Heads up: what follows is, quite obviously, not safe for work, and could be a fraught read for some.

Liam Cole is a pornographer and the UK head of Treasure Island Media, a studio which specialises in gay porn without condoms. The ‘documentary-style’ films of the studio have explored representations of gay sex usually off-limits even in porn. Cole’s films, such as  Slammed , in which the sex is drug-fuelled, have solicited controversy and vehement criticism. Not yet a household name, Cole is nonetheless known throughout the London hard sex scene. We met him at the Southbank centre and, true to form, he opened with a provocation.

You don’t have to be a self-publicist to become a household name. Just takes longer. I don’t care if I’m old when it happens.

Or after your death.

That’s too late.

I watched the opening of Pasolini’s Salò the other day with my flatmate .  I’ve seen it before, when I was much younger, about eighteen; at the BFI on the big screen. This is the first time I’ve seen it since then, and it’s funny – it’s exactly how I remember it. It must’ve made a real impression because it stuck. I have not seen or really thought about it since; I only rewatched it now because I went through a list Michael Haneke had made, his top ten favourite films, and I decided to watch them all.

Let’s talk about Michael Haneke. Is he a big influence?

I like his films because they don’t feel compromised. Most movies, because they are expensive, are done by committee. I like that his early films are very engaged with the technical realities of the time. When digital video was coming in and he was making movies like Benny’s Video and Caché…  part of their subject matter is that we’re watching representations in a particular format. Video format or film format becomes part of the story. That’s interesting because everything about the film can potentially be part of the subject of the film, including the picture quality.

He presents an image that you think is an establishing shot, and then it turns out to be a surveillance camera and then you can hear someone’s voice and — ‘Oh, it’s the people who are inside that house.’ Your brain is working all the time. There are very small clues of what’s happened: you have to look for one person in a busy frame full of people, one detail. You have to be reading the film all the time and paying attention. It doesn’t assume that the audience are pretty thick, or that their attention is going to wander at any moment so you’ve just got to spell it all out to them.

I also like the fact that his interests are melancholic. I could quite understand someone who’s a happier soul than I being uninterested in them. I identify with his tendency to dwell on problems. The problem of old age, death. The problem of violence.

If I were to grossly associate myself with someone who’s far more sophisticated, I’d see some commonalities between Lars von Trier and Treasure Island Media. With Michael Haneke, but even more with Lars von Trier, there’s that strange sense of pragmatic attention-seeking. Yes, it’s auteur cinema, it’s gonna be a limited release, it’s gonna be distributed by certain people and produced by certain companies… So, in that sense, it’s not cynically commercial like a multiplex blockbuster, but it’s still sort of headline-grabby. If it’s not violence, it’s sex. Lars von Trier is still the carny, exploitation film maker, working in the margin that’s left over after mainstream cinema. That carny impulse, or that exploitation cinema impulse, is practical. It’s opportunistic. What would Lars von Trier do if someone started funding multiplex blockbuster movies with all the same thematic contents?

When Paul [Morris, the head of Treasure Island Media] releases a scene and it’s got someone cutting his name into their chest … this is in the middle of a video that is completely full of wonderful fucking, but it’s just fucking – how are you going to sell that? What’s the USP, the tag line to that? It’s beautiful, but it’s hard to get attention with that. What do you say? ‘This sex is more real, it’s more exciting, it’s more sexy’? If you’ve got someone cutting your name into their chest, that’s a way into the video, to get people curious. That’s sometimes how I feel about Lars von Trier: that he needs to drum up the crowd, to get them there.

It’s interesting that the obscenities of Salò made such a strong impact.

I definitely feel that. Having made my porn for seven years, I’m sometimes approached by people who really have grown up on it. I mean, they’re in their late teens now, and their knowledge is coloured by exposure to internet pornography and sometimes they’ve seen my videos as well. It’s a curious thing.

How does it make you feel?

