It’s such a beautiful film. Some of us come from families where your family is your first port of call, and some of us don’t. For some of us, it’s your friends and it’s a family that you’ve made. Both are special and he’s coming from a place where he has this completely deadened dad and the mam is totally fraught and lost and he just needs to escape from whatever this terrible situation is. And he escapes to this place which one would assume would not be a good thing, but he finds his surrogate mam and it explores this idea of the family that you’ve made through circumstance and through connections. It just so happens that the thing here that’s connecting them is quite a sour industry and, for the most part, exploitative. But the film is not really about the porn industry, it’s about the ways that family members exploit each other. And not just in a setting of porn but in just any normal family and that there’s always a danger that you over rely on them and you take too much. I think it’s beautiful for the reason that it shows you this happening but then it also arrives back at a place of peace and mutual support.
Julianne Moore is so amazing in this. The scenes at the end where she has to go to court about custody, it’s just too much. And I can’t not talk about it without mentioning Philip Seymour Hoffman. He’s my hero. That character he plays, he’s somebody who’s on the outside and he wants in, he’s always just on the edge of things. The other reason I would call it beautiful is because the world is full of some ugly stuff but the cameras, and the way it moves, and the editing and colours, are counter to that. They are something extra. So, I think just from a camera dance point of view, it’s just a beautiful, intricate piece of work. And to make an intricate piece of work about a world which had never been treated that way before is really bold and inspiring.
