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Uncompromising Positions:
How Christianity Became More Offensive than Porn
BRAINTRUSTdv interviews Bill Day
Bill Day's first documentary, Saviors of the Forest, played on PBS and National Geographic TV, screened at Sundance, and won top honors at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Day's new movie, Missionary Positions, has had a different sort of success. Though most festivals have shunned it, Missionary Positions has become a rallying tool for Protestant churches trying to inform their congregations about the dangers of pornography. And at the other end of the universe, this infectious little movie is being developed into a Reality TV series by VH-1. Such incongruous reception should indicate what a dynamic and uncategorizable experience Missionary Positions is: not cynical enough to be strictly funny, not pious enough to be strictly heavy.
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Bill Day photographed by pornographer
James DiGiorgio, who relishes his involvement
in Missionary Positions
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BRAINTRUSTdv: Why did you want to make a documentary—neither proselytizing nor critical—about these two young, hip, good-looking Christian ministers fighting porn?
BD: Like most people making documentaries, I will shoot just about anything when it's for hire. But when it comes to those films that I make myself, I like to make movies about activists. There is something about that person who tries to change the world that fascinates me. I am interested in what inspires these people. What makes them tick? How do they get out of bed in the morning and go out to fight the good fight when it just looks like a lost cause to the rest of us? My first feature documentary that I made with partner Terry Schwartz was called Saviors of the Forest, and it focused on environmental activists trying to prevent rain forest destruction in Ecuador. I followed that with a film called Rubber Jungle that focused on a Brazilian labor activist. I've also made a half-dozen short films on activists of various causes. I even sold a feature film project to Ridley Scott that is based on the life of an activist.
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In the case of Missionary Positions, I read a Los Angeles Times article about two young pastors who were setting up booths at porn conventions as part of a crusade against pornography. When I read that, it didn't interest me because I'm interested in the war on pornography. It interested me because these two young pastors fit the profile of people I like to make movies about. It didn't matter to me if they were Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists. I have long been a big fan of Joseph Campbell, the mythologist who wrote Hero with a Thousand Faces. I think I apply |
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Mike Foster and Craig Gross:
Too wholesome to be interesting?
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his principles to my filmmaking. This may seem a bit odd in the making of a documentary, but the truth is the mythical patterns you learn from Campbell exist in everyday life if you know what you're looking for. Activist stories seem to always fit the hero myth pattern.
BTdv: You captured a lot of ups and downs in the efforts of these particular activists. We get a very full-bodied sense of their journey.
BD: The key to making films about activists is the ups and downs of their journey. The activist's story basically follows the same pattern as the hero story in the classical sense. The hero gets a call to action, then accepts that call and goes out to slay the dragon. Along the way he encounters many obstacles that must be overcome. The outcome, or the end of the story, is whether or not our hero is successful. For the documentary filmmaker, you have to be willing to invest the time to capture those ups and downs and the transformation of the main characters. In this case it took about three years to get enough ups and downs to complete the story arc. Luckily, making a film about activists doesn't have to be a full-time job. Their journey is a very slow and tedious process. You can be working on other projects at the same time. The trick is to keep up with your characters on daily basis and know when things are happening.
BTdv: Watching Mike and Craig, one gets a sense of Christianity not as a puritanical organ of judgment and white-washing but as a sort of tender, vulnerable, even "naïve" benevolence that never sinks to condescension.
BD: It may seem strange, but I never gave a thought to Christianity throughout the whole process. It was just the backdrop from which these two archetypal characters emerge. I wasn't even aware that Craig and Mike were a different, more progressive type of Christian until we were well along in the process. I just knew that I liked these guys and figured the audience would, too.
BTdv: You never hoped they'd "slip up" and show their dark sides?