Old. I can’t imagine it because when I was that age, I resented representations of homosexuality. I felt like the best thing about being gay was that my experiences weren’t preceded by images that I had seen. If I’m a teenager having sex with a forty-year-old man in a toilet, the best thing about it is that for all I know, I’m the first person who’s ever done it. Whereas if you’re straight and you’re having your first relationship, if you’re going to the prom, it’s like everything has already happened. So then, when things like Queer as Folk were on television – I didn’t watch it, I saw small bits and detested it. My straight friends would ask me, ‘Is this what it’s like?’, and I’d go, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t watched it, but no. Whatever it is, no, that’s not what my life is like.’

What you’re saying, then, is that making it into a narrative takes out the radical element.

Perhaps. On a personal level, I didn’t want to see what I was doing before I did it. So if they’re seeing getting gangbanged bareback in a hotel room blindfolded with a load of strangers, I don’t know to what degree that would make them more likely to try it, or to make them less likely to try it. They might think gangbangs were fun until they became mainstream.

One thing I think is different is that with a lot of Paul’s videos (and some of mine), in the trailers, in the soundtrack to the trailers, in the choice of the font we use, we’re borrowing from horror movies. That, I think, will become dated pretty quickly, because the new generation who don’t associate gay sex and unprotected sex with death by AIDS are simply not going to have that transgressive, frightening association. I think it might go back to being a romp.

Before HIV/AIDS, the most obvious crossover genre with porn was comedy. The sex comedy, the sex romp, right up to Russ Meyer. There were violent, transgressive elements but it was still ultimately packaged as a romp. All of the 70s, pre-AIDS gay porn featuring people having sex with the pool man, or the pizza delivery man is ultimately tongue-in-cheek, funny. Whereas What I Can’t See , Paul’s early movies and my videos like Slammed – there’s laughter, but it’s gallows humour. In all those movies there’s the subtext: ‘we’re doing something bad, sort of self-destructive, naughty’. That younger generation will not get that.

Paul Morris said in an interview, ‘I don’t have a public; I have a responsibility to a community and a tradition.’ What do you think about this responsibility?

I love what Paul says, but almost as a devil’s advocate, I’ll say I don’t feel the same way. When I started making videos, it didn’t feel like a responsibility. It felt like an irresponsibility, in that I would discipline myself to do whatever I thought would make good masturbation material. What seems like an attractive idea thirty seconds before you come is not necessarily something you approve of the rest of the time. I had to be true to that thirty seconds. It’s a kind of intoxication just before you have an orgasm. The rest of the time is sober time, and I don’t make videos for sober time. When I started making videos, I thought –  I still think – it’s kind of crazy to fuck around and risk getting diseases and getting high. My sense of self-preservation says, ‘You’re nuts, don’t do it’; but that’s a different mindset.

That needy, excited, brain turned upside down chimes with something Francis Bacon said: ‘The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.’

One of my favourite artworks is Mike Kelley’s installation ‘Pay for Your Pleasure’, which is a corridor of crudely painted banners. They’re portraits, mostly artists, philosophers, writers, with quotes from them, all basically coming back to this Romantic idea that the artist must be a little bit insane, or cut themselves loose from morality, or rationality, or moral responsibility in order to create their art. So it’s as if you get a free pass if you’re a genius. At the end of the corridor, there’s a little painting by John Wayne Gacy who painted funny, naïve pictures of clowns, and used to dress up as a clown. He also raped and murdered young men. And then there’s a victim charity box that you put money in. So you get to look at his painting but you’re invited to put money in to “pay for your pleasure”. I think it calls out those Romantic ideas: ‘Really? If the artist is allowed to be insane and immoral, here’s an artist who killed people.’

And it’s the public who pays?

Our pleasure and their art.

But what if the work is presented as reality? The relationship between reality and film blurs in porn but especially in Treasure Island Media videos which are presented almost as documentaries. The scenes aren’t ‘directed’.

That’s true. I don’t give directions about positions or how to do things. I don’t say much during the shoots. I’m constantly making stupid noises, encouraging, but there’s no scenario, there’s no set dressing, there’s no costumes, no script. If two people are versatile, I don’t care who fucks whom. It really is freestyle and technically that is difficult. I manual-focus. Sometimes I use lighting so that it’s light enough to get a picture, but I don’t light it in the sense of creating a tableau which looks beautiful from one angle because then I’d have to shoot it only from that angle. In those ways it’s like a documentary because I’m documenting the way they have sex that day. Also, for example in Slammed they really were slamming, and obviously all the barebacking is real.

