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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Documentarians Joe and Harry Gantz, creators of HBO's "Taxicab Confessions," talk about their new film: A stark, disturbing portrait of three couples who swing.
Feb 22, 2002 | Joe and Harry Gantz are documentary filmmaking veterans who hammer away at the more revealing corners of reality TV and film with series like "Couples Arguing" and HBO's "Taxicab Confessions" (now in its sixth season). Their new film, "Sex With Strangers" (which premieres Feb. 22 in San Francisco), delivers a kaleidoscopic perspective on swinging and confronts the audience with one of the starkest pictures in recent memory of sex and relationships.
The Gantz brothers spent a year filming the lives of three swinging couples. James and Theresa are middle-aged veterans of what they call "the Lifestyle" who see every weekend as a new opportunity to find women. Shannon and Girard are a married couple with a child, just entering the scene, who find their sexual encounters fraught with jealousy. Calvin is the center of a complicated threesome with Sarah and Julie.
It's like "Temptation Island" with deeper complications, or "Survivor" without the wildlife. It can get ugly.
And it's not that sexy, either. Viewers may come away from this film turned off by the power plays, sadness and competitiveness evident in these relationships. The documentary ends up being less about sexuality than about whether these people can manage their personal relationships without creating emotional devastation -- in themselves and others.
Salon talked to Joe and Harry Gantz during their publicity swing through San Francisco.
How did you come up with the idea for "Sex With Strangers"?
Joe: When we did "Taxicab Confessions" in Las Vegas we started picking up some rides at a place called the Red Rooster, which is a swing club. In the ride titled "The Lactating Woman," at the end [the female passenger] takes out her breast and says that since she had implants she continually lactates and she shows the driver. But the amazing part was this couple talked about how they had gotten into swinging, and their experiences.
Before that ride I thought that swinging was something that couples did in the '60s or early '70s, and I didn't realize how many couples were doing it and the intense experiences that were going on. This ride was amazing both in the stories they told and the kind of everyday, very matter-of-fact voices they used to tell them.
Harry and I said we should look into this. We have always felt that people's sexual lives were somehow a key to their psyche, and here was a group of people living out their sexual fantasies to an extreme, yet their day-to-day lives were very average. These people are regular, normal, mostly family-oriented people, mostly in long-term relationships, mostly married, mostly conservative rather than liberal, but in their recreation they're having mutual or consensual sex with other people, and we thought that was just fascinating. We realized that it's everywhere, even in the most conservative parts of the country -- sometimes more so in the most conservative parts of the country.
How did you find the couples?
Joe: It was very difficult because many of these people feel that if it comes out in the community who they are and what they're doing, they will be ostracized and worse. And they're right.
Harry: They'll lose their jobs, their neighbors will hate them, and that's been our experience in making this film.
Joe: But first we went through swingers magazines.
Harry: Then we talked to people who were running swing clubs across the country and asked them if they knew people who might want to participate.
Joe: Then we went to some swing clubs ourselves and handed out fliers. We spent about two months meeting people, making telephone calls. There are three rules to documentary filmmaking: casting, casting and casting. If you have the right people you'll get something wonderful. If you don't it's just going to be frustrating.
We originally cast 12 people from California, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Washington state, and we dropped 11 of those 12. Either they had an agenda that "we want to say that swinging is this and we're going to show you that" so they were very stilted in the way they were in front of the camera, or one had a Web site that they were trying to promote. They weren't being open and just letting us into their lives.
Harry: When we say "casting," we didn't go into this thinking that we're either pro- or anti-swinging -- we mean people who are really willing to let us into their life. Some of them lost their jobs as a result of this. And they knew the risks going in. But these were the three that were able to be themselves, that after one or two times they were able to forget the camera was there. We don't work like a lot of the reality producers where you put hidden cameras everywhere and try to catch them saying something that they wouldn't usually say.
Joe: We work with their cooperation.
Harry: They know that we're there to get the most important moments of their lives, and even though we may not be there 24 hours a day we're there enough where we'll get things spontaneously. [For instance,] the scene where Shannon tells her mother. She told us that she was going to tell her mother. We said, well, make sure that you do it when we're around. That's what we mean by cooperating.
How did you film "Sex With Strangers"?
Joe: Almost every week or every other week would be a four-day weekend with either one couple in Mississippi or the two couples who were in the same neck of the woods up there [in Washington].
Harry: In the beginning we went for a week at a time, but we found that most of these people were leading very regular lives. Most of their swinging activity, like most other people's social activity, happens on the weekends.
Did you have any problems with your couples being exhibitionists?
Joe: We feel that if someone's an exhibitionist they're not really giving you their real life. So if they seem to be performing for the camera or creating for the camera, then that doesn't feel authentic to us. It's a unique person that can be in that moment with a camera crew there. The trick is to find them.
Harry: The opposite can be a problem, too -- they're inhibited by the camera. They think they want to do it and get in there and you can see that they're always self-conscious.
And I know that from the outside people think, if you're making a film about swingers and these people are showing you everything about their life including their sex life, they must be exhibitionists. But we just consider it that these people are willing to tell their story.
Joe: [It's like] they're writers or something. If someone writes a story from their life and it's very personal and tells you every detail, do you say. "Oh you're such an exhibitionist"? No, you say, "You're an artist."
