Brooklyn filmmaker Sarah Schenck’s first feature film, Slippery Slope, bills itself as “a comedy about pornography and feminism.� Those aren’t words you see together every day. All too often, the debates around the topic are polarizing and volatile.

Here, Schenck takes an antiporn feminist who’s trying to get funding so her film Porn for Dummies can go to the Cannes Film Festival, but the only way she can make ends meet is to take a job on the set of a porn flick helmed by a woman. She has to keep her job a secret from her boyfriend while also figuring out the logistics of the genre and what her own politics will let her do. “With hot button issues, humor is often the best way to start a conversation about it,� says Schenck.

The 41-year-old mother of two, who was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for producing 2004’s Virgin, starring Robin Wright Penn and Elisabeth Moss, was inspired by her own potential dip into the world of porn directing, which she ultimately chose not to pursue. While making Slippery Slope, though, Schenck herself got an education in the mock-porn business, shooting mishaps, and learning when to compromise. Her, she delves into the complexity of feminist debates about housework, babies, and smut.

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

How did you get involved in the film world?

I had a lot of friends who were at Columbia Film School and went to parties with them and one of the people I became friends with lost his art director on a short he was doing called Prime Time. He knew that I painted for fun, and he said, I have an empty room in a school and I need to create a prison rec room.� We made this rec room set and I stuck around. I’d never been on a film set of any type before, and watching him work with the actors and the camera mesmerized me.

It wasn’t like I had some immediate revelation, it was more “I have to figure out how I can do that even though I don’t have the skills or background.� At that point, I was doing education policy for the city comptroller. It was an ideal job I’d worked and trained for for a long time. I started doing film stuff on nights and weekends. I basically started telling people that I was up for producing short projects. I produced a bunch of shorts first. One of the things that made me a good producer was that I wanted to direct even at that point, so I invariably felt very close to the directors and wanted to make sure that they realized their vision.

When I was working for the city comptroller, the last thing I did was Love Potion, I made a short film, it was a little weird psychodrama and it played at a bunch of festivals and won a few prizes and it got picked up by one of the now defunct websites. It actually made me some money. It never had occurred to me that I could earn money doing film, especially shorts.

It was time to leave my job, they got fed up with me spending so much time making films and not being fully focused on doing my work. It was a scary step but it was really necessary because I was totally consumed by this way of telling stories. That was eight years ago.

How did Slippery Slope get started?

I shot a trailer for this script which ultimately became Slippery Slope. The beginning of the script was supposed to be a spoof of a porn film. You see what you think is a cheesy porn film but when you pull back you see that it’s part of a documentary critiquing pornography as well as all these other things, a feminist documentary she’s made that’s a laundry list of things she thinks are wrong with the world today and what feminism has to do with it.

I felt strongly that I wanted to shoot the porn film myself, I wanted to do something silly and weird and different. I have worked with nudity and sexuality before in my films, it’s one of the things that I really am interested in. One of the reasons I wanted to make Slippery Slope was I wanted to write sexual and hopefully erotic scenes as well as silly scenes that involved people in sexual situations. One of the inspirations for the film was that one of my best friends, documentary filmmaker Maria Aggie Carter, and I joked we should make porn films focused on a woman’s market because there are so few films out there that are appealing to me as a female viewer. It’s not to say that there’s nothing. In the process of researching for the movie, I found there’s a lot of porn out there now that’s really bizarre, porn that’s really challenging, porn that for me is repulsive and upsetting. There’s so much porn out there that it’s hard to say that there’s anything you can’t find, because it’s such a vast array of it out there, but I still do think that there’s really a paucity of women behind the camera representing a more diverse idea of what women viewers might like. It’s not to say that women and men have completely things that they respond to erotically, because I don’t believe that. The absence of women to a large degree both mainstream film as well as porn ends up leaving us with a less rich and interesting array of films to choose from.

There’s a bunch of sex in the movie and there’s a lot of sex that was written and was shot but of the sex scenes in the movie, there are ones that are clearly played for laughs, but others that I hope seem to be more sexy as opposed to funny. To some degree the sex scenes represent things that I find erotic or things that I find funny but there’s also things that aren’t in the film that I hope to do in films I haven’t gotten to make yet for various reasons.

Did you do any research?

There are some well known porn actresses becoming porn directors as they got older, Candida Royalle is one of them and I’ve spoken to her many times over the years. Nina Hartley’s one of the actresses, when you hear Nina talk about her work, it’s clear nobody’s forcing her to do this. She’s a persuasive representative of the business.

What kind of message are you hoping to send with the film?

There’s a lot that feminism still has to offer to all of us in terms of ideas about gender equality. I think women are still, sadly, very discriminated against. We have a much better situation here than in many other countries─I say that grateful to be an American women. It’s not easy to be an American man or an American woman but I think there are some specific ways that being a woman disadvantages you.

