Director Travis Mathews Talks About His Explicit LGBT Movie, I Want Your Love

Travis Mathews has been making waves in the last year thanks to his sexually explicit debut movie, I Want Your Love, as well as collaborating with James Franco on Interior Leather Bar and also debuting the third in his In Their Room anthology (with a London set docu-film, following ones based in San Francisco and Berlin).

I Want Your Film reaches UK cinemas today (June 28th – read our review here), and we were lucky enough to be able to talk to Travis about his film, its explicit sex, why it got banned in Australia and what he’s hoping people will get the from the movie.

I Want Your Love started out as a short film (which can be watched on the film’s official site). Was there always the idea of making it into a film in the back of your head, or did that come later?
It was actually never conceived as a short film, but when the producer – NakedSword – saw what I was wanting to accomplish with the first draft of the feature script, they wisely insisted that I do a short first. They wanted to see what I could accomplish in bridging sex and narrative and to see how viewers would respond.

How did NakedSword, which is better known for straightforward pornography, get involved?
They were interested in new work that was pushing the envelope of what pornography was and I had recently been introduced to a producer there who had just viewed my In Their Room San Francisco. He asked if I had anything to pitch and this was it.

The film was banned in Australia. I was wondering if you thought it was because they couldn’t see beyond the fact a ‘porn’ producer was involved in the movie? Or was it for another reason?
Their entire system is antiquated on a number of levels. The reason I saw in print from one of their representatives was that the sex didn’t move the narrative forward. Similar to the argument of whether something is art or porn, that’s such a grey area full of subjective opinion and a slippery slope to base any argument. I didn’t hear anything from them regarding NakedSword specifically.

The film presents sex as a natural part of gay life, and the camera doesn’t pull away from it when it happens. However, did you ever feel a tension between wanting to present that sexuality on screen but not making a ‘sex film’?
I go with my instincts on a lot of this and because I was fortunate to not have a producer breathing down my neck trying to make these decisions for me, I had quite a bit of creative freedom. I relied on workshopping with my performers, blocking the scenes and spending a lot of hours in the editing room.

I also really liked the way it was about real people, rather than buff, classically beautiful, hairless, model-types (who are the only ones usually allowed to get sexy on screen). Was it difficult to find a cast who looked real, could genuinely act and were prepared to have sex on camera? How did you go about finding them?
That’s been important to me since I started making movies, to show guys as natural as possible, as intimate as possible, in ways that felt missing from a lot of mainstream gay movies. With casting, I had In Their Room SF and then the I Want Your Love short to show as a reel of my work. That helped to weed out the guys who were interested in this for what I felt were the wrong reasons, while also attracting those who were interested for reasons that ran parallel with my own. The guys who ended up working with me had never had sex on camera before and they knew that we were making something that was more than just sex. It took a lot of trust and daring on their part, but we dove in together.

There’s an improvised feel to the movie. Was it scripted or did you just give notes to the actors?
Some of it was improvised, but most of was a process of me writing scenes then taking them to the performers to workshop together. I encouraged them to improvise in rehearsal. If they said something that worked better, I’d write it into the revised script. It was a very collaborative process and I think it had to be in order to feel honest and natural, but to also allow them to trust in what we were doing.

It seems like quite a personal movie. Is there are element of autobiography to the movie and the tensions the characters feel, particularly with the character of Jesse, who’s an artist trying to balance a need to live with expressing his artistic side?
I think that there’s a tonal element to the film that is autobiographical. Laughter followed by melancholy followed by laughter, that’s my thing.  But that’s it really. The character of Jesse was meant to be almost as a reverse Tales Of The City and a comment on the trend of adult children moving back to their parents’ homes to get their shit in order. That possibility is also just a fear that most gay people have at least at some point, once they leave for one of our gay metropolises, that fear of having to move back home. I wanted to play with that.

Would you say that the film is at least partially about the various different roles sex plays in people lives?
Generally speaking, I just think that the wide spectrum in which we experience sex is so often lost to a narrowly defined vision of what’s ok to show. I’ve been interested in expanding that and playing with the moments that are not intentionally hot. I think that the emotional intensity of some of these scenes can become paradoxically hot for that very reason though. And taking that one step further, I sometimes wonder if that coupling of emotional intimacy with sex is what feels pornographic for some people, i.e. viewers feel implicated in viewing something TOO intimate.

Real sex on screen is still relatively rare, and I Want Your Love is perhaps even more unusual for not shying away from things like rimming. What is it that’s drawn you to showing sex on film, and do you think more directors ought to be more upfront about it?
Not every film needs sex and not every film with sex needs explicit sex. But it was important for me to be as candid and raw with the sex as I was with the emotional landscape of things.

The film seems to be striving towards naturalism, which is in some ways in contrast to Interior Leather Bar, which have several Meta layers to it. Do you see the two films as complimenting one another or very different?
I think the cores of these two films are very similar. Both play with boundaries of all sorts whether those conversations are more implicit, as with I Want Your Love, or more explicit, as with Interior. And in all my movies there’s an element of docu-fiction. Some lean more in one direction and some more in the other.

Was it the I Want Your Love short that got James Franco interested in working with you, or had he seen other bits of your work?
It was the feature that brought me to his attention.

You also recently premiered the third in the In Their Room series. You’ve now been in the bedrooms of guys in San Francisco, Berlin and London. Do you think there are differences between the men in the different cities, or have the film more exposed what we all share?
It’s both really. Moving forward with the series, I’m definitely more interested in diving into less familiar territory where I’ll need to spend more time in the culture while collaborating with local guys. I’ll also continue to bend the template of the series to keep it fresh for myself. One of the reasons I love making the series is that allows me to play and experiment as a filmmaker. The overhead is so low that I have full autonomy to do what feels right.

Finally, if anyone had just heard about the sex in I Want Your Love and went to see the film because of that, they might be surprised by what they get (as it’s far more complex than just being a ‘sex film). What is it that you’d hope they take away from watching it?
Sex is more layered, more complicated and more thrilling than just a hard fuck.

Thank you Travis.

I Want Your Love is released in UK cinemas on Friday 28th June, 2013 (click here for listings), and is also available on VoD and part of the Curzon/Peccadillo ‘Queerest Tales Ever Told’ online film season.