A Debut Film That Actually Feels Dangerous

In a mere 90 minutes, director Elliot Tuttle’s debut feature Blue Film, out now, generates a sense of discomfort that plants itself in your stomach lining. It begins with a livestream fronted by LA sex worker Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore), who flaunts his tattooed body and sexually degrades his hungry followers for quick cash. Later that evening, he arrives at the Airbnb to accept an offer from another one of his fans: $50,000 to spend the night with him.

Except this man isn’t spending his life savings to feel Aaron’s body, but to learn more about his past: he knows that Aaron’s real name is Alex, and that he’s not actually from Miami like he boasts, but from Maine. He knows this because he was Aaron’s middle school English teacher, Hank (Reed Birney), who served a jail sentence for the attempted sexual assault of a fellow student. Aaron was never a victim of Hank’s, but as he discovers early in his night with him, his former teacher was in love with him, and this orchestrated meeting is all an experiment to discover if that is still the case.

Over Zoom, Tuttle explains that he decided to make Blue Film in response to the exhausting online discourse that had reduced intimate scenes to a plot device: the notion that sex in cinema needs to serve the function of moving the story forward, or otherwise be deemed excessive and gratuitous. “I think that a lot of the films that I love are engaging with sex in a very personal way and in a dangerous way,” says Tuttle, who was inspired by provocative filmmakers like Lars Von Trier, Catherine Breillat, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. “And I think a lot of us are rewatching The Piano Teacher instead of feeling like a new Piano Teacher is being made. I really wanted to create a tone that felt very intimate and dangerous at the same time, and that could put you on your back foot a little bit.”

We’re living in treacherous, media-illiterate times—and Blue Film dares to ask its audience to wade waist-deep in moral ambiguity at a moment where the culture seems to demand absolute purity. “I knew that the subject matter was going to be a tough sell, but I still believed in it,” Elliot says. “I don’t think at any point fear impacted any creative decisions.” That defiance goes all the way up to the title itself, which derives from pornography but also refers to a Hays Code practice that involved coloring cells of physical film that wouldn’t pass censors.

That danger was precisely what enticed Moore, who makes his film debut after pivoting from an early career in boxing. “I never planned for my first movie to be about a camboy that spends the night with a pedophile,” he says. “But it’s like, how rewarding. The film itself has made me fearless.”

“Nothing scared me about it, honestly, which was stupid of me,” counters Birney, the Tony Award-winning actor who was Tuttle’s first choice for the role. “When I read it, I knew that there were things in this script that were absolutely in my toolbox. And I was like, ‘Let's go, this would be great!’ I haven’t played a lot of large roles—movies that are just me.”

For a movie wholly occupied with sex, Blue Film sows unease in what it doesn’t show. A careful two-hander, it plays out as a series of soul-baring conversations over the course of the night, as the two men wrestle with the ways sex fuels their shame and the ways shame fuels their sex. Their mutual, non-judgmental curiosity provides each other the space to verbalize and unpack their most taboo desires. But there’s also a disquieting exchange of power: the dominant Aaron submits to Hank’s fantasies, appearing years younger than his bulky frame would suggest. But was Aaron ever in control when $50,000 is on the line? Tuttle says he wanted to create a film where “sex is the thing that would make or break these people,” and truthfully interrogates the role that sex plays in our everyday lives. “I think a lot of us engage with sex in a very high-stakes way. Sex is very rarely about just sex.”

“What I wanted to make by design was an inescapable experience where you have to surrender yourself to the film, or at least figure out where you’re willing to meet it,” Tuttle continues. That experience is a discomfiting one, inviting the audience to swallow their revulsion and accept the complexity of the film’s protagonists: a sex worker who finds self-worth in dominating men into financial submission, and a convicted sex offender aware of his transgressions but who claims to have found peace in religion. “The characters don’t really have that safety net, which I think is a massive reason why the intensity of it is quite palpable,” Moore adds. “We shine a light on something but we don’t necessarily glorify it. We’re just basically saying, ‘Come here, have a look, have this conversation.’”

Before and during production, Moore and Birney were rewarded with a space that allowed them to be as unguarded as their characters. Birney says he exchanged notes with Tuttle over four months, and offered advice about accurately portraying an older character. Prior to filming, both actors were also able to stage all of their intimate scenes, a process that definitively tested the limits of their vulnerability. In their first sexual encounter, Hank gets on his knees to give Aaron a messy blowjob, and cinematographer Ryan Jackson-Healy took a Polaroid to show Birney the shot. “I said, ‘That looks incredible, you must never show me that again,’” he says, laughing.

Whether the industry itself was willing to engage with the film was another matter entirely. It’s been a long journey to Blue Film’s long-awaited release: the movie was rejected from major festivals including Sundance for its controversial content, before ultimately premiering at the Edinburgh Film Festival last summer. “I saw a Letterboxd review after a recent LA screening, and someone had mentioned that they heard someone walk out of the theatre and say, ‘What distributor would want to touch that?’” recalls Tuttle, who ultimately found a partner in the small independent distributor Obscured Releasing. “Capitalism breeds safe choices. We’re not a very safe choice for a distributor or a festival.” Tuttle points to the “frustrating” lack of industry support for “something a little crazier” that dares to venture into those uncomfortable places. “The American film industry necessitates one to make something that is commercially viable in order to be able to keep working.”

I first saw Blue Film at Edinburgh last year, and while quietness is part of the whole deal of going to the theater, the movie had rendered this particular room oppressively silent—the tension settled like a thick, heavy fog in which no one dared to even take an audible breath. “I loved that you could feel the air change,” Tuttle says of that very first screening, which he spent holding hands with a nervous Moore.

For everyone involved, experiencing the film with an audience was just as unnerving. “I weirdly never thought about it being finished or people watching it, which was a problem when it got to my family coming to watch it,” says Birney, who invited his wife and daughter to see Blue Film at NewFest in New York last October. “We agreed not to sit together, and so my wife was over there, my daughter was over there,” he remembers, pointing in opposite directions. Afterwards, he texted his wife to ask how their daughter was doing: “She said, ‘She's completely traumatized.’”

“Elliot said something really beautiful the other day: there’s a shamelessness and there’s a lack of insecurity in the theater,” adds Moore, feeling hopeful. “You go and you’re sitting this close to someone’s deepest emotions, and [the characters] can’t see you so you get to be brave, and you get to be a little bit like the fly on the wall that’s not getting spotted. I just hope people can get past that first watch.”

But even getting viewers in seats has been a challenge. Birney and Moore joked between themselves that cutting a trailer would be an impossible feat—but when the first teaser did eventually make its way online, Birney showed it to a few friends on the set of Rabbit, Rabbit, an upcoming Netflix series he’s currently filming with Adam Driver.

“They watched it very intently,” he recalls. “And then they turned to me and said, ‘Reed, this is incredible. And I said, ‘Does it make you want to see the movie?’”

The firm reply: a resounding no. “It’s not for everyone,” Moore says.

Iana Murray is a writer based in London. She last profiled singer Sienna Spiro for SSENSE.