How about editing?

It’s like editing a documentary in that you’re trying to bring out the thread that you’re interested in. There’s a huge amount I don’t use. The edit is often much shorter than the footage. Not always, but often.

It’s not that there are particular things that I’m cutting out; it’s more like there are only particular things I’m keeping in. When I go through the footage, I watch it and ask, ‘Is this sexy?’ And as soon as I think, ‘Not really’ I cut it. It’s hitting my retina and going into my brain and not really doing anything. Even if it’s all good, you’d still want to see the highlights, really.

So there’s a kind of selection process, if not streamlining. Talk to me more about that – you said once that you see what you do as ‘psychological horror movies’.

I said that if I made a narrative version of some of the videos I’ve made they would be psychological horror. For me personally, the psychological rollercoaster of some of these videos sometimes involves some trauma. Which I don’t think is true for most of the people I’m filming, actually. I’ve never captured anything on film that I’ve thought ‘This person seems disturbed.’ I’ve never had to cut anything out of footage because I think that there’s something wrong with this person.

For me, when I was making some of those videos, I was kind of living vicariously through them. Let’s take Slammed , because that’s the obvious example. You could make a psychological horror movie about getting really high, fucking a load of strangers, and then, the part which you don’t see in Slammed:  coming down, you’ve stayed up too long, there’s the paranoia – that would become a psychological horror film. But if you were sensible, and you went home and took a sleeping pill after twenty-four hours and slept it off, you might wake up and just think, ‘I had a good night.’

Incidentally, it wasn’t about Slammed but on the Treasure Island website a commentator from Montana says, “There are images here that bring back (to me anyway), an echo of Pasollini’s ‘SALO’ “[sic].

Another influence, although it’s not a great film, is Bryan Yuzna’s 1989 film Society , which certainly has things in common with Salò. Society probably visually and psychologically had more of an influence on Slammed . Society takes that kind of fearful, half-knowing stage in adolescence when sex is really interesting, and exciting, and really disturbing at the same time. You’ve got the anxiety that the more you find out – will it be nice or will it not be nice? I feel like Society gives an imaginary answer to the question and says it’s fucking awful, you’re right to be scared, you’re right to be nervous. This is a horror film, aimed at a teen audience, and it definitely taps into adolescent anxiety around sex. The orgies are a breakdown of humanity: ‘If an orgy is happening, clearly kindness and humanity have gone out of the window.’ It’s actually really hard to depict group sex in narrative cinema without framing it as some kind of negative transgression. If you think of Barry Lyndon , or even the really happy threesome in A Clockwork Orange , it’s hard to disassociate it from the violence and some kind of breakdown. Where are all the happy orgies? Maybe they’re in the romps.

It’s a lot to do with things being unknown. I think once you get to a certain age and if you’ve had a lot of sex, it’s almost difficult to remember what that fear was all about. And the generation who grew up with HIV, there was the usual fear of the unknown compounded by the fact that what you knew about was already terrifying, it was going to kill you.

But the younger generation might not have the same dread.

You have that wonderful thing when you’re young — hopefully you haven’t had much of a chance to have misfortune happen in your life, so quite often they are really snooty about having HIV or Hepatitis C. It’s changing, but five years ago, if I watched YouTube videos of interviews of men who were HIV-positive, the comments so often are from young people and really vitriolic. ‘How skanky and disgusting.’ But then again, they’re like that anyway about the body. When you’re fifteen, you think that a twenty-five-year-old looks saggy and putrefied.

Talk to me more about bodies. You’ve mentioned that it’s very difficult to get beauty right on film.

Beauty is a consensus. The way our language is structured, it encourages us to ignore the subjectivity involved. It’s so much easier to say ‘She’s beautiful, this is a beautiful woman,’ whereas what we mean is ‘This is the woman whom I find beautiful at this moment.’ It’s easier to say it as if it were a universal property that belongs to her and not an individual reaction that belongs to us.

