The result was the world’s most expensive toaster at $1,860.93 (not including labor). He took the 404 individual parts of his toaster apart, including the 42 individual copper wires entwined to make the power lead and ended up with a ghost toaster. As if hinting in some Platonic sense at what it might do, the device looks hauntingly like the original but is utterly unable to perform its intended task. The story of making the toaster is comic and quixotic not to mention a study in what cheap things (the original was around five bucks) actually cost. He asks questions about where things come from and where they (and us along with them) are going. All of it is recorded in his book The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011) which also made NPR’s list of best books for 2011 and netted Thwaites a spot on The Colbert Report as well as a TED Talk. The toaster is also now spawning a TV series for Britain’s Channel 4 where Thwaites makes another attempt at making a toaster from scratch as well as trying his hand at sneakers and light bulbs.

***

The Rumpus: Why remake something so cheap and prevalent?

Thomas Thwaites: It’s that common feeling of wondering where does everything come from. One of the reasons I was doing the project was to satisfy that question for myself, and obviously there is that other nagging feeling of the guilt we have when we buy things we don’t always need or when we don’t want to buy things but are told to buy stuff to keep the economy going and that the economy needs to grow, and if it shrinks it’s a disaster and all this stuff, so it was just a conundrum I wanted to solve or, at least, explore.

Rumpus: What was particularly inspiring in to you in the Hitchhikers Guide – and toast?

Thwaites: Like many people, many males my age, I should say, I read it as a teenager, and it’s both epic and mundane at the same time. The same can be said for what I tried to do. I tried to connect different scales of things and find the humor in that as well, and it’s true the Adams’ quote, no toast got made, not yet at least, but I’m still working on it.

Rumpus: The toaster was a school project, but how did you stumble on the idea of an Argos toaster? Or into Argos itself for that matter? It’s a weird place.

Thwaites: There’s an Argos on High Street Kensington near college (The Royal College of Art which is in the tony ‘hood of Kensington and Chelsea). Argos is pretty bizarre. It’s sort of like Walmart. It’s consumerism at its rawest, only there’s nothing on the shelves. You just go in and look through these laminated catalogues and write down the number of the thing you want and then you hand in the number and the sales clerk types it in, and then it just emerges from the conveyor belt at the back. Obviously in the back they have this big nondescript warehouse. It’s like cutting costs to the absolute minimum, so you don’t have to display anything. And, I had – still have, in fact – this fantasy of climbing over the counter and climbing up the conveyor belt and going in the warehouse and then following the toaster back to the source and hitching a ride on the delivery truck and on its return journey….

The toaster I bought was basically just the cheapest toaster I could find, and one of the reasons why is this very cut-down mode of retail.

Rumpus: So once you had it in pieces, what happened? Tell me about your process with it.

Thwaites: I wanted to go from digging something out of the ground and turning it into components for the toaster and just following that process from the very beginning to the end, and once I decided which materials I was going to focus on out of the 100 or so that I guestimated were in the Argos Toaster I could actually start trying to find and mine them.

Rumpus: So, first was iron?

Thwaites: You can’t go buy iron ore in, like, Argos, so I looked online for somewhere I could get the ore, which was also within a reasonable distance of London, and I found this place in the Forest of Dean. I phoned up, kind of cold calling: “Can I come and mine some iron ore?” The guy Ray just said, “okay, sure,” and I went there the next day. I dragged my friend Simon along and took an empty suitcase with me. Like you do if you want to transport iron ore around. That sort of seemed to make sense-ish. The place was a tourist attraction, and it was interesting because here was this grizzled former miner who is now a tour guide for this mining museum and me, this sort of naïve, art school, I don’t know, idiot, perhaps? So, I felt a bit stupid pleading with him to let me mine some ore, but then I took it home in the suitcase and smelted it.

Rumpus: Yeah, in a trashcan, right? Why? Or more to the point, how?

Thwaites: Well, I’ve got this suitcase of rock and have to figure out how do I make it into metal, and then how do I build a furnace? I spent a long time going back and forth with the health and safety officer at college, and even though it’s not very dangerous, I’m sure something about smelting ore in a car-park in London made it seem a bit more dangerous than it was. I built this furnace out of a dustbin and an antique chimney pot I’d taken from my mom’s garden and a leaf blower. Only it didn’t work.

Rumpus: So what happened with this flaming trashcan and leaf blower and iron oxide?