BD: I just don't think like that. I am not there to drag them down. That would be like making Star Wars and looking for ways to denigrate Luke Skywalker. I leave that territory to people like Werner Herzog. I like making movies about successful activists because I really believe they are the heroes of our age. Unlike the rest of us couch potatoes, these are the people who get up and do something. It doesn't matter to me whether they are Mother Teresa or Mohammed Atta. In their head, they are fighting for what they believe is right. The only danger for the filmmaker is that you may end up following a guy like Atta and in the middle of your story he flies a plane into a building and kills thousands of people. In the case of Craig and Mike, they could have turned out to be perverts who were using the whole pastor thing as a cover for their interest in porn. That would have been bad for me because I don't want to tell negative activist stories.
BTdv: Did you ever worry that their general equanimity would bore an audience?
BD: The heart of the conflict for me in these stories is not between the characters so much as it is the point where the "ideal" meets the "real." In this film, you have these guys who think God spoke to them and told them to go out and rid the world of the pornographic plague brought on by the Internet. So they get themselves all fired up and jump into the belly of the beast—the porn convention. Suddenly their idealistic crusade is blown apart by these 44D-type girls rubbing their tits all over their pure Christian values. I think what keeps the audience interested—beyond the boobs—is the desire we all have to watch other people suffer and feel pain. We also want to know what will happen to them. Will they persevere or will they crumble? Will the cruel world capsize their unrealistic ideals and reinforce our dark suspicions that life is hopeless? Or will some genuine magic overcome all the crap and thus allow them to succeed and fill the rest of us with hope?
BTdv: I was impressed with the thoroughness of the research they did before starting their Web site. They traversed the U.S. and even went to Amsterdam, which is becoming increasingly known as the porn capital of the world. They met people who had suffered in some way from the negative effects of pornography—men and women—and tried to determine what sort of ministry would do the most good for these people. Then they developed software and tested it on someone they knew personally who wanted to stop looking at porn. Seeing the number of people who are asking for help is one of the most remarkable elements in the movie—and it's even more remarkable that they were willing to talk so candidly in front of the camera.
BD: In Missionary Positions, I think I was lucky getting people to discuss their porn problems on camera because most of them were Christians. For a Christian, part of the purification and redemption process is based on exposing your sin to the group. The other Christians circle around and pray for you and it all becomes a rather "feel good" experience. There is one particular section in the film where I follow the pastors to a Christian porn rehab facility. Imagine it as a Betty Ford clinic for porn pervs. Inside was a group of about thirty men who were being treated for all sorts of sexual addictions. When we showed up with a camera, I thought we would be extremely restricted. So I was very surprised when the head counselor said he already had ten guys lined up to do unrestricted interviews. They saw it as part of the therapy and also a chance to prove to the world that there are serious problems in our culture related to pornography. One guy I filmed elsewhere but did not put in the film had a problem with kiddy porn. He was one of the most outspoken because he wanted the world to know where an addiction to kiddy porn can lead. For his therapy, he was forced to sit in front of a camera and masturbate to orgasm without the use of any visual stimulus. The therapeutic theory is that the first step for him was to disconnect the orgasmic experience from pictures of young children. Why he had to do this on camera was to prove to the therapists that he could reach orgasm without pictures. Not only was this guy willing to discuss this but also said he would have no problem with me using the tape of him masturbating if the therapist would give it to us. Obviously he was in need of more therapy.
BTdv: Outside the Vegas porn show, Craig confronts a hysterical, hellfire-and-brimstone Christian minister who uses a megaphone to issue threats of eternal damnation. One of the most amusing but disturbing scenes in the movie is Craig trying in his good-natured way to take the megaphone, trying to convince this guy that he's not accurately representing God's feelings on the issue. Craig is met with venomous hostility: "Get away from me, pig!" And the minister looks like he might get violent. And then inside the porn show, of course, Mike and Craig are being brutally made fun of. What was it like to shoot them "getting screwed from both ends," as Craig put it? Was there a lot of tension? Watching it is certainly uncomfortable.
