PORNDUCER

Chris De Vito of Xtra West interviews André Tardif

There's something liberating about making a porn video. You can start shooting without a finished script, the actors are pretty much interchangeable, and story-wise it's a given that everybody's gonna get the boy in the end - sometimes more than once. The problem up until now was that you had to go to Los Angeles to make them.

"Alex & Bruno" want to change that. The first all-Canadian co-production between Montreal's Priape Video and Vancouver's adult gay website Chisel Media, they're also Canada's first major attempt to compete in the worldwide porn video market.

The directorial debut of French videographer André Tardif, "Alex & Bruno" was shot in Quebec, narrated in French, and is available in the "original French version with English subtitles" - though guys getting their jollies moan pretty much the same no matter what their mother tongue.

Our story begins when impossibly cute Alex (Michel Mattel), a city lad, is caught stealing a dildo and sentenced to community service on a farm run by scrrrumptious Bruno (Nino Bacci). Harvesting what the box copy calls "huge equipment...an exciting outdoor orgy and even mutual pleasures with his boss", our lil' camper - heh, heh - sums a subtitle, finds "the country is not as boring as he thought." Its director describes the movie simply as "the wild escapades of hot Canadians."

Because most of the action happens outdoors, however, filming in Quebec posed a problem. "I was in Montreal for only five weeks," says Tardif. "And I had to check the weather forecasts every hour because I needed to know when I could shoot a major scene outside with five guys."

Physically these "hot Montrealers" (it says so on the box cover) with the sing-song French names run the whole gamut. Tardif describes his cast (in one breath) as "all types. And the reason we have all types is because we got all types answering the ads. And since we needed eight to ten models we didn't have eight to ten models of the same type." He knows such casting is "a risk because someone might be looking for a specific video, beefcake or twinkie, and they'll find only one-fifth of it here. But I think the [chemistry] really worked."

His two leads even became friends. "There was no romance and stuff and all that," Tardif quickly points out. "You know what it's like when you have sex with someone and all of a sudden it turns into friends as opposed to lovers?" he asks. "They're not even fuck buddies. They did their scene and they really liked working together. Nino said Michel even sent him a Happy Easter wish. So it's not all cold and factory-style. Sometimes friendships do happen."

Still, the screenplay had to be reworked, Tardif says, "because there was no way we could find someone looking sweet and innocent with the models we were getting." He wasn't able to find his Bruno in Montreal either. "I'd thought if I can't get who I want there, I'm going to get him in Vancouver. So I called Nino Bacci." The two had been friends for a decade before Tardif directed him in a short video with ex-porn star Joey Hart in 1998. "Everybody falls in love with Nino," sighs Tardif. "He's very professional, very reliable and he's got the look" (a trade magazine describes him as "one hot fuck!"). Hart recommended Bacci to L.A. director Chi Chi LaRue and he's been in demand seventeen videos since.

A Vancouver resident, Bacci says he does pornography for, well, "the fantasy of doing pornography, meeting very cute boys and having sex with them, the money and the travel." He signed on to play Bruno because it was one of the leads ("I knew I'd get a lot of recognition.") but says he doesn't really want "his face out there" because it might complicate his "regular 9-to-5 job." Still, he's glad he's got a following. "If [the fans weren't] buying our porn we wouldn't be doing this, so I definitely look up to them."

Approval of his co-stars is a boner bonus ("I was very comfortable with Michel," he purrs) and calls Dylan Reece (a co-star in "How the West was Hung") perhaps his favourite ("He's like an Australian soap star. Amazing accent...very handsome.").

Bacci prepared for the role of Bruno the way he prepares for all his roles: not by farming with a family of horny Montrealers for several weeks but by doing "the usual: finding out what the character's all about; if there's any plot to the movie; who my co-star is and going to the gym."

Helping things along, just as porn videos replaced porn films, Viagra has replaced that old porn movie standard, the fluffer - sort of.

"The fluffers are the other models on the movie," Bacci says, duh-like. "As long as it doesn't interfere with your scene and it's okay with the director, you're more than welcome to play with it. It's encouraged if you need the help and if the other model doesn't mind." Tardif says he's only known one fluffer. "There was no money involved," he recalls. "He was just doing it for the love of it. He was easygoing, and people, of course, were happy to have him around." He says having actors on the pill, "gets the job done. When you watch the video you can tell who's had it because [their penis] really bounces."

And while Bacci thinks "Alex & Bruno" is "very good," he knows the video means even more to the industry; his often bare chiseled butt territorial baboon-speak for Canada's determination to carve out a niche in the porn video market. "I think it means a lot to Canada," he says, "to be recognized that there are people here willing to make it, produce it, be in it and buy it."

And complain about it. Nitpickers will likely whine that CanCon porn merely turns B.C. into L.A. - and not the Rodeo Drive part. But American TV producers have been shooting in Vancouver's worst neighbourhoods for years and if they're really supporting the local economy shouldn't all those rundown areas favored by "The X-Files" and all those other sci-fi series filming in Vancouver look a lot better by now?

CanCon porn could even employ local thespians (especially the fit ones with washboard abs and buns of steel) - and even a few lesbians in those all-important non-sex expository fag-hag roles.

"Today the American companies go to Montreal to get talent and then shoot their videos in the states," Tardif says.

"There's no company in Montreal that actually produces. Priape is hoping to get that market." Tardif hopes armchair tourists with the remote in one hand and you-know-what in the other are going to realize "that Quebec has a market for talent and that we can do good videos and they can be successful and do it on a regular basis."

There's already plans for a second all-Canadian video and even talk of reuniting "Alex & Bruno" for a sequel. Tardif says he'd love to make another full-length video, but he's keeping busy auditioning models for Chisel's interactive shows, shooting solos and scouting for talent.

"I think people are going to be really surprised at the quality of "Alex & Bruno," he says. "It's not easy to make a good product and people thought this being the first all-Canadian one, it was going to be just so-so. But when they see the whole video I think they'll be really surprised."

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