I came of age in a different era when porn wasn’t quite so ubiquitous. There’s a lot to be said for explicit and erotic images, I say that as somebody who grew up in a conservative, repressive home. That was something to be saved for after marriage. And I fully respect people who choose to pursue that path, but that wasn’t my path. My thoughts on porn are like my larger thoughts on free speech in general. The solution to bad speech isn’t censoring it, but let’s have more of it, more ideas, more thoughts from more diverse voices.

There’s some really violent and upsetting pornography out there. When I was researching this, some of this stuff, I just thought, “This is horrible, let’s censor this.� My visceral response, not even looking at some of them, just reading about some of the images that are out there, was really upsetting and repulsive to me, but I still don’t feel like I would take that step and say so we should censor these because I don’t feel that that would have the intended goal, which would presumably be a world where women aren’t subject to violence, particularly sexual violence.

I wanted to make a film about a woman who comes from a more standard doctrinaire position of “Porn is bad, a woman has been forced to do it,� and having her being involved in this other world, where she finds freedom in her personal life. That’s the story I wanted to convey in the film. When you see her at the film festival, when your film plays, it’s not her documentary conveying these higher ideals, it’s actually the sex film she shot, it has been switched somehow, her journey comes home to her. She asks herself, Have I sold out just to get ahead in this process? And I don’t know what the answer to that is. I tried a lot of different endings for the film, it’s one of the parts I’m least satisfied with.

What were you trying to say with the portrayal of Hugh, the very feminist, anti-porn husband? I wasn’t sure when watching him if those were his true feelings of if he was playing up to what he thought was expected of him.

Hugh’s the character that’s really polarized people who’ve really loved him and found him a really refreshing and true portrayal of some men; people kept mentioning the whole Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston thing where he wanted kids and she wasn’t ready because of her career. In my experience, there’s many relationships where the men were more keen on starting a family than women. I would say the number one reason in the circle of friends I’m talking about is because women are so anxious about how they’re ever going to manage to combine their professional lives and motherhood because there’s so little support for mothers and parents. I think women have been educated in a way to really seek professional parity with men. Women are going to college and med school and law school and getting more higher degrees than their male counterparts and look at who’s making partner, who’s at the top of these professions. They’re still more heavily male and I think that’s because women cannot figure out, I cannot figure out, how to combine a competitive professional life with motherhood. I’m trying to do it right now but there’s so little support of any kind of institutional acknowledgement that women have children and get pregnant.

The losses and sacrifices that men make, especially form the family perspective, are really substantial and sad but the ones that women are essentially forced to make in the U.S. are even more significant and painful. I don’t think men want to have kids more than women overall, but nobody asks men who are having kids, so are you leaving your job? People just assume that men are gonna continue to work whereas that’s still not true for women. I feel upset that I’m so tired right now as a mother of two working that I don’t have time to organize on behalf of all of us, to try to get some more useful and high quality widely available and more economically viable forms of day care and child care and job sharing and things like that.

I see both of them as characters who are alienated from their sexual selves. That is, they have all these different sexual feelings and impulses that they’re uncomfortable with or embarrassed about or both. I intended him to be seen as a very sexual creature who is uncomfortable with his sexual impulses. I see both of them having political thoughts that are at odds with their impulses. I wanted to play that for comedy; Hugh is a character who’s made a lot of men uncomfortable. There’s some other subset of men who really love him, I guess they feel like he represents some part of themselves onscreen. One woman said, “Hugh is the way we all say we want our men be but we don’t really want them to be.� I wouldn’t say that. The time clock is supposed to be carrying things to a ridiculous degree. I want an equal partner in parenting and cleaning the house and cooking but I also want a partner who is hot. (laughs) I don’t see any incompatibility in those things. One of the things that was cut from the film was Hugh quoting from an actual book that’s one of the many studies out there on marriage and family and sexuality that cites the fascinating and true statistic that the more domestic work men do around the home, the more sex men have with their wives.

We, as men and women, are such sexual beings but that means so many different things to different people. The whole idea that men want to have sex and women only have sex because they want to get married and have kids is so untrue and misguided. To some degree, it’s hard to find the person that you’re meant to be with. We all make compromises and that’s important, but I also think that if we were jointly more focused on having egalitarian relationships…It’s not just for women, it’s for men too. I think it’s weird for women to expect their male partners to earn the majority of the couple’s income. A lot of men feel very burdened by that.

How did you come up with the title Slippery Slope?

It was the original title and “slippery� just has a sexual feeling to it so that was a good thing but for me, it’s a term used to refer to . . . you get involved in making a little compromise and then you find yourself doing something you neither wanted nor intended to do. It’s usually used in the context of morally questionable acts but I think for my character I wanted to leave the ambiguity there. I don’t know that transformations like that are so black and white but my perspective as a filmmaker is that her transformation is a good one in the sense that she experiences more freedom in terms of her relationship with her husband. I feel like going into the film, she doesn’t feel able to have children because she can’t figure out how she’s going to do all these things.

