When I first saw Meet Monica Velour, I was blown away by the fact that a film that's essentially about a porn star can evoke so much emotion out of me and present real, authentic relationships and dialogue. I quickly realized that it was less about her profession and more about the struggles of a woman in her 50's. After chatting with star Kim Cattrall about her transition into the role (read that interview here), I was dying to meet Keith Bearden, the man behind the script and camera, as well as Dustin Ingram, the young actor who somehow held his own throughout the movie alongside a well-known veteran actress.

We had a fun and candid discussion about the film, old-school porn and some geeky stuff that completely went over my head. It was great. Super funny and nice guys. Read the interview below!

Be sure to check out Meet Monica Velour in select theaters now! Read my review of the film here.

PS. Here's a random photo of Dustin I took after the interview. We thought peeking into the probably-empty mini fridge seemed appropriate. Hah.

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So let's talk about Kim. What was it like working with her?

Keith: It's a really interesting process because when you make a movie or TV series, people think that if you're having on screen, you're having fun in real life. Usually not the case. I knew this movie either flew or died based on the authenticity of their relationship. Like you have to really get a feeling that they really like each other and that they really care for each other. They really hit it off on set. They really like each other. We all hang out a lot. We hung out last night. Kim made us all spaghetti and we had champagne.

Dustin: Yeah, we stay weeks with Kim.

Keith: Yeah, we stay at her house. Dustin's stayed at my house. So it's really rare.

Dustin: The first time I met Kim at the callback in New York when we were reading and mixing and matching, I just met her and was just introduced to her. She put her arm, while Keith was giving me direction, she just put her hand on my back and was rubbing my back really nicely.

Keith: Look, this is my first time making a movie. I make shorts and I make commercials in Europe. And I don't really know how everything works. And what she says is, "Directors just say, 'Faster. Funnier.'" They really don't talk about the character. They really don't have back-and-forth, at least not with her. And when I first met her, I was very very honest about what I wanted in the part. I was honest that I wanted to make her look really bad. And I wanted her to gain weight. And I think if you start a relationship with honesty, you get trust. It goes into a good place. We've kept that kind of relationship and it's interesting. She said, for Kim, it was like summer camp too. It was a break from having to be a glamorous little puppet all the time. When she gained weight, everyone was like, "Oh my God. It's so horrible. How could you gain all that weight."? And she was like, "I loved it." She had the best summer of her life. She was dating a chef and she ate pasta all summer. She ate whatever she wanted. She ate ring dings and yoo-hoos. Of course, she had a good time.

How was the relationship between Kim and Dustin?

Keith: Dustin is a really sweet kid. He has really loving parents. He's really really grounded. He's really emotionally available unlike a lot of young men and that was one of the reasons I cast him. Kim is a little bit like Monica. Kim has been treated like a glamour object or even a sex object throughout her career. She's not been treated like an actor. Sex is great, but that's not why you're in my movie. And I knew she had a very good reputation on the stage in England. And I was like, "I want her to be great in this. She has to be great." And I treated her as serious as you would Laurence Olivier. She was going to [do] a great performance in my movie and she responded to that. It's like when you have a bar that's high for someone, people will jump to it. She really appreciated being treated like a performer.

Dustin: Because she is. She's an actor's actor.

Keith: In America, we think of her as Samantha (from Sex and the City). In England, they think of her as a good actor. She does a lot of great theater. She's a working class girl. She has very common roots. When Hollywood waves money in front of your face, she's gonna go for it. She slept on a futon couch much of the time she lived in New York she said. So it's obvious, for an actor, that's just the way to go to make money. So she did. She loves theater but she had to give up on it. She's coming back to it now.

Dustin: Yeah, she's going to be on Broadway.

What was your experience like as a first-time film director?

Keith: A lot of directors, plain and simple, are little Hitlers. They are little dictators and they're pricks and they wanna get their little power trip on. And that's also how they succeed too. Cause for a director to get your way, being a prick works. I'm too much of a pussycat so it's harder for me. And that's why, you know, I don't have another movie out (laughs). But you know, I like actors. I was a child actor, so that's really important. A lot of directors don't like actors. They would rather control the picture on the wall or their set decorators. It's all about the visual image. To me, nobody walks out of a movie because a pan is ragged. People walk out of a movie because your story sucks or your performance stinks. It's about people. Movies are about people. Unless you're Zack Snyder and then it's about…

Dustin: Trying to direct Superman.

Keith: Yeah, he's the wrong choice for that movie. I mean look, he's an interesting director, but he's wrong. Superman is about emotion. Superman is about this guy. He's the uber-man, man. He's saving the world. Like he can't be about fucking cool special effects. It's like, you want to get that blood going and you want to be like, "Superman's going to save us!" That's why Superman 2 is so great because you have these super good villains.

Dustin: Superman 2 is fantastic.

What was it like working with Dustin who was young and fairly new to the game?

Dustin: I was 18 when we shot it.

Keith: I really wanted to make sure that the set was a nice place for him to be when we shot. We shot in a real porn store. All the older guys on set we're making jokes and I sort of wanted to protect Dusty and be like, "This is not reality, Dusty." I just wanted to make sure he wasn't traumatized by it because he had never been in a place like that. And probably still hasn't gone again. I don't know.

