After seeing Chicago’s BDSM community turn out in huge numbers for a euphoric preview screening of Harry Lighton’s acclaimed movie “Pillion” earlier this year, it’s clear that Madison Young’s equally riveting film, “By the Roots,” is destined to be embraced by audiences in the Windy City. On the heels of her own brilliant debut feature, “Ugly Cry,” Emily Robinson delivers another exhilarating performance as Madison, a role based on the writer/director’s own twenty-something self, who finds fulfillment in her relationship with James (Brant Daugherty), as they take on the respective roles of submissive and dominant. Amidst the steaminess of their erotic encounters are wrenching memories from Madison’s youth that eventually lead her back to the repressive home in Southern Ohio where she grew up.
“By the Roots” stands as crowning achievement in the career of Young, a trailblazing force in the feminist porn movement, who has worked both in front of and behind the camera on numerous adult films, founded San Francisco’s nonprofit Femina Potens Art Gallery and performed an indelible one-womxn show that attracted the attention of Maggie Gyllenhaal. Young’s latest film is based on their 2014 memoir, Daddy, and brings together the talents of producer Laura Wagner (“Fremont”), actor/executive producer Ally Sheedy (“High Art”), executive producer Silas Howard (“Dickinson”), actress/comedian Margaret Cho (seriously, look up any of her standup), and musicians Ani DiFranco and Peaches.
Prior to the film’s premiere this Saturday, April 18th, at the Beverly Hills Film Festival, Young took time to speak via Zoom with Cinema Femme about their extraordinary life, the appeal of rope bondage and the influence of a certain Rob Reiner classic on a key scene in their movie.
While watching “By the Roots,” I was reminded of the conversation I had with filmmaker Deborah Kampmeier, who told me, “Repression and abuse are two sides of the same coin. It’s all about controlling and shaming female sexuality. I have a daughter, and I don’t want her to grow up abused or repressed. I want her to grow up as a whole, sexual being. I feel very strongly that our sexuality is deeply connected to our creativity, our spirituality, our power and our wholeness, and that is being chipped away at constantly in this society. Our daughters need to be educated, not naive and ‘pure.’”
Yeah, it’s so nutsy cuckoo that people are so hung up around sex and sexuality and pleasure. We sensationalize bodies and sex to sell things, but actually embracing sexual pleasure is something totally different. There’s birth, there’s sex and there’s death, and there’s a lot of crossover there. Each of these are very human, animalistic life experiences, and yet, they remain so taboo. I see a lot of people who work in the realm of sexuality also becoming birth doulas or death doulas. I think because our society holds such tight knots around these taboos, there is a great deal of discomfort around them. If we’re able to create a safe space to have open, honest conversations about desire and pleasure, we can loosen those knots. They won’t ever be fully undone, but we have the ability to create space for movement.
We are both alums of Columbia College Chicago, as is one of the lead actors in your film, Brant Daugherty.
That was one of the things that really drew me to Brant. I had searched so long for our James. That was a really hard role to cast. The people who gravitated to this project were exactly the right people for it. They had to be a “hell yeah” to be in this project, and they all knew that this story needed to be told. A few actors I went out to I had seen in thrillers that incorporated bondage, and they were offended when they found out what my project was about. BDSM is so often mis-portrayed in media. When we usually see rope bondage on screen, it is because somebody is being held captive for a scene that is not about consent or a loving relationship. I had some excellent creative writing teachers and great experiences doing black box performances at Columbia, though I did end up transferring to Antioch College because I wanted more of a university kind of feel. All of the classes I had at Columbia were in office buildings that felt very sterile. Plus the winters in Chicago are so fucking cold! [laughs]
Tell me about what led you to found the Erotic Film School.
I was making erotic films for many, many years, and I’ve always been a teacher. I’m a certified sex educator. In my very early twenties, I was teaching peer-led workshops at different festivals like Ladyfest and Homo a GoGo. I always felt that if we learn things about our body, why not share that information? In the BDSM world, there weren’t any classes being taught by submissives. Everything was from a dominant’s point of view. Students were instructed on how to flog or how to tie. What about how to bottom? [laughs] Or how to negotiate a scene with a top, how to stretch beforehand, how to navigate aftercare, all of these things? I would talk a lot in my post-scene interviews about my experiences in rope bondage, and I was pretty articulate about it, so I started getting asked to teach about these topics at conferences.
