Nicole Froio last wrote for The Toast about violence in the favelas. She saw Interior. Leather Bar at an LGBT film festival in Rio and sat down with Travis Mathews, the film’s director afterwards.

Why did you and James Franco make this movie?

I’ll talk about this but I don’t want to go too deeply into his motivations because I feel like – I don’t want to speak for him. But I can tell you he wanted to revisit Cruising in some capacity; he wanted to do a project with a lot of sex in it that was being explored in like a narrative context. And he didn’t want to do this on his own. He felt like he needed to collaborate with someone. So that was the most he knew he wanted to do when he reached out to me.

And when he reached out to me, that’s all I knew: James Franco, Cruising, sex.

And I didn’t know him or anything, so it was kind of a strange…it’s like one of those stories that happen maybe in a Hollywood movie fifty years ago that never really ever happens.

But, yeah, it was very cool. And I knew immediately before I even talked to him that those three elements–him, Cruising and explicit sex–were going to mean that whatever we created was going to be like a lightning rod of the film, in and of itself.

It would be provocative and people would love it or hate it for various reasons. One, because I knew that within the gay community there was a bubbling sense of people–gay men in particular–getting a little suspicious of why he was doing so many gay-themed projects. And people both wondering and curious as to whether or not he was gay. And then if he’s not gay, why does he care? And that question comes up all the time, all the time, all the time. And I knew before I even talked to him that it was going to be something we needed to deal with. That was one reason why we incorporated that conversation into the film. Like when you see the extras and they’re sort of de-constructing what the whole thing is and why it is and what people say about him and his motivations.

Obviously there’s a whole thing about privilege because he has straight privilege –

He has — he is basically like what the whole world in general thinks of as being privileged– white, American, a man, rich and beautiful.

From the moment he came to talk to you, why did you think it was important or relevant to revisit Cruising?

Well, partly because I knew it as a very flawed, complicated film that is an interesting sort of moment in gay history. And I like – I know as a filmmaker I work best when I’m under ridiculous deadlines, with very few options and I have to think creatively. And I saw this largely – not largely but initially – I saw this as a massive challenge. But also, I knew we were going to find ways to revisit Cruising that were in synch to the work that I was already doing. And I wrote the treatment to Interior. Leather Bar. And so, the thing that neither of us knew about when we discovered the film [was] that it was going to have a good launching point to do something for these forty minutes that were shaved from the original because it was too explicit.

We never once imagined that we would or intended to create forty minutes because that didn’t seem as interesting to us in terms of the different things we were trying to accomplish because the more we talked about it and examined the treatment and pulled it apart, twisted it in different ways, the more ambitious we were getting with things that we wanted to discuss, provoke, show.

In my research about Cruising I saw that people thought the movie was quite homophobic because it portrays gay people in terms of murderers and thieves…

There’s a very implicit and explicit sort of suggestion in the movie that a gay life leads to depravity and just horrible events. See, that’s one thing that, if you’ve seen Cruising – you don’t have to see Cruising to appreciate our movie or understand it but it helps in certain ways. And one way is, in Cruising, Al Pacino, who is a cop, goes undercover in this gay subculture and gets lost in it. And it’s implied at the end that everything he saw and experienced as an undercover cop in the S&M scene turned him bad. And we wanted our character Val (Lauren), who is playing Pacino, to similarly go through his own journey into a gay subculture he is not familiar with but to come out the other side, in some ways ambiguous, but definitely not like he turned to the dark side.

Maybe more open minded?

For sure, for sure. A couple of scenes that are really important in the film to justify this, I guess the second scene with the couple that’s more tender and more human and sort of forces Val to connect in a way he didn’t expect to. Not in a turned-on way but just with the humanity and love between those two. And the scene following that during their break a comradery forms.

In that scene was your intention not to only make Val see that but also a straight audience?

Well, the movie is told through the perspective of Val so we implicitly ask the viewer to see the movie through his experience. And so in some ways yes, and it’s interesting because I never really imagined that this particular movie would reach straight men in a particular way but it has, like I’ve had straight men come up to me in screenings or email say that they went to the movie for whatever reasons, with their girlfriend or whatever – James Franco, I don’t know. You know these are left-leaning, progressive, straight men but they watched the film and it caused them to check in with their own homophobia or questions around sexuality and sexual boundaries in ways they didn’t expect. I think for me it’s really cool because, again, we didn’t make this movie with straight men as an audience in mind but to be able to reach a straight male audience with something around queer sexuality is next to impossible.

As you said, that scene was more tender and perhaps even personal, how do you deal with such personal scenes as a filmmaker? 

