Page 21 - AVN September 2022

“I’ve met this guy a million times,” he mused. “In this business, this guy exists all over the place. There are some people in our industry now that act like this. But also, I grew up in a very low-income neighborhood, so I was actually exposed to a lot of hustler, manipulative types of people. So I was able to pull from that, and I also was pulling from her own take and her own experience. She gave me a lot of what she remembered.”
Wilde is very certain to point out that while Stars does delve into some of the more unsavory bowels of adult, she has no intent for it to come across as a cautionary tale.
“I’m not trying to do anything here except tell my story truthfully as it happened,” she asserted. “And you can look at me as an example of what happens when you are in a bad situation and then you look to the porn industry as a place to find direction in your life and find a community. So I just want people to know that it’s not biased. I very much understand that in porn there’s good and bad, as there is in everything, and this is just my experience. So do with it as you will.”
Echoed Mills, “I thought that what was nice about Jane’s story about her own pathway into sex work is the fact that it’s objective and it’s very candid and transparent, so there’s good stuff that happens and there’s really shitty stuff that happens, but the pendulum isn’t swinging dramatically in one way or the other.
“So often stories are told about us, but not often do the sex workers get to tell their own story,” she continued. “So I thought that was very important to do, especially in the light of films like Pleasure that recently came out, and you know, just the history we have with mainstream media ... the best voice that we can give is give the sex workers a voice themselves to tell their own story.”
In keeping with that sentiment, it was just after wrap on that final shooting day of Stars that Mills officially informed Wilde she would be credited as her co-director on the movie.
“For me this project wasn’t about bringing my vision to life,” Mills explained. “In the back of my mind I knew I did not want to put that pressure on her, but I knew in the back of my mind that if this went through as a positive experience for everyone and a really good collaboration, then absolutely I wanted to make her the co-director of this. And she has been an amazing co-director the entire time, and I really wanted also this project to symbolize that there’s a lot of talent that exists within our industry, and if you just support them, we can tell really amazing stories.”
Of this story in particular, she tauntingly submitted, “There’ll be nothing like it that exists, and that much I can promise you.”
Stars is set to release in its entirety on September 28.
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