Clearly, the tendency to universalise what the majority claims to like is a hegemonic, homogenising impulse. The trouble is that when you try to get away from that, as a producer, you risk being too self-conscious. When people say, ‘If I made porn, I would choose people of all shapes and sizes’ – they might find that principle runs counter to their own masturbatory appetites. They might find that their taste is actually quite conservative and that their hard-on is a body fascist — even if they’re not.

Most of the time, I want to film with anyone I think is sexually exciting to be around. But I’m also conscious that my videos are two-dimensional moving images and that we are stimulated by seeing certain physical forms. It’s an outline, and the exact size of the outline doesn’t really matter but the curves kind of have to be in the right places. When you see those shapes, your brain knows. Just in a mechanical way, if it can see the curve of a buttock, it knows there’s some mechanical thrusting power there. If you happen to be put together in such a way that your arse is really flat, it doesn’t mean you’re not sexy but it does mean that the brain is not going to get that particular visual trigger, because it doesn’t see the thrusting musculature so clearly. And it’s the same thing with big cocks. I don’t believe people have much better sex with big cocks, but if you’re looking at a picture, a big cock is easy to see. It really bangs on that button that says, ‘Oh, there’s a cock, sex could happen; this could be sexy.’

So desire is a tyrant.

And tasteless. Not unintelligent, but unconcerned with intelligence. What turns us on is not necessarily clever or original. The cinema I love and the books I love are what I will be interested in after I’ve come. Because after I’ve come, I don’t give a fuck about the thing that I was interested in before.

Is there any possibility to have those two on the same page?

Yes, there is a possibility but it might be a kind of watered down, boring compromise of two things which are stronger when they’re apart. I mean: is it possible to combine the Apollonian and the Dionysian? Probably. Would it show either of them off to their best? I don’t know

So some elements get excluded — such as fatness or femininity, for instance.

It’s neurotic. I only follow my instincts but after I’ve come, when I sit back and I look at it, I can see it’s neurotic. It shuts out certain traditionally feminine elements; it shuts out certain body types; it shuts out certain types of behaviour. These masturbatory tastes — so far, anyway — are body-fascist and neurotic, and homophobic in certain ways. But it might be that my way of understanding these things is not accurate or useful. I might say when I’m sober that a particular taste is neurotic, body-fascist and so on. But perhaps the ideas of neuroses and body-fascism are not useful models; it’s just that I don’t understand what’s happening. If I’m turned on by something, I don’t know why. I can try to analyse it and intellectualise it but how insightful is that really going to be? Self-analysis based on some ideas that I’ve read in someone else’s books.

The gut instinct commands, then?

Definitely. I take so much care over the font I use and stuff like that but I know when I’m looking at other people’s porn I don’t care what the font is. If it’s tastefully done but not a turn-on at that moment, it doesn’t work. I might be turned on by it, but afterwards regard it as trash.

People have allegiances to their favourite bands or their favourite directors and they want to support them, they don’t want to see them rejected. But I don’t think people have that kind of fondness for porn. People getting tattooed with the Treasure Island logo is different because they’re stepping into the picture, they’re becoming part of it. But most consumers of porn are maybe similar to consumers of drugs. You don’t want to meet the guy who made the best coke you’ve ever had and shake his hand, and tell him you’re such a fan. I mean, we might like it but it’s not good for us, right?

I feel that’s often the way people feel about porn. They really want it and they’re connoisseurs until they come and then it’s nothing to them. That’s not always true, because a lot of people love meeting porn stars, and shaking their hands, and having their picture taken with them – but the directors, maybe less so. I think there are people who’d get off on a video I’ve made but afterwards, they might not like me for making it. They might even strongly disapprove of me. Whereas if I see a narrative movie that I love, then I’d love to meet the director and shake his hand and say, ‘What a fantastic accomplishment.’ But I have no such fondness for the person who made the best coke. Because I kind of resent them for producing something that my body loves but that I know, rationally, is probably not good for me.