Thwaites: For a few days I did think I’d actually done it, and I was basically a genius at smelting iron.  But I used the wrong fuel. Because modern furnaces use coke, I assumed coke was better somehow so that was what I used. It’s not used nowadays because it’s a better fuel, but because it’s cheaper. Also smelting is more art than science. You have to judge the temperature and the gas mixture from the color of the flame. When it didn’t work, I was pretty mopey for a few days. I mean, the first thing I tried didn’t even work.

Next, I looked online for other ways to smelt iron. I’d melted my furnace, and getting the health and safety guy to agree to my doing it again was never going to happen. I’d used up a lot of goodwill from the foundry people at college, so I found instead this patent for microwave smelting or industrial furnaces that use microwaves. I knew my mum had a microwave, and I went over to her house and sort of borrowed it one day.

Rumpus: Sort of borrowed it? Does she use that microwave anymore?

Thwaites: Well, yeah, I got her another one. I basically destroyed her microwave.

Rumpus: Which is funny because it costs more than the toaster. Did you buy the second one from Argos?

Thwaites: No, actually I got it secondhand from the Red Cross at a charity shop.

Rumpus: How did it work? I can fix a cup of tea in microwave for a minute and no iron comes out.

Thwaites: Yeah, it just so happens that iron oxide, iron ore basically, is a fantastic absorber of microwaves. Do you ever have a particular cup or bowl where you put it in a microwave and it becomes insanely hot? Some glazes have iron oxide in them, so I’ve had cups where I’ve burned myself when it comes out, but the liquid inside isn’t hot. The cup has absorbed all the heat. Similarly, you put a lump of iron oxide in a microwave and insulate your lump so it doesn’t lose heat and you keep pumping energy into it for 30-45 minutes, and the ore will just get hotter and hotter and hotter. Then, if you also have some carbon in at the same time – and for that I used my mum’s ramekins – you turn your iron oxide into iron. Actually she was more cross about the ramekins than the microwave.

Rumpus: So how hot are we talking about here with the microwave?

Thwaites: At least 1200 degrees Celsius. Iron oxide / iron ore has to get to that temperature. To do that though you have to insulate the inside of the microwave in part to keep it at that temperature, but also if you didn’t insulate it, the whole inside of the microwave would melt.

Rumpus: Once you turned rock into metal, how did you get it into the shape you wanted?

Thwaites: I borrowed an anvil and heated these bits of iron basically in the same way a blacksmith would. I beat it out into long strips, heating and bending them into a very rough toaster frame.

Rumpus: What was the hardest part of the toaster to make? Or collect?

Thwaites: The wires. I had to make copper wire and nickel copper alloy for the heating element. My source material for the copper was very impure. That’s fine if it’s in a lump, but I was rolling it through this wire-making machine in the jewelry department at college. Obviously they’re used to rolling out gold, but if you roll out an impure plug of metal, as it gets thinner and thinner any cracks in the metal become more and more important. As it gets thinner and thinner, the cracks start to spread, so you roll it through and try to file out these cracks and then roll it through and file, roll and file. It just took ages to make.

Rumpus: Iron and copper, they’re metals; they’re elemental but plastic? That’s tricky. With most materials you were going back to like the Iron or Bronze Age.

Thwaites: Yeah, the plastic age only got started recently because it requires this huge infrastructure to make plastic from crude oil. I learned this when I tried to do it myself. I had to get hold of some crude and so phoned up BP, which didn’t go anywhere. They thought it was a joke. Since, I have gotten hold of some crude oil. I went down to this little oil field in Dorset and have refined the crude using fractional distillation but still there is this problem. Crude oil is this mixture of hydrocarbons, and separating the mixture is really, really hard. I’m going to continue to try to make plastic, but I realized I would also need this other catalyst. I’m still thinking about how I might be able to do it but it goes back to the pressure cooker and balloons of flammable gas so I haven’t quite worked it out yet. This is for the TV program, so I can give it another go

Rumpus: For the toaster you also tried to turn potatoes into plastic. How did – or does – that work?

Thwaites: There’s lots of ways of making plastic and one of them happens to be oil, but you can make it from sugarcane and other materials. I went to a conference where this guy was using bacteria to make plastic from sewage. The bacteria digest the sewage to produce a type of plastic that they can harvest and injection mold into whatever shape you want. And, you can use potato starch, but again the chemistry is quite difficult. You need additives to make sure this starch-based plastic doesn’t crack, and I didn’t have them. My starch plastic was all right in small bits but not on a toaster case.

Rumpus: So, then you said uncle and gave up and went to the dump?

