What we ended up doing was putting different people in different corners of the room based on their comfort level interacting with another man and being so close to actual gay sex.
They were all going to be extras for the bar scene, but I was asking for them to be in a very gay space where sex would be happening around them.įor this, I needed to know how comfortable they were with kissing and touching another man in a space that was supposed to be a gay leather bar. I wasn’t asking any of these guys to have sex. Once I got into the specifics, a good third of the men left the room. There were probably 50 guys who showed up. The only thing the guys who showed up knew was it was a James Franco project involving a gay bar scene. We were filmed working through his reservations, and it made it into the first cut of the film, but now it’s the domain of DVD extras. This was an aspect of the film that’s both real, but also sort of staged. We waited until the day of production to talk about these issues. So I contacted him, and he and his real-life boyfriend, Bradley Roberge, got on board.īrenden was reluctant to do this initially, because he wants to be taken seriously as an actor and he didn’t want to do another film where he was going to have to take his clothes off. One of the actors, Brenden Gregory, worked with me before. And James, to his enormous credit, was open to going out on any limb as long as there was a smart reason behind it.Ī couple of different ways. I had a list of things I expected people to ask upon hearing about the movie: ‘Is James gay?’ ‘Does he have sex in this?’ ‘Who does he think he is for touching thisĪnd it’s been exactly how I thought it would be with people asking me these same questions all the time. We knew we needed to be one step ahead of the audience for this to work.
And even though we weren’t remaking Cruising, there’s some baked-in controversy to that movie that casts a pretty long shadow. I knew with the number of films James had recently made that had either gay or queer content, people would be talking. One of the things he knew from the offset was he wanted there to be real gay sex in it, and this is where I came in. This was happening around the same time James was interested in revisiting Cruising. How did you get involved with James Franco and this project?Įarly in the summer of 2012 my first feature, I Want Your Love, was playing film festivals and getting some attention because of the way I wove un-simulated gay sex into the story. Here Mathews shares the joys of difficulties of getting actors to have ‘real’ gay sex on screen and his reasons for taking on a subject many would rather he left alone. Leather Bar doesn’t recreate Cruising but is a mix between their take on that lost footage and a documentary-style, partly scripted, partly real, behind-the-scenes look at how they made it. Now filmmakers James Franco (of Milk fame) and Travis Mathews have imagined what that 40 minutes of footage may have looked like. The story goes the director William Friedkin cut 40 minutes of gay S&M footage to avoid an X rating. But rumors suggest it was almost even more controversial.
In 1980, Al Pacino starred as a cop touring New York’s gay sex venues to catch a serial killer.