the script together. Among the many awards that we won, we won Best Screenplay. So my father got a posthumous award and my son Ricky got an award for screenwriters. So it was another fantastic experience. I shot it in, in in black and white Cinemascope.

So it’s another thing that was what, at that point, I needed to get out a little bit of the parody thing. I just wanted to do something else. But I think that I’ve been very happy with making parodies for the longest time. I mean, I think I did 62 parodies, I want to say. I remember Captain Marvel was my 60th. So I think 62 parodies, but yeah, you know, remember at some point, I started making one movie a year. That was my outlet. I mean, I would shoot all sex movies. I had a contract with Wicked for 10 years. So it will be all sex of some some kind, but then one big movie a year, one parody a year. And that was fine. If I had to do like, you know, six parodies a year again, I would have would have burned out. But I did for a long time. I mean, and you know, I think my first year I did Snow White, 24, Cinderella. I did all the fairytales.

So you know at some point, I have to slow down. Otherwise it would have been like, okay guy, I’m just a parody guy. I didn’t mind being the parody guy. It’s great that you manage to create a brand. You know, that’s fine. But I think in my perfect world, and I stayed in the industry, I would have wanted to,  every couple of years, put out something original, you know, and when I did Possession of Ms. Hyde — such a long shot. I mean, porn movie in black and white. And I remember telling Steve Orenstein, who owned Wicked at the time, that I really wanted to do this. We’re still pretty good friends. And he knew it was important for me to do it and, and I told him listen, this is not gonna make any money. And if you ask me, I don’t care. And he goes, like go ahead and do it. And it was what I needed to do at the time. And yeah, so maybe in 10 years, 13 years, I’ll do a new cut of that, when I’m in my 80s, be cutting The Possession of Ms. Hyde.

I’d rather this be the version. Again, not only for the quality. Like I said, you know, we were able to recover a lot of the original 16 millimeter film, but not all of it. So some of the stuff they have to up-res. But there’s a lot of really good good footage there. When I look at it, I have become, in 20 years, a much better filmmaker and a much better editor. And when I see that, oh, okay, this needed to be revisited. I don’t know, would I be happy that people watch one and the other one, you know, a lot of people might not see much of a difference. That’s the reality. Especially there’s been a lot of subtlety in tones and things and dialogues and certain things that just — you know, I have the time. I think I’ve worked on it for like six months. It was like, I mean, not 24 hours a day. I remember when I saw them, the guys in Vegas, and I just got down like, “Oh my god, what was I thinking? It was like such a grueling experience.” I’m happy that I did it. But yeah, you know, no, I don’t know. I mean, they’re not drastically different. They’re different enough for me to where — yeah, I mean, George Lucas took some things because [he] was dealing with an audience of millions of people who have watched this movie 300 times and when you change that, it’s a lot more complicated than me changing a porn movie that most people today have no idea that are existing right? So I’d be happy if this was the version that they see.

I’ll make an example — this is a movie that I shot for VCA in ’94, ’95 something like that. And I went to Europe because I have you know, a lot of you know, I grew up in Italy, I had a lot of connections, places that I could go and shoot and things  different from what you could see here. And then and I wanted to get the shot that was a girl that was coming out of the subway in Duomo Square in Milan. And wanted to go around her — she looks around, they wanted to have this shot around there. So you know, like today, I’ll be laying down dolly tracks and getting permits and all this stuff. You know, 30 years ago, I put on rollerblades and just went around her. I mean we did it two or three times without permits, without anything, with a small camera. And when you see, they got a great shot. I remember when I took it the VCA, they go like wow it must have cost you an arm and a leg. So yeah, some things that have to do with the guerilla filmmaking. You do them when you’re young and you wouldn’t do them now that’s for sure.

Look, at the time, especially, we were under a wave — there was a director name was Greg Lansky that exploded on the scene. And he really knew how to play social media and he played it in a way that made the majority, the mass of people think that was great. But people like me thought was a turn off. For me it was a turn off the way he always thought about money. It was a very calculated thing that he did. More power to him. A big career that lasted three years. But in those three years, it was the big name and I rejected his persona so much, not because I was jealous. He took a page from a lot of people’s books and and put some thought into this, how to promote himself and after that, and suddenly made me look at myself in a different way. And look, I’ve always been a car fanatic and I would post pictures with crazy exotic cars and whatever. And I posted pictures but when he started doing it, they made me uncomfortable with myself. Because for me, it was not like, “Hey, look, I can buy this car for me like. Look what I did — this cool car.”

Again, some things you don’t realize until you see somebody else doing that. And I realized, oh my god, I look like a douchebag. Because I thought he did. I mean he purposely whether he was or he acted like, but the persona was the douchebag and the douchebag, at a time, reflected, I don’t know, Dan Bilzerian or somebody was like, you know, on a yacht drinking, girls all this stuff, which I never was. But that created social media attention, right? And I always try — I kind of stopped posting pictures with the cars. Like, oh my God, I don’t want to do that, because I don’t look like him.

So with Holly [Randall’s podcast interview], that was the time where he kept saying like, “I’m an artist. You’re an artist. For girls, you’re an artist. Everybody’s an artist”. And I rejected that so much. Look, I took the job very seriously. I took the craft very seriously. But I can sit here and pretend to take myself seriously because you’ve got to have some levity. You’ve got to have some understanding of what you’re doing. I’m glad that you bring into the conversation, Spielberg or other director with — this is the complete different, you know. It’s like somebody who’s good at singing in the shower, and then you go into a recording studio with Celine Dion. And I can’t sing for shit. So, different levels.

So it’s important, it’s always been important for me to not take myself too seriously. That doesn’t mean that I am not proud of what I what I did and what I accomplished, not proud of the work that I put, or my skill as a director, or a writer or an editor or a cameraman, and you know, all these things. Of course, I take pride. If people think that I did something good or interesting or worth a mention, I appreciate that. Let them be the ones to praise. I’ve never cast praise on myself. You know, it’s just I think it’s pretentious. I think it’s just tacky.

You never know, man. You never know. I mean, look, I feel like there’s unfinished business. Listen, the amount of parodies that I still wanted to do. This is a lot. I want to do that. I want to do this. I mean, there’s a ton of stuff that I still wanted to do. I got to a point where because the last three years before I retired, I became head of production for Wicked. It was a different job in a different situation I was responsible for so much. And I was thrust into a much more corporate environment that I was comfortable with. I’ve always been looking being under contract with — I’ve always wanted to be a contract director. I like to be invested in one company at a time. And, you know, my career has been, you know, from VCA to Hustler, Vivid, Wicked. I mean, these are companies where I have tremendous respect for the owners from from Larry Flynt to Steven Hirsch, to Steve Ornstein, Scott Taylor are all people that I wanted to make proud, all people will might have had a personal relationship that. When you’re in a corporate environment and you become a number, you become like, okay, how many views is the scene gonna get, and that’s not how I wanted to operate.

So that stretched my stress level. Movies that I wanted to still make? Plenty. I original features that I wrote years ago that are fantastic that I’ve been wanting to make. And then you know what I mean? Paired with it was taking too much time away from my family. I have young kids, and I needed to spend more time with them. And I want it to be you know, I was in a place where I needed to step away and be more conscious of what I’m depriving my kids. Your kids will never remember how much money you may or what, but they’ll remember if you were there to talk to me at night, and that was what was most important for me. So that made my decision. So, you know, never say never.

Read more about this segment of the interview here.

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