Thwaites: It was quite tempting. Everyday I’d say, “How can I make plastic, how can I make plastic?” And going home, I’d pass these piles of plastic, trash, that had been discarded, and look at them longingly. It was also a good opportunity to start thinking about the other end of the spectrum. Here I’d been thinking and working with mining stuff and taking it out of the ground, but then it will go back into the ground as landfill, so I wanted to focus on the other end of the lifecycle. I mean this stuff is sucked out as oil, turned into plastic, then sits on your desk for a couple years, and then where does it go? It goes back into landfill or recycling centers, which is just down-cycling.

Rumpus: I know this one didn’t make toast, but are you worried about making another for TV and what will happen?

Thwaites: Yeah, I’m slightly worried. There is one key piece of apparatus that I didn’t have when I first plugged in my toaster. That’s a variac, which lets you gradually turn up the power you’re feeding to the toaster, so rather than plugging it in and hoping that the power will make the element glow red hot without becoming white hot and melting itself, you can slowly increase the power until you’re putting just the right amount through the heating element wire. Which I’m hoping will make it work the second time round. On TV.

Rumpus: The first time you were on stage, and how did it feel when it didn’t work? You were at a conference, right?

Thwaites: Yeah, but because it was an art/design project the goal wasn’t really to make toast. In a way there’s something more poetic about not even being able to make a toaster, like Arthur Dent was right, and it was nice to go out in a blaze of glory.

Rumpus: But there was no blaze just glory? There was no fire, and you didn’t electrocute yourself or anyone else.

Thwaites: But it was dramatic in that it flashed. I could feel the heat on my face for a brief moment.

Rumpus: Do you eat toast now? Do you even like toast?

Thwaites: Yeah, I do. I still like toast. I’ve got back into it after a period of going off toast and toasters, and I’ve rediscovered a love for toast.

Rumpus: And what do you like on it?

Thwaites: Just butter actually, just plain.

Rumpus: What kind of toaster do you have?

Thwaites: I have an Argos Value Range Toaster as a bit of nod to the project. I had to buy a few for various reasons, so I put one back together and use it now.

Rumpus: What are you working on other than the TV series?

Thwaites: I’m doing this project in Germany on the home of the future and what will be in it. It all continues from the toaster project. The toaster is about how can we continue this cycle of purchasing more and more stuff and replacing stuff. Maybe we can and maybe we can’t, but the home of the future will look at what will we change and how will that change how we live? So I’ve gone from the Iron Age and smelting to the home of the future via plastic. Arthur Dent would like that continuum because it’s going from one to the other and somehow encompasses the whole history and future of human civilization.

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When I lived there, I was miserable. I was one of the leavers (a distinct category in the book. Its subhead is “The Days and Nights of London Now – As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It”). I’d drag my homesickness to Buckingham Palace to hear an American accent. My journey is nearly the mirror opposite of Taylor’s, going from the city to a rural village in Upstate NY, while he went from a rural Canadian fishing village to London. Now that I don’t live there, I love it – and his book – not because it’s about London but for what it says about the city and how it says it – as well as who says it. Most of the time it’s not Taylor at all. It’s anyone, everyone but him.

The book is “oral history.” Yes, that clunky awkward thing, but in his hands the results are transfixing. The voices are hypnotic, turned into solos where people tell their stories, and each is unexpected. They defy the clichés of a London book, you know those by Peter Ackroyd with his histories and novels and historic novels or more recently William Boyd and John Lanchester’s novels that feel saddled with London types. Here, Taylor tells a greater story, and more than that it’s a lesson in interviewing.

In the New York Times Book Review Sarah Lyall called it a masterclass: “The material he elicits proves his skill not only in asking questions that find the eloquence even in the naturally taciturn, but also in knowing the value of keeping offstage…. In an age of celebrity interviewers and bombastic, self-loving television hosts, Taylor is the rare specimen who appears genuinely to believe that other people’s words are more interesting than his own.”

The book is far from a Q&A, but I thought interviewing him might yield some answers about interviews and people and stories. Unlike Taylor and his interviews in the book, we spoke on the phone, from the sticks to his office at Hamish Hamilton in London.

***

The Rumpus: How did you get started on Londoners?

Craig Taylor: It sort of emerged when I moved here. I didn’t have a great time, and I was always wondering who these people were around me who’d seemed to figure out the city. I started working on the Guardian and interviewed a lot of people in London, and I was curious about them. I thought it would be good to use the city as an excuse to talk to people I wouldn’t have a reason to otherwise. I think any book is an excuse and this just provided me with a really good one.

