Page 62 - AVN November 2017

FEATURE
Dera adds, “Bree writes and directs, which is vital to the production—it keeps
the passion alive. Craven Moorehead, Billy Visual and Matt Holder are a dream
team. They are friends and family to me. It’s so easy to perform when I’m in such
a comfortable environment. I always look forward to my PureTaboo days!”
Whitney Wright, who debuted in porn last September and is featured in A
Mother’s Choice opposite India Summer and Robby Echo, tells AVN, “Shooting with
PureTaboo has definitely been more interesting and more in depth than any other
shoot I’ve ever done.”
“Both times, Bree has really stressed the importance of getting into character
and fully embodying your role—from your character’s quirks and mannerisms
right down to facial reactions and room presence,” Wright says. “Throughout
the entire scene, she calls you by your character name instead of your performer
name, and throughout each scene she guides you through what your character
is feeling, and why. So much so that you really start to feel as your character
would—betrayed, frightened, sinister, self-serving, motive-driven…
“Being cast for PureTaboo is so much more than just being booked for another
scene. … Working with Bree and Craven at the helm is always an amazing
experience, and I love seeing the passion and excitement that Bree invests in
each scene. I’m looking forward to the upcoming weeks as more PureTaboo
scenes release and I cannot wait to see the feedback and praise pour in for such a
deserving website, cast and crew.”
Elsa Jean, who starred in “Girl Tagging” along with Ryan Driller and Reena Sky,
tells AVN she enjoyed her first PureTaboo experience.
“I loved that I got to switch things up and do a scene with more acting,” Elsa
says. “I’ve always wanted to see how my work would improve with more acting in
the scene. Bree is such a great director and she really lets you be yourself and get
into your part. She’s such an encouraging director. She improves your performance
by letting you be as creative as you want.”
Derrick Pierce, a performer known for his versatility, became a go-to guy for
Mills’ edgy 2016 launch, PrettyDirty.com, and more recently played an unforgiving
john opposite Elena Koshka’s escort character in “The Allowance” for PureTaboo.
“IF YOU WANT TO MAKE SOMETHING
FEEL REAL AND YOU WANT TO MAKE
SOMETHING FEEL NATURAL THEN
THE BEST THING TO DO IS TO LET
PEOPLE LOSE THEMSELVES IN THE
CHARACTER AND WHAT COMES OUT
COMES OUT.”
—BREE MILLS
“Myself and Ryan Driller and a few other guys legitimately made a career out
of acting in porn and I know that sounds like an oxymoron,” Pierce tells AVN.
“Tell someone not in the business that there’s dialogue in porn and they think it’s
funny.”
But the kind of intensity Pierce brings in “The Allowance” as the cold-blooded
millionaire who is accustomed to renting women is no laughing matter.
“If they give me that type of a role, I’m going to own it,” Pierce says.
“They’re trying to draw you into more than just the sex. They want you to
explore the what if, the potentially fucked-up shit that people buy. Their approach
to things is a very real approach to embracing people’s inhibitions. It’s not just the
sex, it’s not just coming on some girl’s face. All that stuff is secondary.
“When you watch, you know they’re going to fuck, obviously—that’s a given.
But it’s how do they get there, what does that consist of, how does that work?”
In this exclusive Q&A, Mills, who also founded the critically acclaimed Girlsway
Network in 2014, provides candid insight about exactly how it works as she
discusses the state of adult acting, her determination to showcase it and what
it takes to achieve the level of performance that is becoming the signature of
PureTaboo.com.
FEATURE | By Dan Miller
62 | AVN.com | 11.17
AVN: How does your process with PureTaboo differ from other sites
such as Girlsway?
Bree Mills: With Girlsway we use a very traditional feature-making approach
with how we make that content—so three, sometimes four, camera setups. In the
projects when I would come in and write and co-direct them with StillsbyAlan I
always did full scripts using the same format that you would use if you were doing
a mainstream project. It works very well within that medium. …
With PureTaboo I thought if I’m going to take such gritty, dark, real-world
subjects, why don’t I work with the actors to bring that to life and not necessarily
try to put words in their mouth?
We can use the Elena [Koshka] example [in “The Allowance”]. A lot of people
have talked to me about, “My god, I can’t believe the performance that was given.”
None of that was scripted. It was coming together and spending a long day on set
flushing out, “Who is this girl? What is her situation? How would you react if you
were in that situation? What kind of experience can you draw from people you
know or your own background to bring into this character? Let’s plot out what
would happen.”
That’s a good example of what I discovered early on was the right approach to
take to this: to not try to write every single word that these characters are going to
say. If you want to make something feel real and you want to make something feel
natural, then the best thing to do is to let people lose themselves in the character
and what comes out comes out.
I think when I started to write the early episodes my first attempt was, OK, “I’m
going to write a script,” and then about two pages into it I was like, “Fuck this,
this doesn’t sound real. This sounds like me kind of projecting.” And so I quickly
abandoned that and went into let me be the storyteller. Let me know inside and
out what the story is going to be about and give enough of a stage for the actors
to come on and we’ll all work together to flush out these characters, which is
ultimately how we’ve approached every single episode we’ve done for PureTaboo.
When you say you wanted to challenge everything you had been told
not to do, what do you mean more specifically?
When I said I wanted to approach this project differently I mean it. I want
PureTaboo to be an example of challenging everything that porn should and
should not be.
So for example, “Don’t care about the acting.” Well, it’s the number one thing
we care about. “Don’t rehearse.” Well, we spend all day workshopping the stories.
“Don’t break the line.” Oh, we break the line with our cinematography. With
most of it we draw a lot of inspiration from documentaries and docu-series-style
cinematography. We have a few very experienced industry camera guys working on
this project but we’ve also brought in mainstream cinematographers who mostly
have experience doing documentaries to help capture; what you’re seeing in terms
of those long takes is a perfect example of our process.
Let’s take Elena and Derrick. We’ll rehearse everything that we’re going to say
and get them to a point where they basically have memorized their own improv
and then we bring a cameraperson to be a fly on the wall and he just moves in
amongst them while they’re talking. He knows when to pivot here, when to move
there and what you see are sequences that have very few cuts.
That’s something that because we spend maybe an hour rehearsing both the
acting and the cinematography and then we roll one take and we’ve got it—maybe
two takes to get two different passes at it. But it’s definitely different than what
you would see. I wanted to try to bring in cinematography techniques that you
see in crime dramas. In the Heat of the Night was one of the best examples of sort of
breaking the line on television back in the early ’80s by taking handheld camera
operators into mingling with the actors and the results were this fly-on-the-wall
feeling that you get from kind of going in and being in the scene.
That’s what I want. Because so many of these subjects are psychologically
driven, I like the idea of making you feel like you’re in the room. You feel like
you’re watching a play, which is kind of how we structure the day, so it does have
a very cool, very different look. I’ve had a bunch of people look at me like “you
guys didn’t cut.” … That’s the acting. The whole scene takes place in a room but
you never are bored.