BD: Well, to be honest, it wasn't hard to predict they would get creamed at the porn show. As the filmmaker, I knew this was a very important test of their character, so I was actively looking for all the bad things that were happening to them. The weird thing is how it all played out like a script. I remember Pastor Mike got up that morning, and he was all fired up. He had shaved his head and bought a leather jacket to make himself look less of a geek. He was spouting off slogans he intended to use at the porn convention with absolute glee. It was the prefect set-up for what I knew would be a crash course in reality. At the end of the day, I was following Mike back to his car. He had his tail between his legs and was in serious doubt about the whole mission. "We spent a thousand dollars to rent that booth space," he said. "And I gotta ask myself. Did we do any good here? I am a pastor with a good job and a great family. What the hell am I doing at a porn convention?" Then Pastor Craig returns to his car to go home and finds porn ads under his windshield wiper. It was the final slap from the real world. This is pure nirvana for me, the filmmaker—not so much because I get to laugh at their failure, but because I have a shot at capturing some real magic in the next chapter. In the typical activist story, your heroes will hit these emotional lows, and it looks like all is lost. But then something will happen to propel them forward. In this case, a very rich guy shows up and gives Craig and Mike $50,000 to help the cause. It is truly amazing to watch this happen in real life and capture it all on tape. Mike goes from wanting to quit in one scene to regaining his faith in the next. That's cool.
BTdv: These guys are completely open to being mocked, yet it's that very quality that prevents the viewer from mocking them. There are so many instances of third-party mockery onscreen that Mike and Craig inevitably become sympathetic characters. They willingly perform as the butt of jokes on radio and TV, so it seems only natural that they would participate in a feature-length mockery, if that's what someone wanted to do. And yet you don't stoop to that. I'm curious how you pitched the project to them.
BD: The first thing I did was show them a copy of my earlier film Saviors of the Forest, which also uses lots of humor and mockery to tell the story of activists trying to save the rain forest. I told them how the humor and mockery would make the audience like them better. I was giving them the hard sell, but as it turned out they already understood these principles very well. They were already calling themselves the "goofballs" and coming up with all sorts of funny antics to get a few laughs. To them, you can be funny and still get your message out. So it was a great match between the three of us. I never felt like the exploiter. The only area where they had a bit of catching up to do was revealing the little conflicts between them. At first, they were always in what I call "PR mode." They cleaned up the house before I got there. They took a shower before the tape started rolling. They would always say things are going great when I interviewed them. I quickly got very fed up with this and asked them, "Do you think anyone wants to watch a story about your perfect life? Hell, no. They want to see the real shit, so come on, let's see it." I don't think they ever became totally comfortable with that, but they did give me much better access. Mike especially got the idea. There is a scene in the movie where Mike quits the ministry. He actually called me before he called Craig to let me know about his decision.
BTdv: Your first major festival screening was at Cinequest. There were 174 features, but somehow you got a cover story in Silicon Valley's leading cultural events paper, which published the only comprehensive guide to Cinequest. Missionary Positions was coming into the festival with no buzz. It hadn't shown anywhere. And here it was getting a cover story. It wasn't surprising, then, that you sold out both scheduled screenings and turned away more people than were usually at the festival in the first place. Then Cinequest programmers added another show, and that one sold out as well. It's pretty unheard of for festival fare. By all rights this should have created a buzz that would have led to a lot more festival screenings, rather than the few you've had.
BD: The festival director sent me an E-mail and said the film scored very high with the screeners. Their theme at Cinequest is "mavericks," so I could see how this film about porn, which didn't fit the normal politic, would be seen as maverick. But who knows. It got in and I was very happy about that. Then I got a call from the newspaper you mentioned, and the reporter who called me said they wanted to do a story. He didn't say it was a cover story at that time, but he did seem interested in the subject. During our conversation, my earlier film Saviors of the Forest came up. The reporter remembered Saviors because it screened at Cinequest, and he reviewed it. He was a big fan of that film, so I think that made him more interested. As we talked, I started to explain the connection between the two films in terms of my interests in activists. I think he then realized Missionary Positions wasn't an infomercial for the Christian Right, and we had a great chat about porn and American culture and all sorts of good stuff. It seemed to follow the peculiar pattern of porn talk these days. At first, most people will stay within the current liberal cultural opinion about porn, which is basically: "It's gone
mainstream and isn't that great." But then when I talk about the two pastors and their concerns about porn, lots of people will feel comfortable enough to reveal their own reservations about the "porn everywhere" world we live in. More people than you think don't like porn in their life. I think this reporter was a bit disturbed by it.