Rumpus: When I moved to London I felt like looking for a flat was this advanced form of tourism. I was looking in Brixton – far off the tourist track – and felt like it gave me a picture of people’s real lives being in their homes, kind of like interviewing people about their place in the city.

Taylor: Yeah, it’s an excuse to go deeper than your own life, and I always worried that living here, I would get that one perspective, my perspective. This was a chance to move myself out of the picture, and I think everyone intuitively feels about a city that, wow, here are all these people walking this exact same patch of ground, but they’re seeing it differently and they’re doing things completely differently.

Rumpus: How was moving there? I felt lost, and you talked about that too in your introduction.

Taylor: I always thought it was this burst of happiness where you get here it’s almost like a drug. It can be euphoric. You’re in this incredible city, and then if you decide to say, there’s often – and there was in my case – this precipitous drop into a really bleak place where you see that there’s a veneer here that the very rich can live on, but for the rest of us it’s tough work. Then if you stick around, there’s a slow crescendo of satisfaction as you learn to manage the city.

Rumpus: Not to sound like the tourist board but what do you like and hate about London?

Taylor: It’s constantly offering up this parade of sights and sounds and people and stories and status games and all that stuff you look for as a writer. And, I love the places that I’ve made my own and I love the way it looks at dusk. But, I think it’s hard to have one constant feeling about the place. If you just hate it, well, you get out, and if you just love it, you must be making a lot of money, but for the rest of us you hate the way it pushes against you sometimes.

The book really showed me that even when people hate this place, it can be done often in a very entertaining, operatic way. I always loved what people hate about the city. They’d talk about how someone would tilt their foot out on the escalator so no one could get by. The complaining is done in a way that makes it very funny and entertaining. Londoners can be almost operatic complainers.

Rumpus: Did your feelings about the city change in the course of the book?

Taylor: They deepened. It made me really love the complexity of it all. This is such a complex city, and all you can do if you’re dealing with it honestly is embrace that. I hold all these contradictory viewpoints of the city. It’s like one of the people in the book this city planner said, you have this endlessly intimate relationship with this partner that’s constantly offering up endless possibilities and art, but it can also be mean to you. A lot of my own feelings were expressed by people in the book, and I really shied away from generalizations.

Rumpus: Yeah, and by doing that you managed to have this individuality that was rich and surprising but also incredibly specific, as if the specificity tells the bigger story of the city.

Taylor: I love expertise and listening to people who are experts in whatever they do whether they’re an investment banker or a manicurist. They have this specialty, and as people talk about what they do well, the world just comes alive. One of the people who didn’t make it into a book because of a time constraint was this waterman. He talked about coming up the river in heavy fog and being able to tell where he was on the Thames by the different smells that would emanate from the various docks and wharfs, so even in fog he would smell cinnamon and know where he was.

The worst thing you could do with a book like this is have a lot of people speaking very generally. You have to go deep in the details. There’s the guy who works as an STD nurse. He says so much about the city through the particulars of his job. All these people come in to get tested in the New Year just after the Christmas parties. I always thought that in that detail of his job was this greater truth about the city. I didn’t need to talk about the greater truth. I had to have someone say, “Yeah, in January we have a lot of worried people coming in.”

Rumpus: Which is really pretty sharp as details go. It says so much for London.

Taylor: Yeah, but he’s an expert and no one can argue that fact. If someone said, “God, all Londoners do is drink and screw at Christmas parties,” you can dispute that.

Rumpus: There’s also this humanism, I guess you’d call it in the book, with characters like Pakistani currency trader and the gay Iraqi refugee. They tell this larger story about immigration and what people want in London, but their stories are so idiosyncratic they yield up this richness, this detail.

Taylor: I think with nonfiction you’re allowed to surprise people in a way you can’t with a novel. Some of these stories here would seem impossible or just ludicrous in a novel, like they couldn’t exist. The wonderful thing about nonfiction is that those people do exist, and sometimes that’s the hard thing for novelists writing about London. They choose these archetypes, and I didn’t have to do that. I just went with the real people who are in my mind infinitely more surprising and rich in their experiences.

Rumpus: How did you find everyone? Wasn’t this insanely complex and time consuming? Yet you manage to create a real sense of a journey through the city and how you get to the city, from arriving to leaving, loving and hating it, but getting that sense of narrative must have been hard.

