Australian Penthouse

How does power come into it?
One critical aspect of our relationships with other people is dominance. That’s where power comes into play—the power we have over other people or that other people have over us, whether that be political, economic, workplace, or down to the relationships we have within our families where there are incredible power plays.

Which is more impactful: societal or interpersonal relationships?
Well, they’re both pretty important. Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher, said, “Power is the fundamental substance of human relationships, just as energy is the fundamental substance of physics.” Basically, human beings are a group species; we evolved to live and hunt and survive in groups and therefore most species that have groups have dominant hierarchies within them.

How exactly does power affect people’s interpersonal relationships?
On the small scale, most husband/wife or partner relationships involve a certain degree of power. The definition of power is having control over resources that the other person or other people fear or want. If one person is more in love with the other person, there’s an imbalance. The fact that one person is more emotionally needy will give the other person more power. There are a number of psychological mechanisms that can lead to distortion and a negative cycle of behaviour of the powerful person, so the powerful person starts to see the less-powerful person in progressively more negative terms because of the power imbalance.

How does power actually affect the brain?
Power makes people feel good because it increases testosterone, in both men and women. And that testosterone, in turn, increases the level of dopamine activity in the middle of the brain in an area called the ‘reward network’. That’s the area of the brain that activities like sex and taking drugs act on: it’s the feel-good centre. When that up-regulates, it gives us that ‘glow’ we get when we have sex or when we achieve or when we get that promotion. That glow is the up-regulation of dopamine in the reward network. And being given power operates through the same system.

What are the mental benefits of power?
Being given tiny amounts of power temporarily makes you smarter, it makes you more focused on goals and makes you more confident that you can achieve them, it makes you more action-oriented, it makes you less depressed, and it makes you less anxious. It makes you think more abstractly and strategically.

What are the effects of an absence of power?
A powerless position down-regulates dopamine and increases the activity of noradrenaline, which is a kind of threat transmitter, and that activates more of the right-front part of the brain, which is the cautious ‘accountant’ part of the brain.

How does the brain maintain balance?
In a way, the human brain is two people, metaphorically speaking. One is the kind of gung-ho, confident chief executive and the other is the cautious chief financial officer, always worrying about the downsides and the plausible threats. They make a good team, but the problem with unfettered power is that it basically bullies and inhibits the cautious accountant side of the brain and you get the kind of recklessness and bizarre distorted judgement that led to the Global Financial Crisis.

What do you offer that other porn directors don’t?
Authenticity. I want to show real situations, real people, real settings, real sex.

What difference does a woman’s perspective make to adult cinema?
What arouses women is often opposite to what’s shown in mainstream porn. Good feminist porn focuses on female pleasure. In porn, women are in a minority, both in voice and audience. But when women watch and enjoy porn, regardless of what type, they are owning and exploring their sexuality, which can only be empowering and further social equality.

Why do you think Cabaret Desire won Porn Movie of the Year at the Feminist Porn Awards?
I think it offered viewers something they’d never seen before in adult film; an original premise, cool Barcelona locations, beautiful cinematography, authentic sex scenes, and a great balance of whimsy and realism, eroticism and intimacy.

How do you choose your actors?
I spend a good deal of time finding the right people and then making sure their values align with mine. It’s easy to tell when someone wants to work in adult films but doesn’t enjoy their work. I make an effort to get to know potential cast, their reasons for acting, and their attitude to sex.

What can men learn from your films?
The main thing men can take away from my films is a better idea of women’s fantasies and desires. Most of my male fans breathe a sigh of relief after seeing something close to their real experiences, which mainstream porn fails to do.

How successful have you been, in terms of actual sales?
My movie Five Hot Stories for Her (2007) sold about 240,000 copies and about a million legal downloads between my website, pay per-view and video on demand. Goodness only knows how many illegal downloads there are…

What new trends are you seeing in the porn industry?
Amateur and gonzo-scene collections still dominate the mainstream but remain formulaic. But indie adult filmmakers like myself have benefitted immensely from doing business online, where we can deal directly with consumers and really expand our fan-base.

What was that first meeting with your parents like after they Googled you and discovered what you do?
I was really embarrassed that they found out on the Internet rather than from me, but they were so great and supportive that the awkwardness was relieved right away.

What are your thoughts on the Australian adult industry?
I don’t know much about the Australian porn industry, but I was impressed with Australian filmmaker Anna Brownfield. Her film The Band is incredible.

What sort of porn do you enjoy?
L’Amant (The Lover) is passionate, sensual and erotic. It takes place in French colonial Vietnam and tells the semi-autobiographical story of an impossible love affair between a young French girl and a wealthy Chinese businessman. My favourite adult book is Little Birds by Anais Nin. Written in the 1940s, when erotica was particularly taboo, the stories pioneered the expression of female sexuality.