There’s a sense of doubt in her own mind as to what she does to move forward─is this really okay?─where she made these movies where people are having sex on camera for money for other people to have sex to. I supposed I have some lingering questions about that myself, though not to the same degree as the character. People have asked me if I ever made porn films, it’s something I’ve thought about a lot. I decided it wasn’t something I wanted to do, it felt too complicated to me. The reason it felt too complicated was because even though I feel very strongly that people who say people are always being coerced even if it’s just economical, I think there’s something really denigrating about saying that. They’re saying that people can never choose to be porn directors. I don’t believe that. You’re telling me I can’t make a choice to do that? I’ve seen various actors talk about their choice to work in adult films. Some are freely choosing this and it’s not because they were abused and are broke and desperate, they’re choosing it for themselves.

I do think there are a lot of people in the business who come to it from complicated places. I would say that same thing for prostitution. I don’t agree with criminalizing prostitution, arresting people who are selling sex, it seems like a misguided way to move toward protecting people. I think it’s true that a lot of people in the sex business get there, from what I’ve read and from what I understand, from really painful backgrounds and that it may not be the best choice for them in terms of their larger personal freedom, so I don’t know if that’s something that I want to perpetuate especially if I don’t have the capacity to know if this is something they really want to do or if they’re reliving experiences of sexual abuse. I ended up feeling that making actual adult films wasn’t something that I was equipped to do in terms of sorting out all those issues and making sense of them in a way I could feel good about.

Was it ever a question about you doing fully nude sex scenes?

I was interested in working with actors who had a lot of interest and excitement about simulating the work of porn actors. I was clear that we weren’t gonna be shooting genitals. People often asked me where I got the porn actors in the film! First of all, I think it’s a really different talent pool and I really wanted top-notch amazing actors who we were lucky enough to get. Even working with simulated sex and nudity it’s a whole other level of vulnerability and performance, and I work with the actors in a really different way than I work with my other talent. For actors, having the security of no genitals being shown and no actual sex, it gives them a lot more freedom in terms of their performance. [In terms of] not having scenes of actual penetration, I had no feeling of loss in terms of the effect.

Do you have any advice for up and coming filmmakers, anything you wish you’d known?

I have a producer credit on the film now, but I didn’t go into it with a producer credit, and I wish I had stuck by my own financially conservative tendencies. It would’ve been in the better interests of the film. Don’t compromise until you have to compromise. It’s really important to not give in on the things you think you need to tell the story you want to tell.

You often have to come up with other ideas for shooting a scene when your location falls through or one of your actors shows up five hours late. There’s nothing to be done but to know that it’s important to have a sense of when you must not compromise and when you must move on and get the film done. I don’t know if that’s a very helpful piece of advice but I think it’s important. And cast well, get a great team. Get great casting people to bring in great actors for you.

What are you working on next?

I’m always doing various little tiny jobs here and there to make money. This semester while I delivered my 2nd child I was teaching for the first time at Hunter and advising the New School, both on filmmaking, which I loved. I had no idea it would be so much fun, I hope to continue doing that between films.

When I was getting cuts out to various luminaries to do blurbs, one of the people I came across was Shere Hite, because I feel like she was mostly read by an earlier generation, she was really big in the 70s and 80s, I emt her when she was here last year, she’s sold 40 million books. I gave her a copy of the film and never heard from her and about two months ago, a week or two before I delivered, she called me up from Berlin. She’s self-exiled because of how she perceives herself as being excoriated and mistreated in the American media. She loves the film, thinks it’s hysterically funny and important.

American festivals are not responding to this. We’ve had great screenings in Rome and Montreal, but we were widely rejected from American film festivals and she was very interested to hear this and emailed me and wondered if I would consider making a documentary film of her life and work. I’ve done some documentaries, but I’m much more interested in telling stories as opposed to revealing stories that are already out there. We’re in negotiations with her publisher, in the very early developmental stages of this piece. I’m not sure exactly what it’s going to be because I think my friend and I are interested in doing a much broader scope documentary on sex and people’s attitudes, practices, and thoughts about sex these days. I think she’s a fascinating figure, so I’m working on some kind of documentary on sex research and Shere Hite.

And I’m also working on a piece called Secrets of a Happy Marriage. It’s incredibly low budget at this point. I got so lonesome for the camera and the actors, I just started shooting. Even the shorts have been done in a fairly standard timeline, you write the script, you cast it, you rehearse, shoot, preproduction, postproduction. This one I’m developing the script in a more improvisational manner, working with professionals and non-professionals. It’s about marriage and family and motherhood.

Find out more about the film at Slipperyslopethemovie.com.