Taylor: Some of the best compliments I’ve had are from people who say, “Oh, that must have come easily.” “Oh, you just went out and talked to a few people and typed it up. Well done you.” That’s great, that’s what it’s supposed to feel like, but hopefully at some point they’ll see it must have taken time to get to the point where someone would say certain things.

It took a great mass of words – almost a million words – and just finding everyone….

I still have the notebooks that show all the phone calls logged and all the emails over a good five years. I spoke to something like 200 people, and sometimes the person you’ll see in the book is the result of five or six interviews with other people who are similar but couldn’t quite say the things that needed to be said or just weren’t as eloquent. It takes a long time, but you just make those calls and talk to people and listen. That’s the big thing, listening.

You can’t do it on the phone; you can’t do it quickly. You just show up, and you have to be present. You have to be with them, and you have to shut up and let them talk and you have to accept that you’re not there to be the most interesting person in the room. It’s more like the stuff you don’t do than what you do, and genuine curiosity is what makes it. At a time when so much is sped up and so much journalism is sped up, there’s no way to make this process quicker. You can’t rush into a room and say, “Okay: hopes and dreams I will need all of them and I will need them said well.”

Rumpus: I like what you said about not being the most interesting person in the room. You’ve largely absented yourself from the book. It’s not about you and that’s really interesting as a writer.

Taylor: I knew I wasn’t able to stand astride London and look at it as a great historian, but it’s weird that we’ve gotten to this place with journalism where you can pick up a magazine or newspaper and learn more about the interviewer than the interviewee. That can sometimes be incredibly interesting but for this project there was no way I was going down that path.

Rumpus: You have a clear affinity for people’s stories. What do you like in telling them?

Taylor: Real people aren’t constricted by the rules of fiction. They are infinitely weird and wonderful, with a depth that’s so unexpected. There are people in the book that I spoke to for one reason and they just veered off from that into this territory that was incredible, their lives, their struggles and what they’ve been through. You just can’t come out of doing a project like this without a sense of, I don’t know, empathy towards others. It’s hard for me to hold certain political views or certain stereotypical views of other people because of the stories I’ve heard and hearing about how people live their lives. That’s an incredibly privileged position.

Every interview you do is sort of an improvisation with the person. I remember speaking to this older woman in her house, and I just remember the light changing and the light on the walls changed through the shades, and you get to this point with people where it’s unique. Sometimes they get to a place where they are explaining things they’ve always wanted to talk about but never have, and that can be a pretty incredible experience.

Rumpus: Yeah, after I quit stripping I went back and interviewed a bunch of my old customers. I was curious about what they’d been doing in the club, and their reasons were all very individual. It felt though like this insane responsibility because I asked these men to open up to me, and in some cases I was the first person they’d talked about some of these issues with. We’d left that really prescribed space – a strip club is like the underground, like the Tube, where you don’t really interact with people – but that act of being with someone and giving them space to open up is amazing and intense.

Taylor: Yeah, there’s definitely an energy there when you’re in these situations and you’re listening with purpose. And, there’s this inexplicable urge to need to understand more, whether it’s about a group of men who came through your life at one point or the city.

Rumpus: Did anyone lie to you as you were interviewing them? Did you care?

Taylor: I was never too worried about the lying. If I tell stories about my youth, I change them. I change details; I collapse time. I change things around to gain effect. I make myself more or less sympathetic. Anyone does that when they’re talking about their life, so with that in mind, this form becomes a series of unreliable narrators in the best possible way because we all are. There were some people who were obviously deluding themselves or exaggerating or in some cases just making some stuff up, but that seemed secondary to the purpose. The way they tell and convey is what’s important.

I think it’s summed up by that Samuel Johnson quote I mention in the introduction. It was repeated back to me and mangled and paraphrased. Someone said, “When a lady’s tired of London, that lady’s gonna be tired of lots of other things.” There were people who swore they knew the wording and would be way off.  I thought that sums up this project. It’s not about getting things right. It’s about finding a way, and London for me is very much about that. Living here, you have to change the story because the real story might be too grim. I know I certainly do that. Historians have dedicated their lives to getting it right, but this book is something else entirely.

Rumpus: When I was last in London we were talking about oral history and its flaws. Just the phrase itself doesn’t fit what you’re doing. So what do you call it?

Taylor: Yeah, it has a kind of fustiness, like it’s this kind of thing people do in local history clubs where they indiscriminately interview people for the sake of it. So you’ll have all sorts of old people just talking about what it was like to live in the Thirties. Then, there’s that bias that it’s not really writing, that it only is if you put quotation marks and a “she said” and throw in a detail about where you’re sitting, that that elevates it, whereas this sort of pure voice is not writing.

