I had a list of things I expected people to ask upon hearing about the movie: ‘Is James gay?’ ‘Does he have sex in this?’ ‘Who does he think he is for touching thisĪnd it’s been exactly how I thought it would be with people asking me these same questions all the time. We knew we needed to be one step ahead of the audience for this to work.
And even though we weren’t remaking Cruising, there’s some baked-in controversy to that movie that casts a pretty long shadow. I knew with the number of films James had recently made that had either gay or queer content, people would be talking. One of the things he knew from the offset was he wanted there to be real gay sex in it, and this is where I came in. This was happening around the same time James was interested in revisiting Cruising.
How did you get involved with James Franco and this project?Įarly in the summer of 2012 my first feature, I Want Your Love, was playing film festivals and getting some attention because of the way I wove un-simulated gay sex into the story. Here Mathews shares the joys of difficulties of getting actors to have ‘real’ gay sex on screen and his reasons for taking on a subject many would rather he left alone. Leather Bar doesn’t recreate Cruising but is a mix between their take on that lost footage and a documentary-style, partly scripted, partly real, behind-the-scenes look at how they made it. Now filmmakers James Franco (of Milk fame) and Travis Mathews have imagined what that 40 minutes of footage may have looked like.
The story goes the director William Friedkin cut 40 minutes of gay S&M footage to avoid an X rating. But rumors suggest it was almost even more controversial. In 1980, Al Pacino starred as a cop touring New York’s gay sex venues to catch a serial killer.