Anyway, I think it was this reporter and the fact that the fest is in the heart of Silicon Valley where Internet porn is a serious issue that landed the cover and brought out a big audience. I think it also helped that we had a big picture of Craig and Mike in priestly-looking robes standing next to leather-clad porn girl on the cover. Lots of people complained about us using sex to sell the picture, but the inside joke was the girl seen with Craig and Mike is also the girl in the documentary. She appears in one of the most talked about scenes in the movie. She is the girl who barfs during the shooting of a porno after a guy takes his willy out of her rump and sticks it in her mouth.
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"Lots of people complained about us
using sex to sell the picture."
Photo by James DiGiorgio
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BTdv: As you say, that particular reporter seemed to like the movie. The same article referred to Missionary Positions as one of the most "thought-provoking" movies at the festival, and it certainly is thought-provoking, but that's overshadowed by how downright entertaining it is. It's charming, funny, and surprisingly lightweight considering its subject. Most of the sold-out audience I saw it with was laughing and gasping in all the right places. And then there's the mythic structure you were talking about, which just makes it a good, entertaining yarn with likable protagonists. In other words, the movie doesn't cop out and rest on the laurels of "serious cultural issues," like a lot of documentaries do. Were you aware of balancing heavy and light material during the editing process? Were you interested in avoiding a heavy-handed, issues-driven documentary?
BD: Oh, yes, I was super-sensitive to the duality of the tone. When I first started to assemble the footage, I could see there was lots of funny material but at the same time some really serious stuff. So the question was, what do I do? Should I just make a comedy here? Or should I go serious? Then I happened to be in the video store one day, and they were selling off some old Charlie Chaplin films for ninety-nine cents each. I bought a copy of The Gold Rush. When I watched it, I was suddenly aware of how well Chaplin can mix comedy and pathos within a single film. I then thought, just go for it. Play the funny stuff funny and don't be ashamed to take a turn and go serious when the material is serious. From there it was just a question of timing. When you get into this dual-tone business, you have to imagine you're on an emotional roller coaster. All your ups and downs have to be well timed for it to work.
BTdv: When I saw the poster art for the movie, I assumed it was a mockumentary. I figured that if anyone were really serious about fighting porn or about Christianity, they wouldn't dress up in Jesuit robes with exorcist-sized crosses around their necks and shield each other's eyes from a vamp in leather. It seemed obvious that they would have to take themselves more seriously than that in order to be effective. Why did you decide to market it that way, and how did you convince Mike and Craig to participate?
BD: Using the robes was my idea, and the guys went along with it because it fits the style of the whole ministry, which is kind of pranky. All three of us believe you can be more effective with comedy and appearing "non-expert" than you can trying to make yourself authoritative. The audience is less defensive to start, and over the long run the jokes will fall away, but the message will remain. And it seems to be part of a growing trend in what some people call "marketed activism." Example: Ted Turner, a known environmentalist, started the TBS Superstation on cable. They have been running ecological activist programming for years, but all of it has been very serious and authoritative. It always made you want to go in the kitchen and stick your head in the oven. Now they are going to broadcast a comic ecological show called Earth to America and are advertising it as "Celebrating earth and the funniest people on it." Then, just yesterday, I read about a group of activists in Paris who are on a ecological campaign against SUVs. They call themselves "The Deflated," and they go around letting the air out SUV tires. The humor of that name, which translates as "cowards" in French, gets them more support than if they called themselves the "Anti-SUV Coalition." So, you see, it is how the game is played these days. And Mike and Craig have been on this track for years. Just the other day, Mike came up with a idea called "porn eraser." It would be a product he would offer that would help people erase those porn images stuck in their brains. Lots of people complain about that. I said, "But there isn't anything you can do to erase those images." Mike then said, "I know. That's the point. The product doesn't work. People should know once those images are in there, they don't go away."