The more I look at what it can do though, the more I think it’s a kind of avant-garde form. You’re able to do stuff a novel just can’t. There have been some books that have come out about the city recently. Well, there are always books coming out about London and other cities, and the novels are run by these rules where characters have to meet up or their lives have to intersect. The great thing about this book is that no one is going to ever ask me why the plumber never met the banker or why the dominatrix never showed up and talked to the ex-dockman.

This form can carry the depth of fiction, but it can do stuff that the novel just can’t. It can smash itself into these eighty, ninety different pieces and never cohere because the real city doesn’t. The person you meet on the first day, that cab driver who picks you up when you come to the city, isn’t the one who takes you to the airport on the day you leave because cities don’t cohere to that sort of thing. I think the form – this collage of voices – can be a very freeing way of telling a story. At times when the novel feels a bit stale, I love having this ability to do things differently from what a novelist would be bound to do.

Rumpus: Also there’s something about just giving over to a voice too, which is really powerful.

Taylor: All writing is judgmental, but I never had to say, “She was obviously a working class woman who did this or that.” Things come out in people’s voices. They come out in word choice and in cadence and in different attributes. They just emerge as people speak. Also, it is mysterious when this voice starts up. There’s just this narrator, and you have to piece together things. I think in the book there are some clues for each person about where they fit in the social spectrum, but I would much rather the reader figure that out rather than my telling them.

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Bell currently lives in Amsterdam and speaks at film festivals, porn festivals, and feminist porn festivals. Her life is full of the dualities of life, parenthood, marriage, career. She has a toddler and has been searching for preschools recently. Several years ago she set up her own production company, Blue Artichoke Films, to make and distribute the movies she wanted to see. Now she’s working on a series of three interlinked films and is just finishing a documentary in which she followed a woman embracing her submissive side around Amsterdam for three years. We spoke about film theory, porn, sex and ethics.

***

The Rumpus: How did you become a filmmaker?

Jennifer Lyon Bell: I’ve always wanted to make erotic films. I’d seen porn when I was younger and I had thought that it was really ridiculous and nowhere near as sexy as the fooling around my friends and I were doing. So when I was a teenager, I thought it would be neat to do something better. Only I went off to college, to Harvard, and it didn’t really occur to me that that was a legitimate career option. I was into sex-positive feminism, reading Susie Bright and Carole Queen, but I didn’t really consider that erotic film was something I could do. Instead I went into advertising and had a career there for ten years.

Rumpus: So what changed?

Bell: I moved to Europe with my boyfriend and thought it might be time. I’d talked about making erotic films to everyone, friends and family and strangers on the street. In Amsterdam I decided to get a masters in film theory just to study erotic film and come up with a template for why I believe film is sexy. Is it just a matter of showing body parts or is there more to it than that?

Rumpus: A few years ago the New York Times did an article I think in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section about someone trying to make porn films for women. It was all about the Prada shoes, like if you get the fashion aspirational enough, women will be turned on. But that did nothing to change porn or the tropes, say, of what is sexy, which is what you’re trying to do. We’re conditioned to see porn in a certain way and you’re trying to subvert what that is.

Bell: It’s true. We’ve created a separation between sex and the rest of life that’s unnatural, so I want make films that bridge the explicit sexuality in, let’s call it, porn with the artistic expression and emotions and plot lines you’d see in art films. It’s not just a way to make interesting film but is a metaphor for what’s compelling about sexuality. It’s part of life, so acting like it’s some kind of separate ghettoized experience that we need to hide and not discuss is silly.

Rumpus: How did grad school help? What did you do there?

Bell: Specifically I was thinking, does having character and narrative make you feel more erotically charged by a film and if so why? There I had a framework to understand why I believe making something sexy isn’t just about showing body parts, and I stumbled on cognitive film theory, which talks about why everyone – not just women but men and women – feel what they do when they look at the screen. I became interested in sympathy and empathy.

Rumpus: Do they relate to that weird truism you hear spouted off about women and erotic material, that women need character development and narrative and men need visual stimulation? Is that even true?

Bell: I don’t believe men and women are terribly different when it comes to looking at erotic materials and getting aroused. Culturally we act like women need to have a huge complicated story to feel connected to a sexual relationship, but I don’t think that’s true. Plenty of films that don’t have much character I find arousing. Still there’s a basic statement a film can make that enables you as a viewer to become much more engaged. Having sympathy and empathy means you get more turned on.