You’ve also produced the Erotic Bible to Europe. Do you have any personal favourite places?
The places I like best take something ordinary and create something totally erotic. For instance, London’s Icecreamists… so much more than an ice-cream parlour… they have elevated something as innocent as dessert to delicious adult status.

What fun sex trends have you come across recently?
Right now, I’m in love with pasties—the nipple covers made famous by strippers. They’re a great alternative to bras; you can wear them under sheer tops, avoid ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ in a bikini, and they’re insanely sexy. There’s a ton of variety, from rhinestone to rocker to snakeskin to tassels.

Did you always want to be a porn star?
I never set out to become a porn star. In fact, I never really watched that much porn prior to my first scene. When the opportunity was presented to me, it felt pretty natural since I’ve always been an exhibitionist and very sexual. I enjoy se and knowing people get off while watching me have sex.

Why do you think alt porn is so popular right now?
Because tattooed girls are fucking hot! It just took the world some time to realise it.

Do you have a favourite tattoo?
My favourite tattoo is the roses that are on my waist and go up my right side. It was the most painful tattoo I’ve had so far, but it’s beautiful, so it was worth the pain.

Who do you most enjoy working with on camera?
My favourite guy to work with is Danny Wylde. Every time we’ve been paired up for a scene, I’ve had so much fun. My first scene with him for Burning Angel was just amazing. He didn’t know I was into anal, so when I told him to put his cock in my ass, he was very surprised! Veruca James is my favourite girl to work with; I have a huge girl crush on her and she has been the only girl, so far, who’s made me squirt.

What’s so special about Burning Angel?
The company is more like a family. I feel like an individual and not just a body. I’ve got to have sex with some really amazing guys and girls, as well as play roles in movies where I learned new and exciting things. For example, when we filmed Kung Fu Pussy, I learned fighting techniques and how to do stunts.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve done in your career so far?
I recently shot for a new movie called Evil Head, a parody of The Evil Dead. Besides getting re-animated as a demon, I was in the famous tree rape scene. If you’ve seen The Evil Dead, you know what I’m talking about; if not, I basically get gang-banged by possessed trees. The tree branches had dildos ‘growing’ off them and I ended up with one in my mouth, one in my pussy and the last one in my ass, all at once!

Woah! What do you like to do when you’re not working?
I enjoy exercising and running. I also love to cook for people—it makes me happy when I see people enjoying something I have made.

Which mainstream celebrity would you most like to bonk?
I have a list of a few I would love to bang! Definitely Johnny Depp (but who doesn’t want to bang him?), Christian Bale and Adrien Brody.

Finally, do you genuinely enjoy the taste of man-mayo?
Haha! The more loads I can swallow, the better.

Sounds like a great concept for a movie. Why did FOX sign off on a game?
Games, as a medium, have really gotten to a point where we can create a narrative experience that people have a really good time with. And everyone sees where this is going and how games are impacting people’s lives and just the culture itself. Films are great as a passive medium but, as an active medium, games are even better.

How much time has passed between Aliens and Colonial Marines?
It’s actually a handful of months; we’re not really specific in the game. Basically, it’s enough time for some ‘stuff’ to have happened.

So after Ripley’s dead!
Oh yeah, this is way after Ripley’s death. She’s been gone for a while, and you actually don’t experience that event.

What familiar locations from Aliens should fans expect to explore?
Definitely the Sulaco and also Hadley’s Hope, which is on the surface of LV-426.

Hang on. Wasn’t Hadley’s Hope destroyed in a 30km-wide explosion at the end of Aliens?
If you look at any nuclear explosion, it doesn’t necessarily destroy everything next to it: there’s a radius and there’s a fall-off. Hadley’s Hope was also relatively fortified. So you see the wind barriers and lots of other stuff they’ve built around it to withstand the hostile environment. Hadley’s Hope didn’t fare very well in the explosion, but it survived, to a certain extent.

Is there an Aliens formula that you have to work with?
There’s no real formula to it. As fans, we kind of think about what people are interested in and excited about seeing; what hasn’t been explored before in those spaces. And so the formula is not really a formula as much as it is [a recognition] that everyone has cool ideas and we build on top of those. But really, at the end of the day, you can still check to see how fans received it.

How has fan feedback been?
This is a franchise that people really care about. For instance, fans make custom armor sets, so they do know a lot more about certain things than we do. So when we have an opportunity to work with those fans, to learn from them and what they’ve devoted a part of their life to, that’s really awesome. All feedback is really good: some of it we can implement in the game, and some of it just isn’t compatible. We try to find a happy medium [when it comes to consistency of
fan feedback] and we always incorporate it if it fits.

