The other comment I've heard a lot is that the film, or at least the intense sex scenes between Jack and the moms-to-be, were greatly inspired by heterosexual porn. Was your sexuality, your views of sex and women, shaped by pornography?

Not at all.

How'd you avoid that? I don't know many men who haven't been affected by porn.

Not me. First of all, when I was growing up there weren't even videotapes, so where was I going to watch? VCRs didn't even exist.

What about magazines?

When I was growing up the only magazine was Playboy and that wasn't even pornography. I'm 47. To see porn films you'd have to go to 42nd Street. They weren't letting me in on 42nd Street.

So you haven't watched a lot of pornography in your life?

I mean, I watched it later, but my sexuality was not formed by porn.

So do you think that the porn you've watched influenced the choices you made in the film?

Not at all. I don't even see the connection between that and porn.

Are you kidding? I think one of the biggest, most popular scenes in straight porn is a man with two women, preferably two semi-unattainable women.

Yeah, but you see, in porn he's with two at a time. Jack's not with two women at a time. He's only with one woman at a time.

At the end he's with two women.

Yeah, but he doesn't have sex with them.

In the loft, with the babies ...

You don't see it.

It's suggested.

How is it pornographic? How is it pornographic if you don't see it?

It's not that it would have to be explicitly pornographic, it's the idea of what the straight male fantasy is, of being able to have access to even those women who don't desire you sexually, two of them.

Is it a male fantasy to go to bed with two lesbians? Yes. Is it a male fantasy to be living with two women and have two kids? No. At the end of the movie, that is not a male fantasy, I'm sorry. No man I know would think that's a fantasy. What I think people are missing is that this film starts out as a fantasy but turns into something else.

And once Jack really understands what it means to be led by one's fantasy, he has to change.

He has to. It is a cliché, be careful what you think, be careful what you ask for. Fatima's smart. She knows that she's gonna get him hooked in the scheme. The first woman she brings to Jack cannot be a dyke. She's gonna bring the finest, best-dressed looking lesbians she can get. And then she has him hooked. So then he thinks they're all gonna be like that. And that's when Fatima switches gears.

So you're saying that she uses the pornographic against him, she hooks him through his own susceptibility to the fantasy.

Yes ...

Anthony Mackie, the actor who plays Jack, said in an interview that he feels that his character grows in his masculinity to realizing that love is more important than any family configuration. Was that one of the things that you were trying to say?

At the end, Jack redefines, repositions and recalibrates his moral compass. He realizes what he has done and says, I gotta be a father to at least two of these kids, and a partner to the two people I really care about, especially Fatima, a woman I was engaged to. I think what the film does for me at the end is pose a possibility of a new configuration of the American family. It's ever changing and evolving.

And you are supportive of that new configuration?

Yes, very much.

Even though the film seems ambivalent about what Jack is doing?

Well, I think that the film is even and that we really let the audience decide what they feel about it.

But Jack is clearly apologetic for what he does. He keeps saying that what he did is wrong.

Yeah, but here's the thing. It's not because the women are lesbians; that's where people get tripped up. It's the fact that even if the women were heterosexual, he's brought 19 kids into this world. That eats him; he feels like he prostituted himself.

Do you have ambivalence about men selling their sperm to women who want to have babies?

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