How The Hardest Working Director In Porn Gets The Job Done
This story was originally published on Forbes.com in July 2024.
On a recent Saturday morning, the adult movie director Ricky Greenwood was busy overseeing the production of a big budget pornographic feature entitled Project X. A couple dozen crew members were buzzing around the office space that previously housed a biotechnology company. For now, most of the action was taking place in a hallway where a hospital gurney had been rolled into position. Soon, a sex scene starring veteran performers Mick Blue and Cherie DeVille would be shot.
These days, Greenwood is one of the most in-demand directors in the adult business. At 42, he has made, by his estimate, over 500 porn movies, among them Grinders (a skateboarding movie), Talk Derby to Me (a roller derby movie), and Machine Gunner (a war movie). Originally from Montreal, Quebec, he is tall, bearded, heavily tattooed, and speaks with a Québécois accent. His favorite movies include The Exorcist, Point Break, and High Fidelity. Among the directors he most admires is Michael Bay: “He’s doing commercial movies that are like a big cheeseburger.” Greenwood says this is not unlike what he does. “I know when I’m making porn, I’m making a sort of entertainment. I go with that and play with it. He’s that type of guy.”
Before he got into the adult business, Greenwood worked in television in Montreal. At a certain point, he took a job directing a porn movie. It wasn’t a positive experience. So he went back to television. A friend had a boss looking for a production manager in adult. So he gave it another try. This time, things went better. He moved to Los Angeles. He wrote and directed adult movies. He won some awards. The story for the movie he’s directing today came from its producer, Digital Playground. It’s about what happens when the government finds an alien ship that has crashed on earth. DeVille plays a biologist. When Blue arrives on set, the wardrobe supervisor hands him a white lab coat with a name tag that reads: “Dr. John Harding GENETICIST.”
Getting on the same page Prior to shooting the scene, DeVille, Blue, two talent liaisons, and Greenwood convene in a room. As a camera records, the group goes over a “Pre-Shoot Discussion & Boundary Checklist.” (The performers are given time to complete the consent checklist prior to the meeting.) Here, the actors identify what they are willing and not willing to do in the scene. DeVille takes the lead, noting her dos and don’ts among the 30-plus items listed in the “Sex Acts” column (said acts range from the vanilla—say, kissing—to the not-so vanilla—say, bondage). “The goal is to make the talent comfortable, to create a safe space for the talent and make them feel heard and respected by production,” Greenwood relates later.
Make it look good High production value is something of a Greenwood signature. Unlike the low-budget, lo-fi “gonzo porn” of yesteryear, his productions are saturated in deep colors, preoccupied with story, and look more like a movie produced by A24 than garden variety smut. “Real porn back in the day used to be cinematic, used to be a movie,” he recalls, nostalgic. “Now we want to go back to it: big production, big budget, something that is entertaining.” In the hallway, DeVille and Blue, clad in white lab coats, await the call for action. The lighting is tweaked. In a dimly-lit adjacent room, Greenwood takes a seat and strokes his beard thoughtfully as he surveys the video feeds from the three cameras displayed on the monitors.
Catching the sex “And, action,” Greenwood announces. The cameras move in and out, following the actors’ lead. There isn’t a lot of direction. When it comes to filming sex, this director takes a mostly hands-off approach, preferring to let things unfold organically. “I like to let them do what they want to do,” he shares. “I barely direct them for sex because I feel I want to have a more natural sex scene. I want to be a fly on the wall watching them. I don’t want to give them tricky angles and positions. I want us to witness and not have them working. If you create that safety zone, they will forget the camera. You will get those nice moments and scenes. If you direct them, it become like a job for them, and it become like a fake scene.”
Work against stereotype “As performers, we are like athletes,” Blue, who has pale blue eyes and an Austrian accent and is canonized in the AVN Hall of Fame, opined earlier when asked what it’s like working with Greenwood. “Not a lot of directors who haven’t performed understand that stuff. The better the director understand what we do, the better the outcome will be.” As Blue and DeVille do their thing on the gurney, Greenwood watches, his face bathed in the green glow of an EXIT sign. He’s good at his job, he says: “Because I care.” He knows that some people don’t respect what he does for a living. “‘It doesn’t matter, it’s just porn,’” he parrots the critics saying. But it matters to him. “We want it to be good. We want to make it interesting and different. If we give them a regular porn movie, what’s the point of doing it?”
Know your niche A little over an hour later, the first scene of the day is completed. “I love working with Ricky,” DeVille, an award-winning MILF performer who ran for president in the 2020 election, says in a bathroom afterwards. “I like being extremely organized,” she adds, something they have in common. Meanwhile, Greenwood is getting ready to film a dialogue scene with other actors. He’s busy, but thankful for the work. His friends who direct mainstream movies make a movie every five years. He makes nine or ten movies in a year. Still, there’s a stigma with which to contend. In Europe, “People see a porn director as any type of director. They see it as the same thing as a regular movie director.” In America, it’s taboo. To him, porn is “just another genre that people like and can watch.” That said, he believes public perception is changing—for some, at least. “The younger generation don’t see it so much as bad.”
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