Page 26 - AVN Januray 2017

WHO’S WHO
AS A WRITER I’M
PRODUCING AND
DIRECTING AND
EDITING AT THE SAME
TIME AS I’M WRITING
BECAUSE I KNOW
WHAT LOCATIONS
I CAN FIND AND
WHAT I CAN BUILD
IN THE STUDIO AND
WHAT’S FEASIBLE.
AND I’M ALMOST
ALWAYS WRITING
FOR SPECIFIC
ACTORS.
—WICKED
PICTURES
CONTRACT
DIRECTOR BRAD
ARMSTRONG
IF IT’S LATE SUMMER, somewhere in Southern California
Brad Armstrong is putting the finishing touches on a
movie that Wicked Pictures will street at the tail end
of September, just in time to make the AVN Awards
deadline. And in the case of this past summer, the Wicked
contract director had two projects on his plate, both of
which are well represented in the list of nominees for the
2017 awards.
But on the day he spoke to AVN back in July,
Armstrong was focused on the present, dealing with the
usual vagaries of adult production. Chief among these
was losing access to one of the locations he was using for
the movie DNA, an ambitious sci-fi story. So he had to
turn an oft-used shooting site into the headquarters for
Iterum, a company that clones loved ones for bereaved
friends and family—but these “carbons” only live for 72
hours.
“I had this big cool location … it’s like a designer
showroom. And they kept dinkin’ me around and dinkin’
I
INTERVIEW | By Sharan Street
me around. That’s probably the biggest thing I’ve found
over the last couple of years: the reluctance for locations
to allow adult in their places. ... A lot of the bad publicity
in the press about the condom laws and AHF and that
kind of thing—it’s getting tougher and tougher to find
locations.”
Working with his small, cohesive team of longtime
collaborators, Armstrong re-created the set on the fly in
the smaller location. “These are some of the pieces we
HIS WICKED WAYS
Director Brad Armstrong on the ‘little stepping stones’ that led to a big career
Overall, Armstrong seems satisfied with his
work, but he candidly admits it took him longer
to evolve as a screenwriter. With an educational
background in commercial art and advertising,
Armstrong got the visuals down early. “I’m a
pretty good writer now, and I didn’t use to be.
There was a time when Steve [Wicked founder
Steven Orenstein] said, ‘Well, you’ve got the art
part now, but let’s try focusing on the story.’”
Asked what was the first script that he really
liked, Armstrong named Conquest, a 1996 Wicked
movie he co-directed with Greg Steel.
“As a writer I’m producing and directing and
editing at the same time as I’m writing because
I know what locations I can find and what I can
build in the studio and what’s feasible. And I’m
almost always writing for specific actors.”
For Preacher’s Daughter, Armstrong said, “One
hundred percent, Xander [Corvus] was the only
dude. And it was funny because I had to jump
through hoops to get him because he was already
booked on some of the days that I needed him. I
had to beg Craven Moorehead and Stills by Alan
... they were kind enough to donate Xander.”
Indeed, Corvus nails his part as the sexy bad
boy who deflowers Malkova’s ingénue character
and then finds out just how much fire and
brimstone lies behind the preacher’s buttoned-
down exterior.
“As the writer-slash-director-slash-producer,
Wicked gives me a lot of latitude about who I can
hire, especially in my acting parts. They like to
make some suggestions with the hot chick parts,
but they let me pick my people. And there are
some great actors in adult, especially given the
limited amount of time we have to shoot. … If
you get a script a week in advance, that’s pretty
good. Two weeks is like, whooo!”
For these two movies, the director worked
with several performers who were new to him.
“It’s been great so far, the acting has been
top-notch,” Armstrong said. He gave rave
reviews to Small Hands in DNA, playing a villain
with unscrupulous reasons for cloning his dead
girlfriend. “Small Hands is bringing it to the table
with his role as the bad guy. And he’s been doing
a great job both sexually and acting wise, so he
will be on my new roster,” he added.
Asked what is the biggest challenge to working
with adult performers as opposed to mainstream
actors, Armstrong elaborated, “People are so
trained in the gonzo assembly line—you gotta
do that, you gotta do this. For us one of the
hardest things is having to beat that out of them.
... They’re so programmed into what a lot of the
companies need for their sex scenes, it’s a little
tricky for them to turn that off.”
Armstrong credited Alexis Fawx in particular
for rising to that challenged. When the busty
MILF bombshell played his wife in Preacher’s
Daughter, he told her, “I’m going to tone you
down a fair chunk. You’re not going to be all
porno hair and the big smoky eyes and stuff.
You’re going to be all but nothing.” And she said,
(Continued on page 30)
used ... I brought them back here to tie in this location
with the big lab,” he explained. “That truck out there
is full of fucking stainless steel cryotanks, all kinds of
bullshit. We had a big huge lab set up.”
For his other big Wicked project, The Preacher’s Daughter,
Armstrong had the opposite luck with locations. In
addition to scoring a perfectly preserved Victorian
mansion (the same site where he set some scenes from
his 2011 parody The Rocki Whore Picture Show), the director
also got to shoot in a rustic corner of Ventura County.
“We had a really nice ranch location … great streams and
bridges, all kinds of cool stuff up there.”
These two movies represent half of Armstrong’s
directorial output for the year. “I’ve cut it down to four,”
he said. “It doesn’t make sense for me to do a little two-
day movie.”
And indeed, each is an ambitious project in its own
way. Armstrong penned both scripts and takes on major
roles, playing the aggressively ambitious head of Iterum
in the sci-fi project and the preacher father of Mia
Malkova in the drama.
“We’ve kind of run the gamut from old-fashioned,
small-town country America to futuristic sci-fi, so we’ve
got a good stretch. … Each year I bounce around, from
sci-fi to country to heartfelt drama like Aftermath to a
kind of adventure fantasy like Underworld, to keep it fresh,
so it’s not like you’ve seen one Brad Armstrong movie,
you’ve seen them all.”
Above, Brad Armstrong playing Malcolm Moore, the head of the cloning company Iterum, in the Wicked Pictures movie DNA.
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