When a laid-off sex worker falls for a mail carrier in a world frozen by pandemic unknowns, it will take the help of an astrologer, cinema guru, cam model, retired dungeon owner, porn star, and an infected host of the supernatural, to discover a new way of loving. A dreamy soft sci-fi romance. Cinema Femme sat down with Daviel to discuss the creation and production of this intimate, ‘dreamy soft sci-fi romance,’ available on Prime Video.
How did this get started?
About right when the pandemic hit, I had a dream that was the image that is the poster image. Underwater, clutching — and that was my partner at the time. That was my exact dream. I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t know that it would turn into anything like this, but that image really stuck with me. And so later on, a few months later, I decided I was going to scrap the whole script I had been working on for a long time because it had taken place in a “present day” that didn’t include COVID, which I thought would never be able to exist after. When I decided to write this, I took the main idea I had wanted to communicate from that prior script, in terms of the mundane as erotic. But a lot of the rest of it came from the community that I cast or had around me and also the questions of COVID itself.
When did you start writing the original script idea?
Probably May, 2020. And I finished writing it in November. I had a few readers and we started production right away.
Can you speak to having it happen during COVID and whether you think your message and those of the characters’ stories would be different if COVID weren’t a factor?
It was the perfect way to foreground things that I already wanted to say. And then some of it also just created those things in the first place. Like the distance date in the bath: that was an idea I had for someone I was talking to that we never ended up doing, but it’s like these things came out of necessity, you know? That would have never occurred to me without constraints like that. But there were some things that I was thinking about: the eroticizing of the hand washing for instance, where it was like, these are things that we’re kind of already doing. But it gave a reason to put it ahead. And then also, I think that negotiating, which is something that is, if you are in BDSM or kink, it’s always a part of your life, but it became something that just had to happen when you were negotiating the risk factors of hanging out, you know? So I think that it just took everything that I was interested in and amped it. The series couldn’t exist without COVID.
The other thing is that we didn’t know this would happen. At first I thought that the more time passed between 2020 and the release, the worse our chances got for it coming out at all. But the opposite happened. The more time passed, the more it became apparent that we all needed to talk about these things. It also added a little bit to certain elements of both humor and tragedy, because of what did or didn’t happen in the intervening years. I am shocked that there’s not media that deals with COVID in this type of light. Like metaphorically and also not just metaphorically, but also what it brought up, what it brings up, what we have to talk about. That, to me, is so uncanny how we skipped over this massive thing that just happened.
Can you elaborate a little bit more in regard to there not being media about it?
It’s like, maybe a mask shows up here or there or an episode of . . . I was thinking about that Chicago show actually, what was it called? [‘Work in Progress.’] Basically they touched on it, which is rare. But for the most part, it was almost like it’s a crime scene or something. It’s like — you are told this never happened [by the media]. What I have been finding with things like work in progress screenings is that everyone has an absolutely unique individual story of what they went through in lockdown — that needs to be told — and it’s stuck in them. And there’s such a need [to tell it]. So it’s like on the other hand, an unforeseen thing that this series does is bring that up to the surface for people.
How did you pick your crew and the actors and actresses?
Well, myself and my partner, those two characters: Neither of us had acted and we were like, well, this is who I have access to. So it was like trial by fire, my god. I cringe still when I look at so many of those scenes because I know what I was going through trying to figure out how to do this. But actually, I like it now. So that was out of necessity. I was shocked that she said yes, because she was at the time a school teacher. Because of the topics — she could have gotten fired, you know? So it was this amazing luck that both of us were willing to do that. And then I chose other people, directors I admired and knew I could trust them to handle shooting in their own spaces. The character who plays Julia, Samantha Kelly, and the character who plays the astrologer, Elizabeth T. Vazquez — those are directors that I had worked with or had projects in the works with that I respected; their way of working, and they were also performers. Then there were people like Kyler O’Neal and Raw who are actors (and musicians, multi-hyphanate artists) and that helped bring up the whole situation because they’re legitimate actors. And they were just so generous and willing to work with our motley, you know, COVID crew.
Too often we listen to the world around us about image and how we’re supposed to behave and how that figures into our sexuality. How much of that played into the characters that you created?
You mean not listening?
Right, exactly, not listening.
I think that there’s a certain amount of hidden agenda I have, which is trying to convince audiences to use their imagination more when it comes to sexuality. And so the possibility of getting creative with surveillance kink, that was that was a friend’s idea, where anything can be anything; and then on top of that, being able to include all these fantasy sequences and just like kind of shaking people out of their routines when it comes to thinking about sex and sensuality. It’s just part of my reason for being. So that’s always going to be in my work somewhere. I’ve always been very, like, anti-institutional, anti-authoritarian. I didn’t go to film school. I went to art school. Maybe you can see that because a lot of the images are more like they’re from art history books. I was so privileged to learn from people like Marizó Siller and Samantha Kelly who had gone to film school, who were telling me ‘no, you have to do this because you can’t do that.’ And so they would be giving me the on-set education and I would be able to say in the moment, ‘well, it doesn’t matter, I still don’t want to do it.’ Together, we kind of came to a place where they sort of saved the day and also I was able to see, ‘oh, okay, those are rules. These are reasons why you don’t do X, Y, Z.’ So I think in some ways it was like a blissful ignorance that I tried to maintain to some degree.
