Source: Adult Industry News
By: Rich Moreland
Based in Montreal, Gamma Films Group is an entertainment network that includes Girlsway, Pure Taboo, Adult Time, and recently, Burning Angel, among its studios.
The company’s driving force is writer/director Bree Mills who runs Gamma Films’ multi-faceted production department.
Bree is best known for the all-female Girlsway and Pure Taboo, a studio that delves into “the darkest corners of sex and desire.”
Key to a Mills production is superb cinematography and impressive acting. Performers have the freedom to exercise their talents beyond having sex. The results are spectacular and, in the case of Pure Taboo, often disturbing.
Part of a rising group of female filmmakers in porn, the thirty-something Mills possesses the right skills to fuel performances previously thought beyond industry expectations.
Want proof? Gamma received an astounding eighty-four nominations at the 2019 AVN awards.
Suffice it to say that Bree Mills’ bold creativity and ability to play on the edges of legitimate (i.e. mainstream) production is reshaping the business.
At this year’s Adult Entertainment Expo, I had the pleasure of interviewing Bree to discuss Pure Taboo.
“I oversee quite a few different studios,” she begins. With Pure Taboo, she has “two intentions. The first is to challenge the psychological side of sexuality and take popular porn tropes and tell them with a different tone.”
That means reinterpreting porn as a drama/tragedy rather than a comedy, she says. Bree wants her audience to confront what they are watching, because love it or hate it, they’ll never forget it.
The native New Englander reminds us that her product is still porn; it’s the tone she changes to “make people think and question.”
Her second intention involves bringing out the best in her actors. She wants them “to show their range” and part of that involves dialogue.
Bree says her scenes “are all improvised acting performances. There are no scripts.”
“We work off a scene treatment that I, or my team, writes and the directors bring those characters to life. We rehearse and choreograph it.”
In effect, the scenes turn into “long single takes” based on improvisation. “That is the most powerful aspect” of her films, she adds.
Bree wants “raw emotion, realism, grittiness” from her performers. To realize this outcome, she encourages them to dig into “their own experiences or emotions.” It’s the “method acting approach” she identifies as “porn script theater,” which means spending “the day like a theater workshop.”
Bree sees her role as “the storyteller.” It falls to the cast to “flush it out.” Rehearsals merely tweak things a bit here and there.
Her narratives rely on “realistic situations.”
An example is Prom Night. The film is “one of a kind,” Bree declares, “a gangbang in a prom dress.” After all, there are girls who lose “their virginity on prom nights in ways that were not what they had expected.”
So, why not delve into what is a bizarre and painful rite of passage?
Bree compliments the film’s star, Whitney Wright. They talked through “how we wanted this character to feel” and how to keep it real, Bree says.
“Whitney is a great actress. She’s versatile and a great sex performer. She’s funny, she’s
weird, shows up on set with a smile on her face. She’s very generous and very willing to go the extra mile, the perfect type of person to bring on your set.”
The other film we discuss is Don’t Talk to Strangers. It’s about a young girl kidnapped by a married couple. Bree says it was “inspired by several famous true crime stories that occurred in the early nineties.”
The narrative explores the “Stockholm Syndrome” and the film became “one of the grittier scenes that we’ve put out,” she says.
Casey Calvert plays the wife.
Bree had never worked with the famous Spiegler girl before but was impressed. Casey’s performance was “exactly how I imagined that character, really beautiful, but very cold.”
Bree gets some of her ideas from her fans. But of particular interest are the stories she hears from performers.
The resulting film allows “them to combat something that happened to them personally or an issue that affected them.” It becomes their “platform” to explore the deeper psychological aspects of their lives.
“Sex is a complicated thing” that combines “emotion and anxiety and energy and vulnerability. To provide an outlet for people is therapeutic to me as a director. It’s one of the main reasons I’m in this business,” Bree states.
Well said and we hope Bree Mills stays in the adult industry for a long time.