American Rick Baker is a legend in the world of special effects make-up. Since winning the first-ever Best Make-up Academy Award for An American Werewolf in London (1981), Baker has been at the forefront of innovation in the field. Penthouse spoke with the make-up master about creating 127 original aliens for Men In Black 3 and staying relevant in Hollywood.

Interview: Drew Turney

How do you keep raising the bar after such a long and lauded career?
It really is hard, especially when you’re as fucking good as I am! [Laughs] A lot of times, the script sparks ideas, and what I like about the Men in Black films is that I’m a real collaborator. Barry [Sonnenfeld, director] and I come up with ideas I might not be able to conceive on my own. Barry wants that collaboration and appreciates it. It’s not always appreciated.

What was your inspiration for the alien designs in the Men In Black movies?
Pretty much every 1950s and 60s alien movie there ever was, but there was one in particular called Invasion of the Saucer Men. It was a ´50s B movie and this guy called Paul Blaisdell made these big-brained, bug-eyed alien masks that little people wore. And we got to do a saucer man for Men In Black. It’s not an exact duplicate—we made it a little cooler—but it was very much inspired by that.

In describing your work, do you think of yourself as more of a make-up artist, designer or sculptor?
I’d always just called myself a make-up artist, but then I realised I was taking it to another level and started doing stuff a normal make-up person wouldn’t do. I didn’t like the limitations of make-up. When you’re working on an actor’s face, that’s the armature for your sculpture. If you’re putting a new nose on someone and they have a bump, you can’t really get rid of it. Or if their eyes are a certain distance apart, you can’t really make the distance any wider.

So that’s when I starting getting into animatronics and puppetry. In the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London, we did what we could with standard make-up and then we had two fake heads containing animatronics so they could transform on camera. That was the only way we could do it. I actually got a lot of flack from make-up artists because that stuff wasn’t make-up but, to me, it was a natural evolution.

Is staying aware of the technology a way of staying relevant?
You bet. I’ve kept learning because I’ve been a fan of this stuff for as long as I can remember. Jack Pierce, the make-up artist at Universal who did Frankenstein’s Monster and The Wolf Man and The Mummy and all these classic films, didn’t progress with the times. Other people were using foam rubber appliances and he was still using cotton and spirit gum. I took note of that as a kid and told myself I was going to stay on top of what’s new. But doing that’s easy because it’s just more fun.

“What’s hard when it comes to aliens is trying to come up with something nobody’s seen before”

What make-up work has really impressed you lately?
I was really impressed by the work in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I so wanted to hate that movie because I did the make-up for Tim Burton’s 2001 Planet of the Apes, which isn’t very fondly remembered, but I think most people think the make-up is really good. To me, Planet of the Apes was actors in make-up, and that’s where I’ve come from. But they did Rise… on computers and I thought it looked great. I was very impressed.

I worked with the digital guys on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. We made real-world silicone heads, which they scanned and made the computer models from. In the ´90s, CGI was kind of crappy. It was neat that they could do it, but I thought the stuff we were making still looked more real. But CGI’s come a long way.

You’re known for monsters and creatures, but are human make-up effects like those you did on Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor a whole different ball game?
They are, and I like doing both of them. Aliens are easier in a lot of ways because you don’t see aliens every day. Human make-up is the hardest to pull off. What’s hard when it comes to aliens is trying to come up with something nobody’s seen before, but if you have a defect in the rubber, you can leave it because nobody would know the alien isn’t supposed to look like that.

Do you prefer monster effects because they’re a little more visible and you can get more recognition?
I just like mixing it up, I always have. Sometimes I’ll do an alien, then I’ll do the fat suit for The Nutty Professor where the characters are all human, then I’ll do a big ape suit or The Grinch. I just don’t like doing the same thing over and over again.

With the London 2012 Olympic Games thankfully now well and truly over, James Buckley lifts the lid on the amount of shagging that takes place at the world’s premier sporting event in his e-book Sex & the Olympics: Condomania…

by Nathan Lawrence

That’s the sequel…
Honestly, the IOC probably wouldn’t be too impressed with this material because the Olympics is all about perfection and purity, and achieving your best and sportsmanship. This is the other side to that sportsmanship.

How many condoms are usually supplied to Olympic athletes?
You get Olympic Games with 100,000-plus condoms distributed for two weeks, and they run out! In Vancouver, they ran out a couple of days early, and the same thing happened in Sydney. When you do the math—100,000 condoms divided by 10,000 athletes—it works out to 10 per person.

Why so many?
You get 10,000 athletes around the ages of 18 to 30, they’re all hormone-charged and competitive, and have been building up for 12 to 24 months for the Olympics. All of a sudden, they compete, and 90 percent of them don’t even make it past the first round. Then they’re stuck in the Olympic Village with nothing to do.

