Hey, did you hear the one about the adult movie Pirates? Yes, they also released a cut rated… aRRRRRgh!

In an anticipatory mooring to the wild success of this summer’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,
this movie and, indeed, all sorts of nautical swashbuckler DVDs and
strange tie-in products have made their way to the market in the past
six weeks — everything except that entirely un-clamored for special
edition of Cutthroat Island (sorry, Renny Harlin). There have
been legitimately licensed, pirate-themed fruit snacks and white
chocolate M&Ms, the utterly bizarre and justifiably long-forgotten
Cheech Marin/Tommy Chong/John Cleese 1983 pirate spoof Yellowbeard (with David Bowie thrown in for good measure!), Echo Bridge’s release of Blackbeard
and even an electronic talking piggie bank, among many other items. But
the loosely associated tie-in that certainly drew the most attention is
Pirates, an erotic action-adventure romp from singularly monikered writer-director Joone and his company, Digital Playground.

While racking up all manner of intra-industry awards, the epic-scale
film also made history for its seven-figure budget and as the first
modern adult feature to be re-edited to receive an R rating from the
Motion Picture Association of America, the body which rates all the
mainstream big screen fare of its seven signatory studios. “From the
time we were writing the script, we wanted to make a movie that could
play without any sex in it,” says Joone. “We went in with that
mentality — saying that we needed a great story, and as strong
characters as possible.”

Wait… characters, acting? Didn’t those go the way of the dinosaur in
adult films of the post-video age? “Most of the girls that are in it
are contract stars,” says Joone, of a cast that includes headliner
Jesse Jane, Carmen Luvana, Janine, Devon (above), Teagan Presley and Austyn Moore. “And I wanted to use Evan (Stone), who’s to me like
the Bob Hope of the industry. But you go in writing characters that
they can play, not characters that they have to be actors to play.
You’re not making them do things that are way out of their range.” Duly
noted.

Still, when it came time to solicit the MPAA for an R rating, they
didn’t seem as enamored with his efforts at legitimate storytelling
structure. “I remember the first cut we gave them had a lot more sex in
it and they came back with a flat no,” says Joone. “It was, ‘This movie
is not going to pass.’ We asked if they thought it was possible to get
an R-rated cut out of it, and they said, ‘We think you can.’ So that
was a little light at the end of the tunnel, and then it became a
journey of how to get there, because they don’t really tell you what
isn’t passing, they just say very general things, like, ‘It feels
like it has too much sex.’ Or they even said that they were OK (with
certain content) because the characters were on their honeymoon, but in
this scene it’s people that are not married. So you’re just faced with
some things where you’re like, ‘Oh, OK then. I guess if you’re not
married, you’re not supposed to have sex.’”

It
was a six-month process of give-and-take, spanning from December of
2005 through May of this year, and one that resulted in a movie far
less explicit or titillating than any number of R-rated mainstream
thrillers. Joone left the experience a bit baffled but unbowed. “Out of
context it doesn’t work as well,” he notes. “There were scenes where,
from day one, there was no problem with it, but suddenly, in the last
two iterations, there was a problem with it. You felt like you were
chasing your tail. Studios get way more leniency with their films… both
because of stars and the fact that they know it’s going to be a
theatrical release or whatever. I mean, we could not, in our movie,
have two girls kissing. And in how many movies have you seen that?”

The admittedly hamstrung but still diverting, R-rated cut of Pirates,
which imports the loopy adventure and soused leading man of its
Hollywood namesake, is available from MTI Home Video with a clutch of
extras, while if it’s academic comparison you crave, the triple-disc
version of the original movie offers both standard and WMV-HD
presentations of the film in 16×9 widescreen, plus bloopers, photo
galleries, audio commentary tracks with the stars, behind-the-scenes
specials on the visual effects and other production elements of the
movie, casting videos (umm… what?), cast biographies, trailers and more.

And as for a sequel? “Everybody wants me to do it,” admits Joone
with a sigh, “but for me, if I’m going to do it, it’s got to be 10
times better than the first one.” He sees the future of big budget
adult productions as a rather tenuous one. “My philosophy is that
[Digital Playground] is not a porn company, we’re an entertainment
company,” he says. “You don’t have a studio system. You can do whatever
kind of movie you want as long as it has sex in it. And so, as a
filmmaker, you sort of look at the sex as the commercial that pays for
the movie. But the problem with adult right now is that there are not a
lot of filmmakers and storytellers in this arena. A lot of the films
that are being made are gonzo or pizza-man-knocking-on-the-door-type
scenarios. I think for the future to be successful, you need creative
filmmakers behind the projects. If you have that, you will be
successful — talented people putting together a great product. Our
focus has been about making great movies that are geared toward
couples. They’re not about degradation — it’s great people, good
times.”

After a little more talking, too, Joone seems to be coming around to the notion of another Pirates
adventure, something the enormous grosses of the Disney sequel as well
as the to-scale market success and critical embrace of his film
certainly seem to indicate an audience for. “I’m really thinking about
doing it,” he says, “so long as I get the right pieces together.”