Rumpus: So, obviously we’re talking something more involved than just tits and dicks, say. More than just anonymous consumer porn.

Bell: Yeah, the statement a movie can make is that these are basically decent people. These are moral people, and that sounds funny to talk about morality when you’re talking porn, but for all kinds of film, porn included, being engaged with the story and its characters involves you in their choices and actions and how you ought to feel about them. One way of talking about it is it boils down to morality. Is what they’re doing good or not? And, when people are basically good, you feel bonded with them and you want to feel what they feel. Use that in an erotic move and we can really get into the action. You can create that bond in an erotic documentary with real people’s stories and personalities and showing what they’re actually like and that they’re basically good people. Or, you can do it with fictional characters. Watching them struggle with their morality makes it more interesting and enhances that erotic bond you have with them.

Rumpus: Which you’re doing now in a bondage documentary, right?

Bell: Yeah, it doesn’t have a title yet, but I’ve been following the main character Lotus around for three years. It’s the true-life coming-out story of a submissive discovering her BDSM side in Amsterdam. She approached me because she’d seen the other films and wanted me to film her life as she went through this. It took her a while to convince me. I didn’t think she was serious but was just being flattering. We just shot the final scene recently and she’s happy with how everything turned out.

Rumpus: How is stuff for Lotus now? What’s her life like?

Bell: It’s changed so much. She’s much more sure of herself.  Before she questioned herself and wasn’t as happy in her love relationship. Now she’s in a satisfying one with a man who she’s been with for quite a while. That happened during the filming, and she’s had fantastic BDSM experiences that have made her more happy and has this boyfriend who loves and supports her. The movie’s message matches up with my personal belief in sexuality, which is that only when you feel safe enough to be honest with yourself, with what really turns you on and what you really want in your heart of hearts that you can live your life to the fullest.

Rumpus: As we’ve talked about morality and character that’s made me think of Russell Banks new novel Lost Memory Of Skin about a kid committed for a sex crime. Basically he’s a porn addict, and it’s beautiful, very sensitively written. Banks gives him humanity and depth. As you were talking about a moral sense, it made me think of the Kid (which is what he’s called in the book). He’d been a consumer of internet porn and there was no human aspect to it, just a consumption-addiction driven thing where he was inured to porn. In a way the book was about how and why he couldn’t be open to something slower and deeper and more emotionally driven. It was partly about the larger culture of how that happens, that deadening.

Bell: We contribute to a culture where the only ways of engaging are turned on or not turned on – orgasming or not orgasming, as if it’s binary. Being aroused can have a very different flavor based on what kind of film you’re watching or what kind of situation you’re in and they’re not all the same. Arousal is not all the same. Some people maybe want to have the option of a really quick, not very involved orgasm sometimes. That’s okay, but I think it’s on a broader psychological and philosophical level it’s important to say, there’s arousal that’s more fulfilling for you if you want to find it.

Rumpus: So how does that actually come into your movies?

Bell: My first film Headshot – it’s a remake of a classic Andy Warhol movie from 1964 – and in the original, Warhol detaches the viewer from the image by never letting you see who’s giving the blowjob. You get no sense of the relationship between the two people. And, it’s a silent movie, which also goes a long way towards distancing you. I thought, wow, wouldn’t it be cool to do the same thing and bring in the emotions that come from sound and from seeing the relationship. I remade it with a man and a woman, and you still never see the person who’s giving the blowjob but I tried to bring out his personality.

Rumpus: You get a really quick sense in it that he’s totally up for this, a bit charged by on-screen sex with someone he’s never met, but also that she is too.

Bell: When he and this woman meet each other, it doesn’t take long for you to understand what’s exciting to both of them in this situation, so you’re invested in their having a great time for a couple of minutes because that’s all it takes.

Rumpus: How did you find him? He seems so very dude, like kind of some ur notion of male up-for-it guy?

Bell: At the cast party for Matinee, one of the crew members said he’d like to be in a film for me, and I immediately thought of Headshot. He had no experience at all. He was just a regular guy who wanted to explore his sexuality on film, so when I had the idea he was the first person I called.

Rumpus: How did Matinee work?

Bell: It’s a story of a couple portraying lovers in a play  in Amsterdam and the woman, Mariah, struggles with whether or not to actually have sex on stage with her partner on stage. The play is a struggle and she wants it to be a success. It’s very much her, Mariah’s, story. I want people to be into her and invested in this boundary she decides to overcome. She doesn’t let him know what she’s decided to do, so when it comes to her making this move and having sex with him, you’re completely into it, and you want her to have a good time.