When I began directing erotic films, I was asked if I could teach a workshop on them. After attempting to do them in one or two hours, I realized that I needed much more time to teach someone who has never picked up a camera before how to light, film, write, produce, finance, edit, hold space for intimate scenes, the whole gamut. Eventually, I expanded the workshop into a three-day intensive for students. The first day would be all about preproduction from a feminist porn point of view. We discussed how to go about holding space, what our mission is, the impact that we want to make, and how to uphold our values within the production itself. I brought in other experts for a panel and Q&A, but in order to make everything hands-on, we would create collaboratively a script and shot list.
The second day was all about having students work with models on how to hold space in order to get all the angles and shots that you need. Performers would come in, and they’d film with the students. On the third day, our focus shifted to distribution and marketing. The students would edit their films, and at the very end of the day, they would be screened for a small group of people. Many of the films went on to screen at erotic film festivals all over the world, including HUMP! Film Festival and Pornfilmfestival Berlin. I’ve stayed very close with one of the students, who attended the Erotic Film School as part of her college research for Harvard University. She was writing her thesis on feminist porn. The students were largely female, queer and nonbinary folks who wanted to see themselves seen in erotic film, and that is who I wanted to give these skills to.
I’d also love to hear about your one-womxn show, Reveal All Fear Nothing: A Journey in Sex, Love, Porn and Feminism, that you co-wrote with Annie Sprinkle.
Annie Sprinkle and her wife Elizabeth Stephens are my chosen mommas. I have known them for a quarter of a century at this point, and we’ve been very close collaborators. They were at the birth of my children, they officiated James and my wedding, we have holidays together, and they come to grandparents’ day at the kids’ schools. They are Grandma Sprinkle and Grandma Stephens, and I love them so dearly. Annie had a very successful, amazing one-woman show called Post-Porn Modernist, and she had been wanting that to be a template for other artists who had worked in the sex industry in some way.
I have a theatre background, and had been doing a lot of performance art. We were all out camping together when I told her, “I’m really feeling drawn to theatre right now, and I feel like I want to put something together.” She exclaimed, “I’ve been waiting for this!”, rushed over to her nearby cabin, and pulled out a file with her script that she had performed in the 90s. I was like, “Oh, okay, I’ve got to chew on this and see if it will be the right fit,” and it was! It’s an incredible template of different archetypes that take the audience on a journey of identity. In my version, some scenes remained the same while others grew out of the template and became something different. For example, one of the segments in Annie’s play was called “The Public Cervix Announcement.” In that scene, she would place a speculum in her vagina, and invite the audience up to the stage with a flashlight to take a look at a cervix. All the while, she’s giving a sex educator talk about it.
For my version of that scene, I took the speculum, turned it to the side, and used the Hitachi magic wand on myself in order to talk about the G-spot. I called the scene, “G, what’s that?”, during which I explained things like, “If you’re stimulating the vagina, then the paraurethral sponge becomes engorged with fluid that is produced by the Skene’s glands and can be pushed out by the pubococcygeal muscles.” I toured that show around to New York, Austin, Portland and San Francisco. Maggie Gyllenhaal attended one of the performances, and she got down on her knees in her white suit, and looked at my G-spot with a flashlight. She subsequently gave interviews in which she spoke about how my show served as a source of inspiration for her character on “The Deuce,” and has been very supportive of my work ever since. We were both in postproduction on our latest films at the same time, and I had no idea her’s was as enormous as it proved to be! [laughs]
What was the experience like of writing your memoir, Daddy, and how did it evolve into this beautiful film?
I’m definitely a polymath. I’m really good at bringing people together to collaborate, and I’m really good at holding space for people to be vulnerable, whether that’s in an emotional scene or in an interview. I like to be physical in my body and do performance art in theatre, and then I love to be in the flow in writing. I’m also a really good self-producer and have built relationships over the decades that have enabled me to book, for example, my one-womxn show, which turned out to be a great way for me to sell my memoir. The book preceded the one-womxn show, and like Annie, my writing is often not fictional. [laughs] A lot of my work is very autobiographical, regardless of the medium I happen to be exploring.
