LOS ANGELES — Adult Time debuted its award-season feature “Birth” — directed by Bree Mills and starring Casey Calvert, Seth Gamble and Leana Lovings — with a red-carpet premiere on Saturday night at the Bourbon Room in the heart of Hollywood.
The event featured the first public unveiling of a non-explicit cut of the horror thriller. Presenting such specially edited versions has become a tradition for award-winning director Mills, who previously gave the same treatment to her features “Teenage Lesbian” and “Perspective.”
The premiere included a star-studded red carpet inside the Bourbon Room, which features a bar, a large nightclub space with table service, a full stage and film-screening capabilities. The trendy Hollywood venue is decorated with classic film and music memorabilia, which provided a suitable backdrop to a catered buffet and cocktails, enjoyed in a relaxed atmosphere by cast, crew and the invitation-only industry crowd.
The screening was the first time that the stars, production crew — including Pig Machine’s Siouxsie Q and Michael Vegas, which co-produced the title with Mills — and guests were able to watch “Birth.”
It would give too much away to spell out if “Birth” is a horror movie or a suspense thriller. The story is told from the point of view of Calvert’s character, placing it in the psychological narrative tradition of Hitchcock’s “woman in peril” stories as well as Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” The subgenre those films spawned, featuring women seemingly losing their minds, is carefully chronicled by Kier-La Janisse in her book “House of Psychotic Women.” Mills has also mentioned as an influence more recent A24 cult classics like Ari Aster’s “Midsommar.”
Calvert gives her career-best performance yet, as a woman first trying to get pregnant and then going through her whole pregnancy while she begins harboring suspicions about her distant, manipulative husband, played by a pitch-perfect Gamble. Lovings enters the story halfway through the feature as a religiously devout doula, providing a heightened dose of eeriness around Calvert’s character and her reproductive ordeals. Although a relative newcomer compared to her co-stars, Lovings holds her own opposite two of the industry’s most respected acting talents.
Ultimately, however, it’s Calvert’s show. She transforms not just psychologically but physically, aided by a Hollywood-quality prosthetic belly, its steady growth paralleling her suspicions and mental deterioration. Calvert gives a nuanced, empathetic performance that avoids clichés and also bears witness to the careful collaboration between Mills and her actors, all of whom improvised their dialogue based on the director’s scene prompts.
Mills told XBIZ that it was a real thrill to screen “Birth” in a theater setting for all her collaborators and industry friends.
“I love to be transgressive,” she explained. “I like to evoke emotion, so it was really fun to watch the movie open with sex moments, which always instigate a kind of nervous laughter, and having it go from laughter to awkward laughter, to groans, to silence, to people going, ‘Oh God, no!’ So I felt like I took people on a roller coaster where they thought they were going to get something, but then it started to get increasingly weirder and darker and more fucked up. That was a joy to watch!”
Techniques like the improvised dialogue, Mills added, were possible because of the work she and the actors did beforehand to help each performer get into the mindset of their character.
“We all worked a lot together in pre production,” she elaborated. “I met with all of them, but I intentionally met with Casey separately, Seth separately, Casey and Seth together, Seth and Leana together — but never Casey and Leana together. We spent a lot of time talking about the truth behind the story, and who these people were. I also had them do all the styling themselves as part of their character prep. By the time we started filming, they knew who they were for the next two weeks. The proof is in the performances.”
In particular, Mills said, her goal was to give Calvert “that was just going to blow everybody’s minds.”
Calvert confirmed to XBIZ that this was the first time she had seen the final result of their hard work.
“Bree offered to show it to me, but I decided not to watch it before the screening,” she said. But it didn’t feel totally surprising, because I lived the story while we were shooting it. Watching it with a group of my friends and see what people reacted to was very fun. And people overreacting when she pulled out an enormous jar of Vaseline was amazing! I did actually put so much Vaseline inside of me, it was awful,” she laughed.
Calvert also enthused about her co-stars.
“Seth is amazing and so incredibly talented, and it was wonderful working with Leanna,” she said. “She’s absolutely perfect for this role. She did so much research into the things that she needed to say to be in character. It was incredibly impressive and I think it shows in the film. There was a lot of stuff that her and I did, little subtle things, to try to be opposites from each other. A lot of work went into that.”
For Calvert, the scenes in which her character confronts Gamble’s and their emotions flare up were special, both on set and on the screen.
“Seth and I really get into it,” she said about her long-time colleague and friend. “We did a lot of workshopping. We spent a lot of time working on the dialog for those things and dialing it. That was an incredibly enjoyable process.”
Gamble told XBIZ that he was proud of how he “got the point across of how big of a piece of shit” his character was.
“It was a very difficult experience to go through, and I had to do a lot of self-care afterward,” he shared. “But I’m really proud of what we did. Bree pulled off a great movie and Casey was absolutely incredible. I do believe it’s the performance of her career.”
The veteran performer added that he has been working for Mills since she started directing, and has seen a clear evolution leading to “Birth.”
“By now, she knows exactly what she wants,” Gamble offered. “She knew the story she wanted to tell, and she helped all of us bring out very challenging roles in each other throughout. The road we all traveled together is really amazing.”
Lovings told XBIZ that she relished playing someone who was despicable but did not see herself as the villain.
“She sees everything that she is doing as justified,” Lovings reflected. “She thinks everything is destined to be, so it’s woman pitted against woman. It’s very sad. I really took the time to develop the character, and I wasn’t allowed to meet with Casey until after they had filmed specific scenes so that we would have as much tension as possible when we were finally in front of the camera.”
Lovings called sharing the screen with Calvert and Gamble “incredibly humbling.”
“I feel very honored to have had the opportunity to act alongside them, to learn alongside them, to share this experience with them,” she said.
For Lovings, “Birth” is further proof that Mills is a one-of-a-kind creative talent.
“She is such a fantastic representation of what porn can be,” Lovings concluded. “Her ideas are so wild and fantastic, and it’s so wonderful to be a part of her creation.”
To watch the explicit version of “Birth,” visit AdultTime.com.
