Page 41 - AVN June 2018

By Sharan Street
In the Beginning On a spring afternoon in the AVN Media Network office
in Chatsworth, director Axel Braun seemed completely at
ease. He greeted everyone with breezy charm, confident
that those few he hadn’t met before had a pretty good idea
of exactly who he is. As would anyone who has been paying
attention to the annual AVN Awards Show.
The statistics speak for themselves: The Italian-born
helmsman, known for his triple-X parodies of superheroes
and other pop-culture icons, took home AVN’s Director
of the Year statuette four times (2011, 2012, 2013 and
2014) and garnered wins in parody categories over eight
consecutive years for movies produced first for Vivid
Entertainment and then for Wicked Pictures. On top of
that, three times his work garnered Movie of the Year
status, starting with 24 XXX: An Axel Braun Parody (Wicked)
in 2015 and three-peating that honor with his parodies of
Peter Pan and Suicide Squad (both for Wicked).
Impressive numbers to be sure. But there’s another
one that’s more interesting: the number three. This
handsome, cultured 51-year-old is the son of pioneering
Italian pornographer Lasse Braun, and the father of
Wicked Pictures director Rikki Braun. Three men, three
generations, three paths to a career in adult entertainment.
During a long conversation on that spring afternoon, Braun
talked about his career while also sharing stories of sons
and fathers with the skill of a natural-born storyteller.
One of the first questions Axel Braun answered was
regarding when he first learned what Lasse Braun did for a
living. But the much more interesting fact turned out to be
that Axel didn’t even meet Lasse until he was 14.
“My mother had an affair with Lasse Braun during a time
where she and my dad were separated,” Axel explained.
Referring to the man who raised him as “dad” and the one
who provided the DNA as “father,” Axel described how
he was conceived—an origin story ripe with drama. His
dad was a prominent executive with Seagram in Italy, but
the comfortable life he provided to Axel’s mother had not
included children (his mother bore a stillborn daughter
seven years before Axel came along). During a short
separation, Axel’s mother hooked up with Lasse briefly.
It was just a fling, so she didn’t tell Lasse she had gotten
pregnant—but she told the truth to her husband, and he
raised Axel as his own.
Lasse spent much of his time away from Italy during
Axel’s childhood; he had 77 warrants for his arrest in his
home country, so he lived in exile in America after his
passport expired. (It wasn’t so bad, Axel said—Lasse lived
in Malibu.) When Lasse got back to Italy, he learned about
Axel from old friends. “So he made contact with my mom.”
Axel was 14; Lasse was 44. The dad he had grown up
with was a buttoned-down executive who wore suits; this
new figure had long hair and wore leather jackets. “To
a 14-year-old kid that’s very appealing,” Axel recalled.
Lasse was presented as an old friend of his mother’s. “My
mom has cool friends,” Axel thought. They went to “the
fanciest restaurant in Milan … We had this crazy lunch
and we talked. He told me he lived in Los Angeles.” Back
then, in the porno chic era, Lasse was rubbing up against
some interesting elbows. “He was hanging out with Jack
Nicholson ... Robert Redford,” Axel recalled.
“HE HAD A VERY SPECIFIC
WAY OF DEPICTING SEX, THE
PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND IT, THE
REASON WHY—HE WANTED
TO ALWAYS UNDERSTAND
WHY THESE TWO PEOPLE ARE
ATTRACTED TO EACH OTHER,
NO MATTER WHAT IT IS.”
—AXEL BRAUN ON LASSE
“I always had a contentious relationship with my mother—
we would get into screaming matches. ... One night I said,
‘Why don’t you guys get divorced—I can go live with Dad’
and she just let it out: ‘He’s not even your dad.’ There are a
few things in life that unless they happen, you don’t know
how they feel—this is one of them. It was probably the most
shocking moment of my life, yet right away I thought, ‘Oh my
God, it’s that guy.’”
The first thing Axel asked was whether his dad knew. “I
appreciated my dad in so many ways, but then you understand
that I’m not even his son and he raised me, loving me—it’s
just mind-blowing. And I asked, ‘Does he know who my real
father is?’ and she said no. And I said, ‘Why?’ And she said,
‘He never asked.’ My dad passed away in 1995. He passed
away without knowing that I found out.” Axel never talked
about it with his dad because of “the risk of breaking his
heart.” And he also never revealed that he had followed Lasse
into the porn business.
“Lasse was a completely different type of relationship, of
course,” Axel recalled. Back in 1982, when his mother told
Lasse their secret was out, the senior Braun came straight
to Milan. “It’s interesting—we didn’t grow up influenced
by each other, of course, but we grew up in the same type
of environment,” Axel recalled. “We had a strong mother, a
father who was very strict and very honorable, the good guy,
this type of figure. And genetically, obviously we’re similar.
And we were literally finishing each other’s sentences.”
By 1987, Axel was spending much more time with Lasse.
He also attended film school, first in Italy and then in
Southern California at Columbia College Hollywood. “I started
collaborating with him a little bit. He had these projects
that were really interesting. For him, porn was literally a
revolution. The sexual revolution.”
He added, “His whole pursuit was in opening people’s eyes
to the power of sexuality. That’s what it was. … He had a very
specific way of depicting sex, the psychology behind it, the
reason why—he wanted to always understand why these two
people are attracted to each other, no matter what it is.”
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