I’ve written three books, and the first one was the most difficult. I wrote it a few times, and it took a while for me to get it right. I was directing two erotic films a month, running the Femina Potens Art Gallery I had founded—which had over 500 art events—as well as writing grants and traveling the world performing in other people’s films. And then also, I’d write. So it took a while for the memoir to come into being, but I honed in on it and made it happen. I found our amazing publisher, Rare Bird Books, and they loved it, but there was one specific part of the book that they zeroed in on. They told me, “We’re really interested in your relationship with your father and your relationship with your dominant, and the fact that he’s your ‘daddy.’ But you only have that right now as two chapters in this book! We want for you to take those two chapters and rewrite the entire book.”
I was a new mom and my first kiddo was a little less than a year old when I got the publishing deal. I rewrote everything and the last chapters were not memories, they were what was happening basically that day. They were so fresh, and that was very, very vulnerable for me to put out into the world. However, it was very interesting revisiting that book, and deciding what chapters I wanted to take from it to create this screenplay for the film. How we hold a memory changes constantly along with who we are. Our experience of any particular moment in our life is held slightly different as that lens changes. So I wanted to be very authentic to who I am in this present moment as I am telling this story about twenty-something me.
The movie’s total running time is an hour and forty-one minutes, ten minutes of which are comprised of archival footage over the end credits, which was its own little beautiful gem to put together. Among the places you see me traveling to in the footage is The Tool Shed, which is a fantastic, small, sex-positive, queer feminist toy store in Milwaukee. It’s always special for me to teach in the midwest. Chicago has a great BDSM and rope scene, and they have fantastic shops as well, including Early to Bed and The Pleasure Chest. I have spoken at Northwestern, and I did one reading in Cincinnati—though it’s always a little weird for me to go all the way back to Ohio, which is where I grew up. [laughs] I definitely want the film to make its way there as well, and I’m hoping that we get into the Chicago International Film Festival.
How did you go about finding the three marvelous actresses—Emily Robinson, Briar Magee and Nessa Dougherty—who play you at different ages throughout the film?
We started off with production of the scenes featuring Madison’s teenage self, Tina, in the Hudson Valley area, which is where we shot all of our exteriors for the film. Some of my good friends have an art farm in Kingston, and they let us use their beautiful land for all of our exteriors. It has hundreds of acres of woods, fields and barns, and it was gorgeous there in October. I did a lot of the casting myself, just looking at different reels, which is how I found Briar. My interviews with actors are very important to me—how someone comes across, how open they are, what questions they’re asking about the character, why they’re interested in the project, how much of themselves they’re going to give to this role. And Briar was amazing. She really dove into it and asked incredible questions. She hasn’t done a lot of film work—a lot of the actors had more experience in theatre—and her mother is amazing.
Briar is now in college, but when we filmed the movie, her mom would come to each shoot, and was just a fantastic presence. I felt the same way about Nessa’s mom and thanked both of them in the credits. I had discovered Nessa because I knew she was Bay Area-based and had done “Fairyland.” I had auditioned a lot of kids, and it was very hard to find someone that age who could take on that part and let go. We shot over a period of a year, and Nessa had a growth spurt, so we finished production just in time. She was amazing, mature, very relaxed and had a blast in the woods. She had done gymnastics in the past and was like, “I can balance on the logs like they’re a beam!” On her last day of filming, she made a little bracelet that said Madison on it and gave it to me. It was so sweet.
One of our producers had sent me a few possible actors for me to consider, and I just really loved Emily’s work. I started watching all of her stuff from “Transparent” to “The Year Between,” and I was like, “There needs to be more!” She was so young but able to do these beautiful, emotional scenes. Of course, I want highly talented actors to work with, but who someone is as a person is just as important to me, maybe even more so. Emily has spoken about her queerness, and I knew I needed someone who is queer to play this role. She’s a writer, she’s intelligent and has this huge heart. She is very sex-positive and was addressing sexuality and feminism in a lot of her own work like “Virgin Territory.” I just really resonated with her on so many levels, and finally was like, “Okay, you’re gonna get this.”
