Page 47 - AVN August 2022

“I was feeling very inspired by the idea of shooting at a theater...”
- Casey Calvert
For her tentpole project, so to speak, of the year 2022, writer/director/performer Casey Calvert decided to take the concept of porn-as-performance art to a very literal place—an actual theater, to be precise.
The project, Going Up, which begins rolling out this month from Lust Cinema, was primarily lensed (over 11 of its 14 shooting days) at a sizeable playhouse in Orange County.
“We looked at a bunch of theaters,” Calvert recalled. “All of the theaters that we could afford in L.A. were too small.”
Quoting 2015 Best Picture Birdman and the Christopher Guest classic Waiting for Guffman as two of her main inspirations for the endeavor, she expounded, “One of the things I was feeling really inspired by was shooting people walking around backstage and like the long hallways shots that are in Birdman and following people and leading people down hallways and people going into different rooms and moving all around backstage. And so I needed a theater that had a really accessible, easy backstage.”
To back up, the storyline of Going Up, Calvert explained, “is about the opening night of a play, and everything is going wrong. So the movie starts two-and-a-half hours to curtain, and the lead actor has just dropped out. And they have to put it back together, but everything keeps getting in their way. Everything keeps going wrong.”
At first, she revealed, she had set out to make a musical. “We started to get into that and then we realized that was probably a terrible idea,” she laughed. “But by that point I had already come up with a story that was about the opening night of a musical.
“And in figuring out what I wanted to do for my big feature this year and also thinking about just what I wanted to do as a director and how I wanted to grow as a director this year,” she went on, “I realized that I’ve been focusing a lot on storytelling
ON THE SET | 8.22 | AVN.COM 47