BTdv: Speaking of that, porn director James "Jimmy D" DiGiorgio shows up in Missionary Positions saying, "I wish I could delete files. I've done stuff I wish I didn't do. Sometimes you find yourself doing some really disgusting stuff." It's clear from every remark Jimmy D makes that he's disgusted with the porn industry and wants to help the other side. He ended up losing business because of his association with Mike and Craig's work—volunteering to help them make a commercial for their Web site. The Jimmy D scenes in the movie are incidental, but they really debunk the porn industry—specifically that scene you mentioned earlier in which an actress vomits ("wretches," as Jimmy D says). It's also interesting that so many other porn professionals jumped on the bandwagon and helped Jimmy D make the ad for Mike and Craig.
BD: I was surprised when Jimmy D showed up. I received an E-mail from Pastor Craig, and the subject read, "This is huge." It was an E-mail from this porn director named Jimmy D DiGiorgio. Jimmy had met Craig and Mike at one of the porn conventions and then read about them in an adult news magazine. He said he wanted to help them out with their next anti-porn TV ad. When I first learned of all this, I was thrilled because it was yet another example of these mythological patterns that Joseph Campbell discusses in his books about the hero myth. Once the hero accepts the call to action, he will go out and cross the threshold of his everyday world. He will enter into a new universe and encounter many hardships. But on his journey he will also encounter what Campbell refers to as "supernatural helpers." Now Jimmy is certainly not very supernatural, but the timing of his appearance was almost magical. Craig and Mike were once again at a point of almost quitting. They were out on the road doing speaking engagements to empty rooms, and their Web site was under regular attack by some Turkish hackers. You could just feel Mike falling into a big black pit of doubt. He was on his last legs when this E-mail from Jimmy D came in. It was like a bolt of lightning struck and re-energized the whole ministry. They set up a meeting at a Las Vegas Porn Convention, and I tagged along. I just walked in rolling tape, and Jimmy just took it all in his stride. He wasn't nervous about what he was doing or worried that it might hurt his career. As he later explained to me, "It is very hard to flunk out of porn."
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BTdv: So he doesn't regret participating in your movie or helping Mike and Craig?
BD: Jimmy doesn't regret being in the movie at all. In fact, he writes about it all the time on his blog and gave out DVDs to his whole family. Looking back now, it's no surprise to me that he helped out. As I got to know him, he made me understand one thing very well: the people who hate porn the most are the people in the porn industry. I think there's a good amount of truth in that point of view. What else would explain all the donations of cameras and equipment that came in from other porn companies to make an anti-porn commercial?
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Craig and Mike with pornographer Jimmy D,
who got a haircut before appearing on the 700 Club.
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BTdv: Mike and Craig didn't seem particularly surprised that Pat Robertson spoke out against them. They seemed disappointed but not surprised. Robertson said, "Jesus wouldn't go to a porn show." And in a Q&A after the screening, Mike said, "Jesus wouldn't host the 700 Club either." This Christian in-fighting seems really counter-productive and silly, but looking at social problems in terms of talk versus action, Mike's perspective is unassailable.