I needed someone who was going to go the extra mile and really research this role. Both Madison and James have been doing rope bondage for years, and the people playing them needed to have an understanding of what rope means to them as a couple. Emily came in close to a year before filming and met a lot of the BDSM community. We had a big dinner where she was able to ask a lot of questions. We had three days with an amazing BDSM educator who was able to get Emily’s hands on rope. We had an almost hour-long conversation on consent and communication and how to communicate in rope as well as the history of rope bondage. Emily was able to tie herself and see what it felt like to have rope on her. Then she said, “I want to experience being up in the air,” and I was like, “Are you sure?” And she did jazz hands and exclaimed, “Enthusiastic consent!” [laughs]
At first, with the suspension scene in the film, I thought that we would use a double. But Emily thought it was important for her to do it herself. That’s also something about Emily that resonates very much with me. She is tough, she doesn’t complain, she wants to be present, and she wants to feel everything. This is also me. We are obviously two very different people with different histories, but there was a lot of commonality that we share.
The way you’ve articulated your first experiences with rope is powerfully conveyed in Emily’s performance.
I’ve had an anxiety disorder since I was a teenager, and we know that with certain neurodivergence, there is comfort in compression. I love bear hugs and weighted blankets. Some people like to be hugged lightly, but for people like me, a light hug is almost painful to my nervous system. I need a secure touch. Whereas some people like a very gentle, relaxing massage, other people really need you to be standing on their back. I’m a deep muscle person. It’s all informed by how we take in sensation, how we receive it and how we move it through our bodies.
I found the scene where Madison enacts an orgasm in a public restaurant to be a brilliant variation and subversion of the iconic moment in “When Harry Met Sally…”
I have to say that for years, “When Harry Met Sally…” has been my go-to film to watch when I’m having a tough day and just need to laugh. I remember having it on VHS and then DVD, and I always love that scene. When I needed to perform a monologue in high school, I did the orgasm scene from “When Harry Met Sally…” [laughs] As for the scene in my film, it illustrates how the dynamic between Madison and her lover, Blake, is a very public one. They feel like the streets are theirs to fuck on and to play in. Whereas everything has to be hush-hush and quieted when Madison is at her parents’ home, she has such comfort in this physical space. Nothing about her has to be packed away tightly. She can sit across from her lover and let out an energy orgasm just to tease and tantalize her after they’ve fisted in a bathroom. So it plays very much to that dynamic, but it also a hundred percent has a nod to “When Harry Met Sally…”
What was it about Brant that you felt captured the essence of James?
Like Emily, Brant did a huge amount of research. He got to pick James’ brain during a three-hour conversation where he asked all the right questions. James is generally more private, which makes it a bit hard being married to me, since I am very much the exhibitionist. [laughs] I also let Emily, Brant and the rest of the cast know that their job is to create. I provided them with reference materials that they could pull from, but they are each developing their own characters. At the same time, it was very trippy for me to watch Emily and Brant in these roles. I’ve had to sometimes remind myself while watching Brant that, “This is not James!” He did a fantastic job bringing on a lot of James’ mannerisms while capturing his essence.
I wanted to have a lot of very authentic details in the film, and that extended to the props, such as my old flip phone and James’ Blackberry. I served as the costume designer and had Emily wear a lot of my clothes from the early 2000s, some of which you see in the archival footage, such as the chain necklace. A lot of the art that we filmed was from the old Femina Potens Art Gallery. So we really revisited the past, and all of these details were infused into the world we built for the film.
The BDSM dynamic portrayed in “By the Roots” is very different from the one in the recent film “Pillion.” I sensed much more sensitivity and love in how James approaches his role as a dominant, and I believe it will enlighten audiences whose familiarity with the culture extends only to “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
That’s what I’m hoping! There were a lot of other components that ended up getting cut for time, such as a scene where we see their process of aftercare. It felt so important to include, but this film isn’t meant to be educational. Since marginalized communities—such as queer, trans and kink—are often misrepresented on screen, there is sometimes an expectation for them to be presented as perfect in order to counteract the stereotypes. For me, it was important to stay true to both the memoir and the messiness of life. Yes, our main characters are in this open dynamic, but Madison has definitely been wounded by abandonment in her past. Even though she’s totally enjoying getting fisted in the bathroom and is able to hold multiple relationships of her own, she still gets jealous around James.
