Page 22 - AVN June 2015

INTERVIEW | |By Mark Kernes
in XXX, stretching back to his
directorial debut in 1997 on Big
D avid Stanley has a storied career
Game, through a short stint at
Elegant Angel in the late ’90s,
then a roughly five-year run at
Vivid (where he won Best Director and Best
Screenplay for Pretty Girl, starring Ashley Blue)
and finishing up with four years at Wicked
Pictures, which he left in 2008.
But it’s been quite a while since Stanley
was in the Los Angeles area, even though he’s
maintained his contact with the industry for
the past four years or so by writing scripts for
his friend B. Skow, first while Skow was still
with Vivid—Stanley won the Best Screenplay
In the Director’s Seat
‘Just the Two of Us’ marks David Stanley’s return
honors for Skow’s Vivid release The Condemned—and then
moving with Skow to Girlfriends Films, where Skow has
his own line of top-rated features, many of which have
been AVN Award-nominated, thanks in part to Stanley’s
scripts.
“I love working with him. It’s the greatest,” Stanley
enthused. “The way I think of it is, I waited 15 years to
work with B. Skow. Like, I waited to meet him, and we
were always right next to each other. We worked at Vivid
at the same time, we were in the business, I always heard
his name, but I had no idea who he was until suddenly he
called me in 2009 and I started writing for him.”
So ... why is David Stanley back?
“Because there’s still stories I gotta tell,” he explained
on the set of his directorial comeback, Just the Two of Us.
“There’s still things in my personal life that I want to talk
about. It’s all the same muscles; I just don’t use them
so much anymore because I kind of went off and started
doing other things.”
Like?
“Well, I moved to Minnesota, got married, had a kid,
and I started a family, and we built a bakery and run an
ice cream store in a little beach town in Wisconsin, and
I bake all the cakes and cookies and stuff and my wife
scoops the ice cream. That’s what we do.”
Well, not all that he does, obviously—and his wife
seems to be on board with all of it, as he revealed in
talking about Just the Two of Us.
“Actually, it should be called The 28 of Us,” Stanley
quipped. “It’s a story based partially on my own life. It’s
about a couple where the husband likes to watch his wife
with other men, and what happens when she confronts
her conservative sister and the sister finds out about
her activities, and the conflict between those, and how
it awakes the conservative sister’s libido, and it wakens
her up to what she used to be like and she becomes wild
again, and the other sister who was wild becomes more
conservative, and it’s the dovetailing of those two.
“It’s a very sex-positive story, told from the point of
view of a married guy—me—seeing life through that
prism, and loving watching my wife with other men and
then, well, this was so good for my relationship,” he
revealed. “It was like we had hit this sort of dry road, and
didn’t really know what to do, and we started doing this,
and it really fixed everything. It was the opposite of the
After School Special version, which is, ‘Oh, that’s your
road to ruin.’ It really saved us, you know, so I said to
myself, that’s what I’ve got to write about, so that’s this
movie.”
Just the Two of Us is the first of two movies Stanley will
be directing while in L.A., both of which will be released
through the Skow for Girlfriends Films label.
“I’m sort of reauditioning for the job a little bit,” he
admitted. “It’s getting Girlfriends Films familiar with my
directing style and things like that, because they know
my writing really well now, but they don’t know that I
know where to put the camera, and they’re obviously
open to it, so this is really my audition for them, because
I want to prove that I know what I’m doing.”
From what we observed on Stanley’s set, there’s no
question that he does ... but that’s another story for
another time.
WHO’S WHO
22 | AVN.com | 6.15