BUDAPEST — It was late September 2021 and I received a mysterious text from Rocco Siffredi. It was a photo of a marble statue in the neoclassical Greco-Roman style — a larger-than-life likeness of the legendary Italian Stallion himself, depicted with eyes closed and phallus rampant.
Upon receiving this unusual dick pic from such an illustrious source, I replied with a “WTF” followed by a befuddled series of questions: “What is this? Who made it? Do you have it? What are you doing with it?”
Siffredi bemusedly replied to the first three questions: “Yes, it’s a marble statue of me.” “It was made by famous Italian sculptor Fabio Viale.” “It’s with me now. It just arrived to Budapest.” Then he hinted at the answer to the fourth: “I’m making a movie with it.”
Almost a year later, we have tangible proof in the form of “Introspection.” The latest feature written and directed by Siffredi is a showcase both for his latest starlet discovery — anally obsessed French Canadian Bardot-esque beauty Eden Ivy — and for the imposing work of art henceforth referred to simply and reverentially as “the Statue.”
“When celebrated sculptor Fabio Viale entrusted me with the unique statue he made to honor my image and career,” Siffredi told me in an exclusive interview from his home base in Budapest, “I knew I didn’t want to make a ‘politically correct,’ elegant film with the Statue, something clean, super nice or smooth. I wanted to do something cinematographically beautiful, but — crucially — full of all the sex that represents my life. My life today and also since the beginning.”
A Monument to an Icon Who 'Loves Sex All the Way'
Siffredi then elaborated on the significance of “Introspection.”
“I was born with the brain of someone who loves sex all the way,” he explained. “I wanted to honor a piece of art that a really big artist gave to me and be loyal to him and loyal to myself. I wanted the movie that introduced the Statue to the world to show who I am.”
Inspired by ancient Rome’s famous Barberini Faun, the hyperrealistic, fully nude marble monument represents Siffredi as a mythological woodland sprite.
Viale — recently the subject of a personal retrospective at the Royal Museum of Turin, one of Italy’s most prestigious museums — told an Italian magazine that he considered the Statue a collaboration with Siffredi and also “an experiment that will surely lead to news and inevitably to discussions.”
Siffredi describes Viale as “a big artist — he was at the biennale of Venice. He’s been recognized as one of the best modern sculptors. Fabio works in a classical style, but he adds really controversial twists, like a tattooed Jesus Christ or a Michelangelo’s Pietà with a black woman as the Virgin Mary. He likes to be controversial. When he decided to do a statue of me, he said he felt he had to alter the old style of Greek and Roman statues — which always had small or soft dicks. He wanted to do the real me!”
Viale told Siffredi, “You spend more time with your dick hard than walking, or doing what other normal people do. You’re special and I need to give you recognition about this.”
Siffredi said that when Viale showed him the finished Statue, “I was very surprised how beautiful it was and how much I liked it. It was so beautiful. I never imagined he would give me the statue to make a movie, but when he said, ‘I would love for you to give life to the Statue,’ I immediately replied, ‘The only way to give the life to the statue is to make a movie, and it must represent the way I see sex in my brain. The sex in my brain is very special.’”
Viale replied, “I don’t want to know, I want to see” — and Siffredi immediately started conceiving “Introspection.”
Eden Ivy, Bride of 'The Statue'
The Statue’s main co-star in the movie is Eden Ivy — the movie’s working title was “Eden’s Visions” — who landed on Siffredi’s proverbial lap through his long-running reality show for aspiring porn professionals, “Rocco’s Academy.”
“I met Eden in November during the latest season of ‘The Academy,’ which still needs to be released. I noticed her first because of her astonishing beauty and said to myself, ‘Oh my God — she’s so beautiful. But then I watched her having sex and the natural way she was doing it, without pretending, without overacting, without pushing herself, was incredible. And she was a real-life, huge anal fetishist! Eden was always touching her ass, always stuffing her ass with things. I said, ‘This is the girl.’”
Siffredi pulled Ivy aside and asked her if, after wrapping the reality show, she wanted to do “a movie, a big one” with him. “Of course, Rocco,” she replied. “I am so pleased with this.”
The five scenes in “Introspection” are structured around a framing narrative of Ivy first stalking, then being analyzed by and ultimately seducing mature expat performer Mike Chapman, playing what Siffredi describes as “a psychologist/sexologist/comedian.” The “sex lead” of the film is Siffredi’s longtime protegé Vince Karter, playing Ivy’s boyfriend, with whom she has a “Fifty Shades of Grey” dynamic.
“The story is very simple,” Siffredi explains. “Eden starts sending sex videos to get Mike’s attention. She wants to know more about her sexuality — why she loves anal sex, playing with her ass. And he doesn’t really answer her until he gets stage fright during his live comedy TV show. He’s stuck. He can’t remember his lines and his team doesn’t understand why he can’t perform anymore. He decides to meet the girl in the center of Budapest and he takes her to his house. The movie really starts when he asks her, ‘Tell me about you.’”