The big sponsors like to throw these big parties where the athletes attend as VIPs. You’ve got a few past athletes and that sort of thing, and most people can only peer through the doors and wonder what’s going on in there. And, from what we can tell, it gets pretty wild.

There were only 1700 athletes, but there were about 40,000 condoms, so you’re looking at 26 condoms per athlete. If you couple up there, that’s 52 per pair for a two-week event.

Are these athletes perpetually horny?
It comes back to this: you’ve got all these people together of a similar demographic. They’re all essentially beautiful people, very athletic and chiselled. They just generate sexual energy, really.

What sort of condoms are being handed out at the Games?
They play around with them at different Olympic Games. At the Sydney Games, they offered a bronze, silver and gold range, to mix it up a little bit. I think [different colours] is the extent of it, though. They do the job they’re meant to do, and at the end they’re thrown around.

Literally?
At the Seoul Olympics, the British team got in trouble because used condoms were all over the roof of their building. Outdoor sex was banned on that occasion.

Who won the sexual Olympics?
We have a promiscuity index that rates each country on how likely they are to engage in casual sex. England was very high up on that list. Travellers to this year’s Games, statistically, were more likely than ever to engage in casual sex with one of the locals or, if they’re lucky, one of the athletes.

Did organisers at this year’s London Olympics run out?
They distributed 150,000 condoms this year; they tried to make sure they didn’t run out. But the Games were in a western country where sex is not as taboo as it is in some places, and there were a lot of athletes : 10,000-plus. I reckon it was tight in those last couple of days; I don’t know if the 150,000 held.

What do you enjoy most about workingin the adult industry?
When I started out, I identified as a straight woman. Working with both men and women with a variety of sexual identities has taught me that my own sexuality is fluid. My favourite thing is [that] I have the opportunity to represent a non-stereotypical body type in porn. One of my main goals with my work is to use my body to make the statement that fat women can be desirable and sexy.

What’s the response been to your work?
I am very blessed because 99.99 percent of the feedback I get is positive. I have received many emails from women and men telling me how seeing my work has helped them feel better about themselves and made them realise they can be just as sexy as someone who is a much thinner body type.

How did you personally find confidence as a plus-size model?
For me, confidence came once I stopped basing my happiness on my weight. I idealised being thin. In my early 20s, I lost a huge amount of weight and suddenly I was a thin person, but I was a thin person who was still unhappy. I realised that happiness is a choice and my enjoyment of life was a decision I had to make in my head not based on my weight or my clothing size.

You have your own sex toy: the CyberSkin Voluptuous Vagina…
I was a little hungover that day and was relieved when they told me all I’d have to do was lay down! There were three people working on the moulding and they worked quickly and efficiently. They have developed a top-secret method that involves layers of goop and other materials that harden and become the negative of what they mould: in this case, my pussy.

SEE MORE OF APRIL FLORES at: http://fattyd.com/

How do you get on set?
It was a rocky road in the beginning. A shoot that had been set up for me and Paige fell through, so I called an agency that was looking for new male studs. They didn’t make it easy! I had to fork out the money for a motel room and meet this woman and her husband there, who brought the camera equipment. I’d driven three hours straight from my day job and was exhausted.

My head was completely in the wrong space and I couldn’t perform properly. By the time I got home, I was ready to give up but [my wife] would not let it go. She was like a dog with a bone!
Not long after that, I was lucky enough to get an audition with Anna Span, the UK’s best (and sole female) porn director. It went really well and I was invited back for the rest of the shoot.

It was Anna who nominated me for Best Male Newcomer at the 2007 UK Adult Film and TV Awards, which I won. She also got me signed up to Elle Brook’s Blue Diamond Agency, and from there the work poured in.

I was considering working in the industry full-time when my visa was approved and my wife and I moved to Australia.

I spent the next year contacting every company that produced, distributed and sold porn. I went to sex shops and SEXPO, and just as I was about to give up, I logged on to the Eros website (www.eros.org.au) and there was a link for producers and up came Adult Voyeur (www.adultvoyeur.com.au)—a completely Australian porn production company.

I spoke to them on a Wednesday, and by Friday I was doing a test shoot. I thought it had gone terribly! It was outside at 3:00am in the middle of June. It was freezing and I had a cold wind blowing up my arse. I was up and down like a yo-yo but, considering the conditions, they were impressed and took me on. I’ve been in almost every scene since.

Where do you want porn to take you?
At the moment, I’m just along for the ride and enjoying where it’s taking me, but I would like to be involved in porn in some way for the rest of my life, maybe as a producer or opening an agency. I really want to see the Australian porn industry succeed and for Adult Voyeur to become as big and as successful as I truly believe it can be.

I would be very proud if I could say that I came to Australia when there was virtually no porn industry at all and I helped create it.