Rumpus: Your movie Skin Like Sun has no dialogue or story, so how do we invest in the characters there?

Bell: It was commissioned for a feminist porn festival, and I made it with Mureille Scherre, who’s also a DJ and lingerie designer. We wanted to bring to life the female character’s experience. One way we could do that was taking a lot of shots that represent how she feels in sex. Those are likely to be shots you won’t see in straight porn since it’s oriented towards men. We tried to take close-ups of when she’s touching his hair and ears and meld that all together so it feels like one continuous experience and you feel their relationship in a broader, closer way. The most important decision was to make it feel like real time. We wondered if it would make us feel closer as viewers to her experience.

Rumpus: The movie has a sweetness to it in all the touching and affection. Those are the telling details that make it clear they love each other. Somewhere I read that in looking at erotic images men are more likely to look at faces first, then genitals, which I thought was interesting and unexpected.

Bell: If you’re looking to understand how someone feels in a certain situation, the look on their face tells you a tremendous amount that can make you feel connected to that person. In traditional porn, men’s faces are largely absent. We see the woman’s face and body and genitals but we don’t see much of his body, and we definitely don’t see his face. But I want to. I miss it. In moments where characters go through a change where they get much more aroused I don’t want to be looking at their body parts but the reaction in their faces.

Rumpus: What movies inspire you?

Bell: Larry Clark’s films, hands down. He has a real feel for how complicated sex can be and that there are different kinds of arousal that being anxious or nervous and how those negative emotions can play in an erotic way. I really love how he has focused on that and made it the emotional centerpiece of his work, showing how sex is so much more than intercourse. He’s particularly interested in adolescents because at that age we don’t have words yet for everything we’re going through, and that makes it a really volatile and exciting time. I’m interested in those same phenomena for people of all ages. Sex is much more complicated and dynamic and electric than it looks on film. I also love Lars von Trier’s movies and how they show people pushing their own boundaries. I love the idea of incorporating that electricity of boundary pushing into my erotic filmmaking. I’d like to think everyone who’s worked on my films has a positive experience. I’ve never had anyone have a nervous breakdown like Bjork was reported to on his, but I respect that he’s not making a simple easy film. He’s throwing his whole self into making it and he expects his actors to do the same.

Rumpus: So how do you balance being married and having a kid, with making sexy movies? You don’t look or act like you have a dual life.

Bell: People always say to me, ‘You don’t look like someone who makes erotic films. I expected someone to be wearing a leather outfit or a vinyl bustier,’ but that taps into what I really want to be saying about sex. There aren’t sex people and non-sex people. Sex is part of everybody’s life and that you can be incredibly sexual and wear a flowered dress. Also making a film of any kind puts you in a vulnerable position. Well, I feel vulnerable making erotic movies because they have to be sexy to me. Each one is like saying this is what I personally find sexy. That’s scary for me even now.

Rumpus: Yeah, I was a stripper but don’t want to write about it in my fiction because I’m uncomfortable with people thinking that was/is/could be me. And, I don’t really like talking about my own sexuality partly because I have a hard enough time not judging myself for it. So, how have you gone beyond that?

Bell: I spend a lot of time managing my boundaries. I need to feel free and comfortable working with my actors and writing my scripts and doing the things that I need to do to make a movie that’s moving and exciting to me. I often spend months building up relationships with the actors. On set there are also all these fine gradations that I’ve learned to manage where someone says, well, how do you feel about – anal sex, say? Or, if someone says, how do you feel about sex doggie-style? I have to be careful to separate out my feelings about whether doggie-style sex makes sense in this film from how I feel about it in all erotic films and how I personally feel in my own bedroom. It’s a balancing act that can come down to a pronoun or else talking to fewer people at one time. Everyone on set has a different comfort level but I have to be able to talk about sex bluntly, and I have to respect my partner’s privacy too. Like, he may or may not want me talking about sex in a way that exposes him and his feelings.

Rumpus: Respecting a partner is one thing but you have a daughter? Wait, I didn’t mean that to sound like I’m shocked. At some point you’re going to have to have a discussion with her though.

Bell: I feel really lucky to have the opportunity to practice what I preach and raise a daughter who’s sex positive. I think I make the kind of films that I’m proud to stand behind. I think they say something good about sex and the way sex really is, and I hope to raise her with open and body-positive attitudes and to talk when the time is right about what I do and she’ll appreciate that.

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