In a world of receding taboos, actual sex in mainstream cinema is still one,
though a number of notable French imports — including the incendiary Baise
Moi and Catherine Breillat’s Romance and Anatomy of Hell —
have over the last half dozen years made erosive inroads here, alongside Vincent
Gallo’s divisive The Brown Bunny. The latest film to draw attention for
such content is maverick director Carlos Reygadas’ challenging, elliptical
Battle in Heaven, arriving on DVD fresh from an arthouse theatrical run
last year, and I took some time to speak with star Ana Mushkadiz on occasion of
its release.

As with The Brown Bunny, the frank depiction of sexual fellatio
in Battle in Heaven is decidedly at odds with a stylistic mode that might
charitably be described as meditative. Those looking for cheap, streamlined
thrills would for several reasons be advised to look elsewhere — not the least
of which is because Reygadas (Japón) likes to work with
non-professionals. Ergo, there’s no offshoot titillation of familiarity here, as
there might be for American indie fans with Chloe Sevigny in The Brown Bunny.

An intimate dual character study (for which the colloquial expression
“two-hander” might be appropriate under other circumstances), Battle in
Heaven tells the story of Marcos (Marcos Hernandez), the middle-aged
chauffeur of Ana (Mushkadiz), the adult daughter of a Mexican general.
Although a child of privilege, Ana leads a double life as a prostitute in a
high-end brothel, as much to amuse herself and stave off boredom as anything
else. Marcos is the only one to know her secret, but when he picks Ana up one
day he too is burdened by a terrible secret that he eventually confesses to her
— the fact that he and his obese wife (Berta Ruiz) kidnapped a baby for ransom,
a baby that has subsequently died in their custody. From here pity, fanciful
crush and fleeting affection commingle in expressionless, straightforward
fashion, building to a shocking climax book-ended by sexual whimsy.

If Battle in Heaven is an unlikely blend of elements — locating
intimate, and sometimes even charged, but non-traditional erotic angles and
holding firm on them, as well as panning outside and around a courtyard during
one sexual encounter — erstwhile freelance art designer Mushkadiz is an equally
unlikely star. Neither a professional actress nor someone even necessarily
looking for a break in film, she says a mutual female friend gave Reygadas her
phone number, and she went and met with the director not knowing in advance why.
“We just talked about life, that’s it,” she says matter-of-factly. “He told me
about the story and the sex scenes. He described it in about two sentences. I
saw his other movie, Japón, and so I got a sense of where he wanted to
take it. But he talked about it with so much confidence and in a really natural
way, so it never seemed obscene or like porn or anything.”

“It’s so natural to him that he didn’t even really need to explain it,” she
continues of the film’s explicitness. “We talked a lot about sex in real life
and sex in movies, and we share many ideas about this — how taboo it is to show
sex in movies, and about how simply he wanted to show this, with no sheets or
covers.”

Battle in Heaven was filmed with a spare, 10-person crew, and when it
came time for exterior shots, of which there are a decent number of extremely
long takes, Mushkadiz recalls affectionately how everyone “just (told) people
we’re shooting a film, don’t look at the camera.”

A young woman of finely balanced contrasts and contradictions — she one
moment says she doesn’t consider herself a big film fan, but later declares a
love of cinema — Mushkadiz has a bit of the dreamer’s disease. “I went to circus
school when I was younger,” she says. “I was really into performance, and clowns
— juggling and the rope and trapeze.” Later she says, “I studied photography in
Mexico, a bit of painting and drawing, and then (writing) and poetry at
Massachusetts Art Institute. And then I studied philosophy. I like mixed
technique very much.”

She doesn’t necessarily think analytical application or parsing study yields
singular insights into Battle in Heaven, though. “When you do painting…
it’s a feeling, an instinct,” says Mushkadiz in accented English. “It’s hard to
change or (translate) the creative process into a fully intellectual process.
When a movie is finished (and) people start asking questions, you (arrive at an)
idea to give lots of explanations, but in a real sense art is a creative process
that one goes through without thinking — just doing and being sensible about
one’s way of believing and feeling.”

For Mushkadiz, Ana is a bit of a place-holding cipher. “I think one of the
beautiful parts of Ana is that she’s a really open character. For some can be a
real bitch, for others very tender, and for others very manipulating. But she’s
really just the feminine side of the movie, she represents a woman,” Mushkadiz
stresses. “The reason there’s not much background on her is because it’s not
important if she’s there because her father is a bastard. What’s most important
is what you get from the idea of, ‘Why not?’ Why not a girl who is rich
and of good social position — why wouldn’t she prostitute herself? Why does
having money and coming from a high class family mean that life should be
perfect? So she represents that; she’s just a girl, any girl.”

Having already completed one other film, Alex Infascelli’s yet-to-be-released
Hate 2 O, Mushkadiz seems somewhat conflicted about a career in front of
the camera, and in fact charmingly emits a big, unselfconscious yawn when
discussing such a proposition. “Yeah, I think so,” she says when asked if she
wants to continue as an actress. “I’m really into doing what I do also. I think
art is a really demanding career, in that it requires time and energy and
patience to one day finally become a real artist for yourself, where you
consider your work valuable and prestigious. But I still think acting is quite
an amazing experience. So if I keep having the opportunity, I’ll be very happy.”