BD: To me, this was just more evidence that I had latched on to a real-life hero story. In some hero myths there is a character called "Holdfast." This is the old guard who refuses to give up his position and allow fresh blood and ideas to come forth. Pat Robertson became that character in this story. Here we have Craig and Mike out in the trenches winning hearts and minds. Robertson's news organization goes to great effort to produce a story about Craig and Mike, but then Robertson refuses to allow the story on the air. This is a perfect Holdfast. At that point, my camera pans back to Craig and Mike. What I want to know now is how they will react. Will they just cry in their milk, or will they accomplish the impossible and somehow get around Mr. Holdfast Robertson? In this story Craig and Mike win because Robertson's staff waits until Pat takes a day off and run the story when he is not looking. (They claim Pat never watches his own news program.) And in a sense that is the real triumph of Craig and Mike story. They are slowly pushing the Pat Robertsons of Christianity out. When I first started with them, they could barely get into any church at all to talk about porn. Those churches that did let them in relegated them to Saturday morning men's groups. Most people claim this is because so many pastors are involved in porn. But I don't see it that way. To me it is just a matter of tradition. The old-guard Pat Robertson type philosophy is pretty clear: the best way to deal with porn is to not talk about it. Why even let the innocent know it's there? That is the way porn has been dealt with for many, many years. Craig and Mike have come in with a new idea. Their philosophy is that there is a 24/7 pipeline of porn hooked directly into your home thanks to the Internet, and it can't be ignored. Today, despite the protestations of people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, Craig and Mike are changing the prevailing philosophy. Evidence of this can be seen in the fact that Craig and Mike are no longer relegated to Saturday. They are now the main event on Sunday when they speak.
BTdv: Mike and Craig walk a fine line in trying to appeal to both Christians and non-Christians with their message, but for the most part they don't hit it off with either group—in the timeframe of the movie. At times it even seems that Christians are more opposed to them than non-Christians. Were any individuals or groups resistant to participating in your documentary? Did anyone refuse to be on camera?
BD: The only Christian person who refused to be in the film was a parent of a teenager who had a serious porn problem. I can certainly understand that. But everyone else I approached was willing to appear. I think having two pastors as the main characters added a great deal of comfort to the Christian people who were asked to sit in front of the camera.
In terms of who opposes Craig and Mike the most, the secular world is where the vast majority of their opposition is. In shooting this story I learned a great deal about Christianity and how so many people just hate Christians for no particular reason. If I were more concerned with the Christian aspect of the story, I would dig into the crimes Christians have committed throughout the centuries, but that isn't my interest. I just look at them and marvel how similar they are to, say, that Amazon Indian tribe I was shooting for National Geographic last summer. Just like those primitive Indians, they love, they laugh, they cheat, they steal. They get jealous and envy one another. They cry when somebody they love dies. Christians are flesh and bone just as much as Indians and pornographers. You have good ones and bad ones. But if you say the word "Christian" in a non-Christian film crowd, most people will turn up their noses for no good reason. To be honest, I am a little shocked by the intolerance of some of my film-world brethren. Groupthink is a sad thing.
BTdv: You've said the movie never gained much momentum on the festival circuit, but it has had a lot of attention from unlikely quarters. VH-1 has you shooting a pilot for a Reality TV series based on the movie, for instance. And a church instituted "Porn Sunday," and 5,000 people showed up to watch the movie (which, as it happens, is pretty graphic for a church crowd). Now Porn Sunday is a national phenomenon, and churches continue to join the campaign. How do you feel about these very polarized sorts of attention?
BD: Yes, they had to add extra screenings at Cinequest. We also had a packed house at Nashville and won Best Documentary runner-up, and we also won Best of the Fest at a smaller fest in the heart of Porn Valley here in L.A. But then it just went dark. It was then rejected by everyone from Montreal, to Mill Valley, to Hamptons, Woodstock, Telluride, and the Los Angeles Film Festival. Why? Well, the rejection letters all said there were so many good films submitted, there just wasn't enough room for all the good films like mine. Beyond that, I can only guess. My personal theory is that there is the Christian bias I just spoke about and also the reality that some fests just don't want to be associated with porn on any level. The other thing is I don't think Missionary Positions fits the film festival world very well. Most people in America still see porn as a First Amendment issue. Anybody who complains about it is attacking the First Amendment. I don't know of any festival programmers who are not big supporters of the First Amendment. When we showed it to VH-1 as a possible candidate for reality TV series, I expected pretty much the same thing. But they jumped in with both feet and have never looked back. The difference is VH-1 wants to be hip and cool like a festival, but they can't ignore the bottom line. They need a big audience, and that is what this project is able to provide. That is what the church screenings have proved.
BTdv: How did the church screenings come about? I can only guess you weren't thrilled about it.
