QX: How did you decide to work together on The Fluffer? How much of the film is autobiographical?
RG: We met at a party in L.A. six years ago and we were talking films immediately. Wash wanted to write a script and he told me his idea for the movie, which I thought was a great one. I was there sort of overseeing what he was doing and putting my two cents in. It was Wash's script, but I was very excited about it and I was working with him from the get-go.
WW: I can't really claim authorship to most of the script because I just went into the porno industry and kept my ears open. A lot of the characters are based on real people. A lot of the lines of dialog were really said. A lot of the events actually happened. I was working at a small tin-pot porno company and I found the people there fascinating. Everyone had come to working in the industry though their own route and everyone was nonconformist. I mean you've got to be! What's more exciting: finding out your granny was a stripper in the '40s or finding out she was an accountant? Obviously you want your granny to be a stripper, but at the time it would have been more respectable to be an accountant. These are the people who are working in porn.
QX: In the film there's the old school and the new school. The young people are basically in it for the money, but for the older guys it's their whole life and identity.
WW: The guy who introduces the film is called Chad Cox. He meets the main character Sean at the front door, takes him in and gives him a crash course in what the porn industry's like. And you feel like this is a guy who would do the job without pay. He's just there because he's been in porn for 30 years. He loves being around the models, he loves the whole atmosphere. It's become his oxygen.
RG: The porno company is called Men of Janus, and the traditional emblem for Janus is a young man looking in one direction and an old man looking in the other. For me there's something poignant about the idea that a lot of people start out in porno as models. People want to see them naked for a while, then people get bored with seeing them naked. So what are they going to do, wait tables? Well they might start directing porn or doing some other job within the company. And you find with someone like Chad Cox, to me he's someone who our fluffer could easily become if he sticks in porn too long.
WW: Yeah, he's the ultimate fluffer. There's really three fluffers in the movie. There's Sean, the main kid. There's Babylon, who is the gay-for-pay porn star's girlfriend-she's really an advanced fluffer. And then there's Chad Cox who is basically the ultimate fluffer who basically just wants to hide under his rock and crawl out and suck a dick every now and then.