latest notices
Greening Screen
Following on from Metro Screen's The Greener Screen event we would like to say: When preparing your next project, we ask that you consider how you can work to make your production greener. This does not have to be an...
This Life Explored
(NSW)
Lester Bostock Metro Screen Patron
(NSW)
Controversial Joaquin Phoenix Film to Release in Australia
Sydney, Melbourne, Perth(Nationwide)
latest news
AFTRS Opens its Doors on Open Day
Australia’s premier film, television and radio school is set to hold its opening days in Sydney and Melbourne over the coming days...
Working for Change
We speak to award-winning Aussie filmmaker, Genevieve Clay, about her role in the first ever Live & Love Short Film Competition.
Different Focus
The Focus on Ability Festival recently wrapped for its second year and we spoke to the festival’s founder and this year’s winner.
Kick Starting Talent
M2 Entertainment (M2E) has relaunched as a film finance and production company which aims to nurture emerging and established talent.
search the site
newsletter
Enter your email address below to receive the weekly Filmink newsletter
Come As You Are. Day 10 of the Sydney Film Festival. A Daily Blog.
We speak with porn star turned feature film leading lady Sasha Grey about Steven Soderbergh’s latest cinema experiment, The Girlfriend Experience.
Porn Star Sasha Grey walked the red carpet at the State Theatre for the Australian premiere of Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience. Grey has made the transition into mainstream film in Soderbergh's experimental film, although she has no intention of leaving adult films behind.
It's 2008 and the US presidential election is looming and the global economic crisis has well and truly set in. A savvy, high class call girl Chelsea (Grey) who offers ‘the girlfriend experience', that is sex, as well as lending an ear or a shoulder to cry on goes from business meeting to meeting to discuss how she can expand her business. She's in a committed relationship with personal trainer Chris (real life personal trainer Chris Santos) but that relationship is put in jeopardy when Chelsea becomes infatuated with a new client, while her reputation is tarnished by an unsavory.
Soderbergh handpicked Grey for the role because of her notoriety for pushing the envelope of sexual depravity in adult film, and while sex is only intimated, not explicitly portrayed - the director wanted the audience to believe that this call girl would do anything. The problem is, Grey puts in such a cold, emotionless and flat-as-a-tack performance for the most part that even with that reputation, she's simply unbelievable.
While Soderbergh (who does double duty at the festival this year with the epic Che also screening) should be congratulated for this timely look at the effect of the GFC, for creating a character that is the antithesis of the stereotypical dumb blonde call girl and for his versatile if pretentious camera work, it's Grey's lackluster performance that brings the whole production crashing down.
It's not hard to see why The Girlfriend Experience was chosen to compete in the official competition at this year's festival because it clearly fits the ‘outside the square' mandate. But put simply, clever camera work and a timely story combined with a charisma free lead performance, does not a good film make.
Ironically it's Grey's back story that is infinitely more interesting than the film itself. Filmink sat down with Grey, a veteran of over 100 porn films at the ripe old age of 21, for a surreal discussion of sex, her heavily improvised feature debut and researching the call girl trade.
"I have had previous theatre training so I did have that to bring to the table," giggles Grey. "But at the same time, Steven really wanted a natural quality to the film and not too much premeditation. It was kind of trying to marry the two together. I kept a really detailed journal and I wrote a back story and sent it to Steven. At pre-production we didn't even have an outline of the script, I just knew what the story was at a very general level. We interviewed two escorts. For me, that really helped in the sense that I got to have a small insight into their world so during some of the improvs, some of the questions I was being asked by other people, I had asked these women. We were also sent these anonymously written escorting blogs from the casting director and that was really interesting because they went into a lot more detail than these other women did which was really fascinating as well."