But then also, like the character who doesn’t want to go online, I think showing people that there are possibilities with ways of living our lives and ways of looking at our lives is one of the agendas and something that I owe to certain books I’ve read. My first film was about Natalie Clifford Barney, who was non-monogamous, like, in the 1920s and just totally flaunting convention with her life. So I think that I feel like if I’m gonna make art, that’s part of what it is: helping people to expand. Whatever they can imagine, they can do. And that might be met with resistance, but at least they’ll be trying. At least that thought will be there.
Are there any influences in your work?
A lot of the stories were drawn from people in my broader kink community here in LA. One of the stars is someone I met more through the adult entertainment world and so I feel like sex workers are my heroes; making something accepted and enjoyed by that community was first and foremost — like, we did it, you know? And so that’s kind of like primary and then when you go into artistic sources, there’s Lizzie Borden. Her film ‘Born in Flames’ has been my favorite movies since I’ve seen it. It just had a Criterion release, actually. All her films are amazing, but that was the one that I saw first. It is like fiction in the style of a documentary, but also had no script. So the way she was working with actors was like they were improvising their own lines. It hits on every level. Every time I see it makes me want to make films. But if you aren’t a filmmaker, it makes you want to have a revolution. It’s so beautiful. It took 10 years to make, like, talk about doing it outside of the system. You get a bit of money and then go shoot something and then get a little bit of money and then go shoot something. And so people that have been doing it that way are what I look to because I’m starting to understand that I’m not the one who’s gonna do it from the inside of the system, you know? I’m starting to kind of accept that. But I still have these very ambitious goals, and I think something like ‘Born in Flames’ is just like a perfect example of that. I’ve shown it in classes, I’ve seen it on the big screen. It just gets better every time you see it. And also, Catherine Bigelow has a cameo [when she’s ] very young.
I love the role that mail plays: the element of mystery while opening a package mirrored by the professional roles these characters have. Can you speak to this?
OK, do you remember, during Trump season one times, the whole ‘Save of the USPS’ thing? That was the target distraction of the moment, which is interesting from this vantage point to be like, well, whatever happened with that? Like, how our attention and energy and care is manipulated in this way of ‘look over here, now over here.’ So in 2020, that was happening. Also, I’m a lifelong obsessor with mail and love writing letters. I used to have a practice to write three crushes of mine a physical letter and send them in the mail on my birthday each year. And very few people write back. I mean, very. Still I love everything about mail. the opening, the anticipation — I wrote that into the scenes. And, what’s so strange is that the actor, Valerie, who played the mail carrier, used to want to be a mail carrier. It was like her dream. It was just so, so cute how it all worked together.
I once taught a class at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I spent a lot of years in Chicago. It was called The Art of Address: Oratory and Correspondence. We talked about how letters to prison and letters from prison have been a form of liberation literature for a very long time. And in some ways, letters, even though they do get censored in certain ways, have an ability to kind of . . . when The Lesbian Tide was being sent out in unmarked packages, people were getting their lesbian news in the 70s because of the mail. I think that that might be something we have to look to again in these times, you know, in terms of censorship. So I think that there’s something important about it. And also, I mentioned that I’m an archivist of sorts; my first film was based on a lot of archives because it was The LadiesAlmanack, which was in 1920s kind of who’s who of famous lesbians. And the letters that people write to each other become, especially for gay history, become all we have. So on every level, the mail is a huge homage.
One scene that I just absolutely loved is when you were standing in front of Antonie and you were telling her what it is that you did for work, what your profession was. So often in a scene or moment like that, in a film or a show, characters are apologetic and almost ashamed. But your character said yes, while you were sorry for not telling her, you are also proud of it. You’re good at it. And you love it. I found that so refreshing. Was that a conscious decision for that moment or did it happen naturally?
Yeah, both the fight in episode four that preceded it, and the resolution in that scene, they were some of the hardest ones to write, but they were breakthroughs for me because I noticed in my past, I always kind of skipped over the conflict in my writing. So I really wanted to do this in a way that both mirrored how people do fight, but also got at the heart of, like, I guess the secret pill in the sugar coating of the whole series, which is: If this goes to places and is seen by people who haven’t considered deeply the plight and the POV of people doing various types of sex work. It’s a kind of solidarity viewpoint of like, we all are doing it. I didn’t want there to be a hierarchy to the types of work because that’s also such a historical problem and that goes along with lines of access and all kinds of things.
And then to have the chance to be able to say sex work is no different from any other employment. There is a power dynamic when you’re being paid for something. And so the opportunity to say something that I feel, [and to offer that] is a love letter to sex workers that are the heroes that have been doing this since the beginning of time and are so important. What do they need from us, to understand, like on a remaking-yourself level? And I do think that it’s couched softly enough in there [the series] that there are people that maybe will have never considered these questions, who will be like, ‘Oh, I guess so,’ you know?
What do you hope audiences get from the series, that they take away from it?
Well, aside from what we talked about in terms of changing minds about sex workers and sex work, what if people can’t walk by a flower anymore without kind of smirking to themselves [in] that they’re like, ‘wow, there’s so much potential for an entire erotic imaginary in every single thing that surrounds us,’? Like that kind of heightened, sensual engagement with living, with being a body on Earth for a moment.