BD: The church screenings got started as a result of the film festival programmers giving the film a hard time. I wanted to show the programmers that Christians would support the film and fill up seats like they did for The Passion of the Christ. I asked Craig and Mike to get a few letters of endorsement from Christian pastors. The first one they showed it to said he wanted to do more than just write a letter. He wanted to show it in his church on a Sunday evening. I was very resistant to the idea at first because I didn't want a bunch of Christians looking at my film for free. If it was going to be in a venue like that, I wanted some compensation. Mike and Craig, however, made it pretty clear they were going to show it anyway, so I just kind of sat in my corner and pouted. Then after the screening they called me. They were so excited I could barely understand what they were saying. I remember they kept asking me, "How many people do you think showed up?" I guessed a hundred, but then they said the estimate was 5,000. I was like, "Holy crap! You showed my film to 5,000 people for free!" Then they said, "No, you dumb, greedy filmmaker, you don't understand. The pastor asked for an offering, and we're coming home with $50,000." Ever since then, I have been saying, "Forget the festivals. I'm going Christian, baby!" Other churches heard about this and wanted to have their own Porn Sunday.
Looking back now, I think I learned an important lesson. When you play around with the hero myth, you must understand that the myth is so universal it will appeal to almost any group. But it's important to understand the limitations of what you can do in a documentary with mythology. When George Lucas plays with the hero myth, he can generalize it to the point where everybody can plug into it because he is creating fiction. In doing a doc, however, you can't generalize because you are downloading reality. You can't escape the fact that you are playing to the very same group you are filming. They become your main audience. In my case it was Christians. I had one Christian tell me the story of my documentary is really the "Christ story." I wish Joseph Campbell could have been there for that. He might have smiled and said, "The truth is one. The sages speak of it by many names."
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Mike and Craig with their Porn Mobile and their porn-fighting rabbit.
(Naturally, the rabbit is groped at porn shows.)
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BTdv: It seems like Missionary Positions would have been tough to shoot because of the globe-trotting, if nothing else. How many were in your crew?
BD: The total number of crew at any given time on this show never exceeded one. Most of the time that was me. I've done lots of one-man-band work, so it was not a big issue. In some cases, I told them to take their own camera and record it themselves. They would get someone around them to tape it.
BTdv: What cameras were you using?
BD: When I was shooting, I always had two cameras with me: a Sony PD-100 and a Sony PD-150. I find I can cover almost any situation with those two. They balance color-wise really well and are very durable cameras. For example, if they were doing a speaking gig, I would set the PD-100 up on a tripod from the back of the stage and just let it run. Then I would go out front with the PD-150 and get all the shots I needed from there. With that single shot from the rear to use as cover, I could cut the rest of the material with ease.
BTdv: How did you deal with audio in such disparate locations?
BD: For the sound, I always use the PD-150 as the audio source because the audio is much easier to deal with on the 150. I don't use a mixer because it's too much to deal with. I carry two radio mics and a shotgun, and I find that I can cover most situations.
BTdv: What was the most challenging thing to shoot throughout the course of making the movie?
BD: The most challenging thing to shoot for me on any show are those moments of truth, those little happenings where the characters reveal their true selves and aren't ruining the scene by saying stuff like, "You're not taping this are you?" I call these rare moments "in the pocket." It is that point where something real suddenly happens, and you are in just the right place to capture it all, and all the players no longer notice the camera.
BTdv: There's an interview with Craig that feels ex post facto, as though it's an interview about the movie rather than a part of the movie. He comments on everything that's happened "so far" and even offers a point of epilogue. It feels scripted. It feels like a surrogate for the filmmaker's voice, a superimposed voice-of-God narration. Was this an intentional device or was this just an interview which happened to have a unique texture?
BD: This is a really interesting issue for me. It's part of a very odd process my subjects go through as I make the movie. The important thing to understand is most activists don't understand their own story. They just know they're out there trying to change the world.
