Lovelace was one of the big premiere films of the Sundance Film Festival and it is now hitting theaters this weekend. The very development of a Linda Lovelace biopic was big news throughout its gestation, as well as competing Lovelace films, one which was to star Lindsay Lohan. This Lovelace stars Amanda Seyfried as the star of Deep Throat, and explores both the fantasy and truth of her involvement in adult films. Peter Sarsgaard plays Chuck Traynor, the boyfriend who got her into film, Adam Brody as Deep Throat costar Harry Reems and Juno Temple as Linda’s friend Patsy. We spoke with directors Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein in Sundance after their 9AM screening of Lovelace.
CraveOnline: Was it important to have a light touch with the scenes in the adult film industry in the beginning of the movie?
Jeffrey Friedman: Yeah, it was important to start out I think in a lighter vein just because it was going to get so heavy. I don’t think an audience could have taken the intensity of the bad stuff for the length of the movie. And, it was also part of our storytelling strategy, to tell the story in the way that the public heard about it, the way that Linda presented it to the public at different stages in her life.
Were there a lot of discussions about how you would portray the act of a blowjob in a non pornographic movie?
Rob Epstein: Well, between us there were discussions about how to approach it and we knew ultimately we’d have to get the actors, the male actors, to sell those scenes. Those scenes are really their scenes and Peter Sarsgaard and Adam Brody both did a great job. Then in terms of the mechanics of it, yeah, we had to choreograph it but those scenes were actually the most fun to film. There was a lot of laughing on those days.
Jeffrey Friedman: And everybody understood what the challenge was so it was really a group effort. It was us and the actors and the D.P. just figuring out how we could sell it.
Linda had a horrible experience, but this movie is not an indictment of the entire adult industry, right?
Rob Epstein: No, I mean Linda’s horrible experience is really one of domestic abuse, domestic violence. For her that was married to her experience on the set but that’s really where her trauma lied.
Of course we’ve all heard about Lindsay Lohan being cast in a Lovelace project and the other competing Lovelace movies. What was your development on this Lovelace film?
Rob Epstein: Well, let’s see. Going way back seven years ago, producer Laura Rister had the idea to do something on Lovelace. She hooked up with Jim Young, another producer, and they hired Merritt Johnson to write the first script, brought on Heidi Jo Markel as a producer who got the financing from Millennium, the studio. At that point they were ready to look for directors and three years ago when we were finishing Howl, they came to our studio in San Francisco and watched Howl on the edit bed and brought us in for a pitch. We pitched the concept which is pretty much the structure of the movie now. We were hired and then we worked with Andy Bellin on the final screenplay.
Was Lohan ever attached to your project?
Rob Epstein: She was for another project. There was another project called Inferno based on completely different material. So they were parallel projects but they didn’t have any relationship to one another.
Jeffrey Friedman: I think Millennium might have been involved at some point.
Rob Epstein: They might have. That predated us.
Do you think getting your film out first will impact the other Lovelace projects?
Jeffrey Friedman: Well, it’ll impact it. I don’t know if it’ll be fatal.
Rob Epstein: Yeah, it depends on the approach. When we did Howl there were two Ginsberg projects and now Kill Your Darlings is here.
There’s always two. Hopefully you can be the Volcano and not the Dante’s Peak.
Rob Epstein: Yeah. It didn’t work for the Capote projects unfortunately and they’re both great films.
The doctor’s office scene from Deep Throat might be the only dialogue scene I remember of any porno. What was it like to recreate that particular humorous dialogue?
Jeffrey Friedman: It was fun. We could just play then because that’s what they were doing. They were just having fun.
Rob Epstein: It’s really the only scene where Amanda as Linda is doing more of an impersonation of Linda Lovelace performing in Deep Throat. All the other scenes in the movie, she’s just living as Linda, but there because there’s the artifact of Deep Throat, that’s more about trying to do a caricaturization of Deep Throat.
Is the other scene with Debi Mazar also from Deep Throat? Because that I didn’t remember.
Rob Epstein: Yeah, that is. There’s a scene with that character, Dolly, in Deep Throat where she has those very lines.
