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.