Then comes that point where they see the film for the first time. It may be a rough cut, but it's the first time they see their story organized with a beginning, middle, and kind of an ending. Suddenly the mythical elements are out on display, and the subject becomes an interactive participant in the creation of his own story. He will say, "This is true and that isn't true," and we will play this game of making changes until we are both happy. During that process, however, the subject can become rather detached from his screen persona and start seeing his image onscreen as a separate person from himself. I'm not sure of the full psychological phenomenon here, but I do know one thing: once the subject crosses this threshold, his behavior on camera begins to change. In this case, the last interviews that were conducted with Craig took place after multiple screenings of the unfinished film. These interviews were no different than any other interviews shot for the film, but the tone of them does shift. There is really nothing you can do about this, other than not showing the film to your subjects until it is absolutely necessary.
BTdv: There has been much talk about every image-producing technology being appropriated for pornographic purposes, and never has this been more true than with DV. At the same time, you shot this movie on DV, and it's being used by churches in their campaign against pornography. Strangely, though, Missionary Positions in and of itself isn't on either side—it isn't a Christian movie, and it doesn't defend porn. What is your personal position? Are you just sitting back laughing at it all?
BD: To be honest, I will confess that I do see life as ninety-nine percent folly. I see myself as a tourist always. If it weren't for Joseph Campbell convincing me that there is something magical going on just behind the curtain, I would be a complete nihilist. As I mentioned earlier, my interest is the activist and not the issue. I don't even think it necessary to present both sides of the issue to the viewer. There is so much information in the world, people can take bits of information from numerous sources and form an opinion that way. I just want you to experience what it is like to be with someone who really believes they can change the world and have the passion to do it.
In terms of how I personally feel about porn, I think I came away with the feeling that porn has been with us since the days of the caveman and will always be with us. There is no getting around that. The human sex drive is just a force of nature that cannot be denied. Whether porn is a good thing or a bad thing is anybody's guess. One thing I do believe is that porn does have a power to it, and I think that power needs to be respected. One woman I interviewed told me porn really warped her sex life. When she was a teenager she found some gay porn—as in two guys having sex. She began a pattern of masturbating to this stuff, and over time, she claims, it rewired her sexual preferences. When she started dating guys, she couldn't fully get off unless she was with two men who were having sex with each other. This was difficult because it was heterosexual men who were attracted to her. So she was forced to go on these expansive campaigns to convince her boyfriends to have sex with other men for her. "I still prefer watching and masturbating than actually having sex," she told me. You hear lots of these types of stories when you talk to people about porn. If someone came up with a plan to put warning labels on porn like we do cigarettes, I would be a big supporter.
BTdv: No matter how far-fetched, tell us what you see as the ultimate long-term goal for digital video technology in terms of production, distribution, exhibition, and public reception.
BD: I see many upsides and downsides to the evolving digital world. First and most importantly, it will continue to put the means of production in the hands of people who otherwise would not be able to express themselves in the video medium.
I started using 8mm video in 1990 to make documentaries, and I thought it was so cool that I could afford to make my own films. My happiest moment came during a Q&A after screening a doc I made in 8mm. A woman raised her hand and asked me who gave me permission to make the film. When I told her "nobody" she got this confounded look on her face. It was a very beautiful moment. On the other hand, this world of everyone out there expressing themselves with a camcorder and a laptop is also creating a glut of material that can become overwhelming. I think the average film festival will tell you that submissions have gone up dramatically over the last five years. I think Sundance went from something like 600 submissions per year in 1990 to something like 3,000 last year. If you go down to the Sundance office in Los Angeles during submission season, you will see bleary-eyed screeners arrive about eleven o'clock in the morning literally pulling a little red wagon of DVD submissions they watched the night before back to the office. About a half-hour later they will re-emerge with a fresh load of new DVDs and looking none too excited about the long day ahead. That is the way I feel sometimes looking at the digital media horizon. There's just so much out there I don't know what to look at, and it stresses me out. It gets to a point where everyone seems to be talking, but nobody is listening. I call it the Age of Distraction. I've been thinking about making a film on the subject but worry no one will have time to watch it.
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