Ivy then starts to recount her sexual experiences with Karter — the bulk of the movie’s sex scenes — and eventually she moves on to her “visions” of the Statue.
'Introspection''s Climactic Scene
“The first vision, Eden is outside in a forest all of a sudden she sees the Statue, and the Statue disappears, and she has to masturbate and she pulls from her ass a snake,” Siffredi explains. “By the time of the second vision she reaches the Statue finally — it’s completely in a dark place, and as soon as she kisses the statue, the statue comes to life, opens its eyes and below the smoke you start seeing a lot of bodies. Altogether, 40 girls all laying down as if they are sleeping, they start to wake up, she starts sucking the dick of the statue, then the girls start to touch themselves, then she sits on the dick of the statue and the girls start to touch themselves more.”
Siffredi calls this scene, which is the centerpiece of the film, “an erotic shot, not very long, only five minutes but it’s a nice representation of the statue, like putting it back to life with all those bodies around it. She finally takes the big, big dick of the statue in her ass — and Eden really did take it, which I wasn’t sure she could do it!”
The Statue was carved from a block of pricey Carrara marble, the most famous type of Italian stone and the preferred sculptural medium of the ancient Romans and the great Renaissance masters. The original block weighed 3 tons, and 1.6 tons by the time Viale was finished sculpting it.
“Really fucking huge, heavy,” Siffredi notes.
“It’s at a larger-than-life scale,” he adds. “My dick is 23 centimeters [9 inches]. The Statue’s is 33 centimeters [13 inches]. John Holmes in marble! That was the main reason why I was worried about finding the right performer who was going to stick that big thing in her ass. And why the ass, you may ask? Because the ass can take a bigger size than the pussy! It has to go in straight, because the fucking thing doesn’t bend. So that was the reason why.”
Aside from a couple of cameos as the eyes of the Statue, Siffredi himself plays no role in “Introspection,” although he said he may “probably do something with the Statue while I still have it here, something more easygoing, not so serious.”
“Introspection,” he adds, is “a really one-off movie” within his opus, one “shot with cinematic lenses, cinema-style” that also serves as an Eden Ivy showcase.
“The fans of Eden Ivy will love it, because they will see a lot of this girl,” he adds. “My favorite scene is the scene after she has the foursome with the little people. Vince was so disturbed for real, because it puts her character in a different level of pushing her limits … Vince kept saying, ‘How could you have done this?’ And she kept smiling at him — she’s that good.”
Besides Ivy and Karter as the BDSM-exploring young couple, Siffredi also relied on the mercurial talents of Mike Chapman.
“I needed a guy who can make the movie more personal, more intimate,” he explains. “Mike Chapman to me as an actor is a really special guy. He has a kind of special personality. Mike has made movies now for a while. He was originally an expat DJ from New York in Bucharest, then he came to Budapest. My cousin Gabby was waiting for two girls at a cafe, and when they arrived Gabby asked the girls, ‘Are you here waiting for the Rocco movie?’ and they said yes. Mike was there drinking a coffee and overheard them. He went to my cousin and said ‘Rocco? Sorry man — are you talking about “the” Rocco?’ My cousin said, ‘What do you mean ‘the Rocco’? and Mike said ‘The Rocco Siffredi one!’”
When Gabriele confirmed that he was indeed talking about “the Rocco Siffredi one,” Chapman “took Gabby’s casting Polaroid camera, went to the bathroom, took a picture of his dick and gave it to my cousin and said ‘Please, give this to Rocco.’ Gabby came directly to the office and since then, Mike has been working with me. He’s a guy who can be completely in character and in ‘Introspection’ he plays off Eden in a way that’s incredible. He’s a really, really deep person. He’s very smart and has a huge sensitivity.”
The therapy session ends with Chapman assuring Ivy that there’s nothing wrong with her. Chapman and Siffredi want to send a message to all kinky, obsessive anal enthusiasts that they should embrace their inner freak — and all the Statue-filled visions that populate their dreams.
“All those ‘Eden’ you saw are all your personalities which you should accept and not question,” Siffredi recaps.
Helping Ivy come to terms with that message are co-stars Cherry Kiss, Kitana Lure, Scarlett Jones and a specially billed appearance by U.S. trans superstar Natalie Mars.
“I had to wait for Natalie Mars who was coming over to Europe to finish the film,” Siffredi said. “I wanted the best trans performers, who are harder to find in Europe. I wanted the movie to encompass all my ideas of sex. Contrasts are what I like. That’s also why I had the scene with the little people. I like big and small, old and young, trans and cis people, groups, gangbangs — to me all of this is sex. This is why I made the movie the way it is.”
When Siffredi finished “Introspection” he sent it to Fabio Viale, who had asked not to know, but to see.
“I knew it,” Viale proudly reacted. “Knowing you, I knew you would show all the controversy in the sex. Because I know, Rocco, how you see sex. You’re completely open to anything and everything.”
“That’s why I put it all basically in this movie,” Siffredi concludes. “I missed almost nothing.”
