Shawn Alff quickly greets me as I step into the kitchen of the shoot location for “What We Do for Money,” a plot-driven erotic crime drama for Sweet Sinner. “Hey, that’s my job!” exclaims Jacky St. James. On today’s shoot, Alff is behind the camera, while St. James is his production manager, whose duties include welcoming visitors. The momentary confusion can be expected; the pair swapped their usual roles to allow Alff to make his directing debut. “I’ll just stand here and look directorial,” Alff quips. Costar Gianna Dior is sitting nearby, filling out paperwork. “I’m not used to seeing him like this,” she says, grinning.
Typically, Alff, a longtime production manager, is the one responsible for brewing coffee, ushering performers into makeup and checking with the crew on the setup of the next location, just a few of the innumerable tasks that keep a modern porn set operating at peak efficiency. But for the next two days, the responsibility falls on St. James to keep the machinery humming. “Hey, that’s my job!” is a phrase that will echo with regularity all day long.
With this movie, we explore a whole notion of using sex as a tool to get what you want. They all have their motives and they’re using sex to get it.
“I feel naughty,” Alff quietly confides. “I owe Jacky so much and now she’s bringing people coffee. I feel like I should be doing that, but she keeps stopping me.”
After he guides me through a quick tour of the set, St. James, a charismatic force of nature, marches into the room where Alff and I are chatting. “Hey, director!” she barks. “Your actors need you upstairs. They want to run lines.” As Alff trots from the room, she begins to recite her lunch prep. “I’m not a cook!” she says. “This is Alff’s usual job and he’s really good at it.” She recalls my own prior work history as an adult industry production manager and we launch into a detailed discussion about when to get lunch prepared, and when to start cooking, so everything is fresh and hot for cast and crew when the first scene of the day — featuring Dior and Zac Wild — wraps. A burst of laughter echoes from upstairs. “I might have to stroll up there and crack the whip,” she says. “But not quite yet.”
Later, Alff and I stroll into an upper room, elsewhere in the house, that was built to serve as an office, complete with desks, computer monitors and whiteboards. The first sex scene of the day will unfold in a small bedroom down the hall, so the camera crew has set up camp here; lights and cords and accouterments are stacked in neat piles. Right next door, in the other direction, is a hospital room dressed in sterile blues and greys (“No naughty nurses in this movie,” Alff notes, grinning.)
The stills photographer has set up his equipment in one corner, shooting Dior and Whitney Wright against a bare wall. As we watch, Wright calls up a song on her phone with a driving beat and the women begin to dance; Wright suddenly, and impressively, performs a handstand against the wall and begins to vigorously twerk, to applause from Dior and crew.
“Okay, ladies, back to business,” remarks the photographer. Dior and Wright snap to attention and strike a series of sultry poses, together and separately, for a session that will eventually become the box cover art. The script’s Macguffin is a big, tempting pile of cash that causes problems for Wright and the people in her life. So the women pose with a prop gun and seductively fondle bundles of cash, effortlessly striking pose after pose and improvising, for example, by tucking money into their lacy lingerie. Alff is impressed. “I’ve heard the expression a million times, that good directing is 80 percent casting, or whatever the number is. But now, working for the first time as a director, I get it. You can’t go wrong with Whitney Wright and Gianna Dior. In fact, I’m afraid I’m going to let them down.”
Alff later repeats that deeply felt sentiment in an official press release from Sweet Sinner. “When I learned [the studio] was trusting me with a project of this magnitude for my first film, I felt like I was getting away with fraud,” he said. “I spent the last year working under the most effective, story-driven director in the business — Jacky St. James — and stealing her best ideas. From her, I learned the secret to directing: hire the best people and give them the freedom to create. This film reflects that ethos. I booked professionals who are more talented than me in every department and trusted them to make me look good. They did not disappoint.”
The photo shoot we are observing later includes Marcus London, who is a raconteur offscreen, but for the photo shoot he smoothly strikes a series of glowering poses, gun in hand. As London wraps the shoot, Alff walks me to another set-up where St. James stands in as a lighting model. It’s an overcast morning, so the sunlight isn’t cooperating as the crew experiments with the light levels needed to capture a shot Alff has envisioned: Wright’s looming shadow as she approaches a glass door, with shades drawn, from the outside. Suddenly, St. James’ shadow fills Alff’s camera monitor and he exclaims happily. St. James rushes inside to watch the effect. The effect is appropriately moody and fits the film’s noir feel. Their shorthand with each other is apparent as St. James and Alff quickly discuss yet another camera angle for capturing a key exchange of dialogue using Wright’s reflection in a mirror; the crew works to set it up. As he waits, Alff steps aside to praise St. James’ expert advice and guidance.
He notes a story St. James tells of an early scene she directed that went awry. “The girl really hated the guy afterwards and keyed the guy’s car and put him on her ‘no’ list,” he says. “So it’s good to have Jacky’s kind of experience in the room. And it’s just good to have a female in the room, so you know nothing sketchy is going on.”
Alff reveals that he and St. James have elected to tweak their roles on any of his future directing gigs. “What we’re scheming is she’ll be like a producer, going forward. I’ll still rely on her for a lot of the stuff I can’t handle,” he says. “She’ll handle the money and it will take a lot of the stress off of her. She can relax and focus on her other movies and hire a production manager to work on that other stuff.”
Wright and London appear, ready to get to work; Wright is quietly running her lines under her breath, while London asks if his satchel, meant to be bursting with money, could be weighted down to create the sensation of hefting that many bricks of cash at once. Alff walks them through their first set-ups for dialogue, settles in behind the camera monitor and calls “action.” He chuckles softly; “I’m still getting used to saying that,” he says.
One week later, we meet for coffee and a post-mortem. “The first day went over (schedule),” he recalls with a grimace. “But the next day, I hit my rhythm. The second day, I started out a little more hesitant because of what happened the day before. But Jacky said what I needed to do was go to (my crew) and say, ‘This is my vision, show me one or two options, and we’ll go with that,’ instead of, ‘What do you guys think I should do?’ So the second day, I went into each scene and said, ‘I want a solid two-shot and a couple of clean singles,’ so we don’t have to worry about continuity, and we powered through and finished early! And we had so many more scenes than the first day.”
Alff notes he committed a “rookie mistake” as a director on his first day: “Too much coverage! I wanted different angles, mirror shots, so then we had to block all of that and set the lights. I just stripped everything down the second day.” In addition to Wright, London, Dior and Wild, the cast includes Silvia Saige, Nathan Bronson and Tommy Gunn, whom Alff praised for their professionalism and good nature and which enabled him to move quickly and decisively as a director.
He believes he needed to experience the stumbles of the first day to allow him to prioritize and focus on the second day. “I told Jacky that (creative limitations) also works with my creative style, in a way. Writing is so cheap and minimal. You can do it without anybody; you just sit down at your computer. But I’ve found my writing is better when I have creative limitations and I have to just work with what’s there. ‘Okay, we have these two locations, these two actors on this day, the other two actors on another day.’ It takes away some pressure because you have to come up with a story that works within that framework. I think that’s what I like about directing. ‘This is what we have, be it money, talent, location, what’s the best we can do within the limitations that we have?’”
He and St. James are also energized by the idea of conceiving sex scenes that are driven by character development, instead of simply just stopping the storyline to have the characters fuck. “The sex scenes came out of story in this movie,” he said. “That’s ideal and that’s what we strive for each time, to have sex be an integral part of the conflict. With this [movie], we explore a whole notion of using sex as a tool to get what you want. They all have their motives and they’re using sex to get it.”