Sometimes that’s more voyeuristic than even watching something that’s – you know you can watch something that’s more pornographic or that has explicit sex but if it’s just like, porn-y and there’s no intimacy you can disconnect. But if there’s intimacy you’re implicated in being a voyeur in someone’s personal thing. I should say that’s edited, what you saw is edited and whenever I do something that involves sex or anything where I’m asking the person to be vulnerable in some way I take a lot of care and I try to make is as collaborative as possible so they feel like they’re taking some ownership of what’s happening. I never go in and I’m like *mimes authoritative directing* I’m never ever like that and I check in with people. But I should also say that it’s not like we tell to people to go fuck and we just like shoot and wait ‘til they’re done. It’s quite like, blocked and choreographed. So it’s like for a little bit we’re going to do this, then we’re going to stop and then I’m going to check in with them .

This and your other movies are being shown in this festival and that’s a safe space to show them in. Would you like Interior. Leather Bar to be screened in maybe more ‘straight’ places?

Well, let me say I feel like all my other films are gay films and I feel like this is a very queer film. I don’t use the term queer very often and I feel like it’s overused and pretentious when people use it. But in this case it is queer because both in the form that the movie is being like a docu-fiction it’s like a little bit experimental and it’s like… agitated. I feel like the movie is agitated and refuses to sit still. But then what we’re doing in the movie it’s very queer so I don’t think it’s a gay film. I mean again the movie is told from the perspective of a straight man and you mentioned this as a safe space — I mean for my other films, I guess so, for sure. But I’ve had gay men come up to me and be very upset about this film partly because we were revisiting Cruising which some men of my age or older still have very strong feelings about and they’re upset that we would even consider revisiting that film in the first place. And then, um, going into areas like where you were getting at with James Franco. I think they’re feeling like they’re being toyed with a little bit.

Or used, maybe?

Yeah, yeah. So I had a lot of that coming for me interestingly in the initial screenings but then it just died out. I don’t really hear that anymore. I think part of the reason for that is when, I mean, our movie was being talked about before we started shooting or anything and initially it was talked about as if we were remaking Cruising and then it was talked about as if we were doing those full forty minutes. So I think up until the first wave of screenings we had, people really thought they were going in for something and they got something else. And people still think that, they still go in for something and get something else. It’s framed in a different way now and I think people who are interested in the film have heard that it’s not this, that it is this.

We can see you in the film directing the scenes behind the scenes, what was the process of getting those scenes done?

The way in which we film was very much in the way the movie is. Meaning, we kind of swam in and out of things that were staged and lightly scripted and then things that were completely spontaneous. And Val, like that first scene in the film in the hotel where we’re talking – none of that was scripted. That was really the first time I met James in person, the first time I met Val in person and everything you hear is just us talking, and so those reservations you hear with Val initially – those are real. But at some point during the production he started to really get what we were trying to do and he started to act. This is all him telling me later. We were moving so quickly with shooting that I didn’t have time and I wasn’t interested to know if it was really uncomfortable or to know if he was acting because I was getting what I wanted. Do you know what I mean?

And I mean like, I didn’t feel like I was manipulating him. I mean he’s an actor and this is the scene. And he had the script, as you see at the end of it the script says all of the things that he does and he knew what he was supposed to be doing. And so the treatment was a series of scenes that were pretty skeletal and like it was the bare minimum number of scenes that we needed, both behind the scenes and forty minutes stuff to have the arch that we wanted. But we knew that the conditions of our set and what we were doing were so odd and so ripe for stuff to happen that we made the choice to always have multiple cameras filming constantly even after I say cut. So there would be scenes that would just happen, and so it would be like I’m over here and I have my camera and I see you doing something and I’m like “OK, this would be perfect”, so I tell the sound guy to come over here and like on the fly we manipulate what’s really happening. So it’s easy for you to be natural because you were just doing that thing. And I love the energy of working that way. I mean, it’s not always successful and it comes with a lot of risks but it’s so dynamic and it’s so like — alive, you know? Because when you do a narrative film, like, say it’s a scene of both of us talking. It can take five hours. It’s like – it can be really boring to produce that.

So what’s next? Do you know?

James and I are talking about working on another project together but before that I’m gonna direct my next feature some time next summer. And it’s gonna be… I don’t know if I want to say anything about it yet. It’s not gonna have explicit sex in it. I’m not interested in carving out a whole career where I’m like “It must have explicit sex”. You know? I feel like I’ve explored that a lot and sexuality will always be interesting to me but I feel like for every project I do there has to be something that has to be mandated.

So what’s James Franco like? I always wondered. Is he like exactly as he seems?

Pretty much. I mean he’s very like laid back which is crazy when you consider the number of things that he does. You’d think he’d be really like *mimes objective and rigid attitude* and maybe he is on the inside but he projects this really laid back exterior. And he’s really nice. He answers emails quicker than any of my friends do which again I’m like – if I didn’t know any better I would think he has some one answering his email.

Interior. Leather Bar premiered at Sundance