I thought it was really important to show that love can still exist within imperfection. When people have asked me about “Secretary,” which is a film that I love, I say it’s about two people figuring out who they are, and they are super-messy about it. This is not a relationship to model your kink around. They have no community and no education around BDSM. They are flailing around in desire. As for “Fifty Shades,” I mean…[laughs] I just can’t. It is not based on anyone real, and wasn’t written by someone in the community. It’s just too much of a fantasy for me and I can’t process it. It feels like the bad kind of porn that I find very un-relatable. No matter what kind of story you are telling, I need to have a strong emotional connection to the characters and care about what the protagonist is doing. Otherwise, it’s very hard for me to continue watching the movie or reading the book!
I love Ally Sheedy’s portrayal of the art curator whom Madison has a formative encounter with during her adolescence.
Ally Sheedy’s film, “High Art,” came out in 1998 when I was 17, and it was one of the first queer films, along with “But I’m a Cheerleader” and “Chasing Amy” and “Bound,” that I saw. I especially loved “High Art,” and it has been very formative to me as a filmmaker. I love the use of light in that film, and they just did a 4K restoration of it last year. Ally is a big advocate of the LGBTQ+ community, and she loved the script for “By the Roots.” The role really worked for her, and we were able to do a lot of great back and forth.
She’d be like, “I don’t really think this line is working for me. I think I can just convey this with a gesture,” and I’d say, “Of course!” She then said, “Some writers won’t let me do that. They hang on too tightly to the script,” and I replied, “You know, I tell the story and then it’s a collaboration with the actors. Let’s play with the words that are here. See what works, see what doesn’t and then make the magic.” Ally’s scene is based on a real moment in my life that happened at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. We shot the scene at a beautiful feminist art gallery in Brooklyn and it was filled with people from our community as well as art pieces that I curated. I wanted to be very hands-on with the visual art curation throughout the film.
It seems you’ve been an intimacy coordinator long before that was a widely used term. What was your process for creating a safe set that allowed for such steamy scenes in this film?
Our intimacy coordinator, Maya Herbsman, was phenomenal. I am very familiar with that type of work, but I was also doing a thousand different things onset, so I was grateful to have Maya there because I felt supported in my holding of the space. She was able to fly in and help with any choreography that was needed. There’s always another way to tell the story. I never want to tell a story in a way that will make an actor feel the slightest bit uncomfortable. They need to be grounded and free and brought to a place of trust that will enable them to go to the edges. I know that is what I need as a performer.
There was a scene where one of the performance artists, Jiz Lee, was doing a nude performance up against a beautiful projection. Jiz told me that at the end of it, they would ejaculate, and I was like, “That’s amazing! I don’t know if anything like that has ever been put on film before.” Then Maya, who was very helpful, asked me how the crew felt about this. Not only did we need to have the consent of the performers, but of everyone in the room because that act would not be simulated. So we had a fantastic conversation that resulted in us creating a closed set where everyone felt comfortable. We also had three amazing rope bondage artists that we worked with. It was very, very important to me that every person on the set felt like we were all on equal ground, and we were collaborating on this vision together.
Has this experience made you want to continue exploring your voice as a feature filmmaker?
Yes, I have a few scripts that I am currently working on, and not all of them are autobiographical, so we’ll see. My original idea was to have three films come out of my memoir, and each would be based on a different archetype, the first being the child self. For this film, I focused on the chapters that were really about the relationship to the child self, how we hold memory, the memory literally being held in the land that we are from, and our relationship to those places that we are from even after we’ve left them to discover who we are. Something in that land is calling back to Madison for integration, and that is at the root of this first story.
“By the Roots” premieres at 7pm on Saturday, April 18th, at the Beverly Hills Film Festival. For tickets, click here, and for more information on the film, visit its official site.