Dustin: It's not my scene (laughs).

So do you have a favorite porno?

Keith: The only porn movie that I can actually recommend that people watch is called Nightdreams and it was written by the guy who wrote Permanent Midnight -- Jerry Stahl. I'm going to go to hell. This is going to go on my tombstone, but it's a movie you can actually watch and masturbate to. But no, most of them are terrible. Most of them are just terrible. Most of our movies are a better version of terrible. Most of them…they give new definitions to bad and boring. And now they're not even movies at all. It's like a cheap hotel room with a girl who's on meds.

Dustin: I really love that Stall was referenced.

What was it like stuffing Kim Cattrall into a shopping cart?

Keith: Here's the thing. In the script, he pulls her out of the shopping cart. And when you write something like that, you don't realize it's impossible. Unless you're a power-lifter, you cannot pull 100 pounds from down inside a shopping cart. So he couldn't get her out.

Dustin: Even though I was 140 pounds of pure man at the time.

Keith: So I said, "Well, you have to punt. You have to sort of make it up or he's going to push you out." I was like, "Kim he's going to push you out." And she was like, "Fine." And about the tenth take, because we have that camera movement and it's like a one shot, on the tenth take, she actually hurt herself really badly.

Dustin: Her arm got caught in between the shopping cart and the rail.

Keith: She was like, "Ow! Ow! Ow!"

Dustin: But what she said was, "Throw some Neosporin on it and let's do it again."

Keith: I said, "We got the shot. We can stop." And she's like, "No. Go until you get it right." So we do about three more takes. And if you look at the strip club [scene] even though we have all this makeup on it, you can see the bruise on her arm because we filmed that afterward. When you're a writer, you have all these scenarios in your mind and then when you are on set, especially with a low budget movie you film in 26 days, there's things you just have to change.

Like the strip club or the motel porn bust [scene]. Originally, all those actors, the guys in that scene had lines, but they were all terrible. Like beyond you-wanna-cry terrible. So I got one of my producers to play one of the parts. We're in Michigan and we get these guys, and they look great. We got a big fat guy and a little guy who looks like the guy in Benny Hill. But you know, you punt. Because things don't work. Kim was an absolute trooper. And you hear about Sex and the City, big popular show, and you hear, "Sarah Jessica Parker this" and "Kim Cattrall's the real bitch." Kim is tough and you don't have a career in the movie industry without being tough and without saying "no" to things, but my relationship with her as an actor and director, she was amazing. When she's trying to make herself throw up in that toilet, that is an actual trailer home we pulled from the dump. It's scrapped. It's full of mold and dust. It's disgusting and she's putting her head inside a toilet, didn't complain once about any of that stuff. When she's wearing....[during] the scrapbook scene when [they're] looking at the scrapbook, she stops before we shoot and says, "This costume's wrong." I was like, "What?" She's like, "I want a piece of pizza. I need a food stain right here." This is a woman that wears $100,000 dresses! And she stops the set and was right. Monica would have a food stain on it. She was an absolute trooper and incredibly good to you (looks to Dustin).

Dustin: Incredibly.

Keith: Real encouraging.

Dustin: She's responsible for getting me cast in a play. She introduced me to the casting director.

Keith: It's really nice. The movie is about a page turn. The movie is about two people who need a page turn. Dustin's character needs to become a man and grow up.

Dustin: I need to...just turn that first page. She's on the cover.

Keith: And Monica needs to go to her third chapter or her epilogue, which is she needs to get out of this destructive lifestyle that was part of her life but doesn't work anymore. I want it to be that for Kim too. Kim is Samantha to most people. And that show's deader than a doornail now. And where do you go after that? She's 53 years old. Like where does an actor go? I literally said when I first met her, "I'm gonna blow Samantha into tiny little pieces and you better be cool with that." And she's cool with that. And if people see this movie, whether you like the movie or not, people will really recognize that she's an actor to be reckoned with and that she's completely committed and created this part. It makes me really happy. Also, for a writer/director, when you create something to have someone of her stature or honestly, of any stature, completely work with you to make it real…Kim makes fun of me so much. The first day we were shooting, I go up to her while we're shooting. I came up to her and just started crying. And she's like, "What are you crying for?" And I said, "Thank you for helping me tell this story." You know, this is something that I made up in my mind and in my heart and when you write, it's so hard. It's like, your dreams go nowhere. I know successful screenwriters who make half a million dollars a year who have pile of scripts that don't go anywhere. Literally, in their kitchen, stacked up like boxes of cereal. It's like a baby that's been abandoned, so the fact that someone really wants to create this character as I envision.

So how similar are you two? You seem to be very much alike.

Dustin: Everybody thinks it's about him when they see me. They're like, "Oh you cast a younger you." We're very similar because we get along. Keith is one of those people I can hang out with and it not feel like work because we have the same sort of like-mindedness.

Keith: You're one of the few people that I wouldn't be having sex with that I live with. The thing is, the part is written for a fat kid. And we couldn't get anyone…

Dustin: Hey, I put on like two pounds. Come on…

Keith: You went from 128 to 130. We couldn't find a fat kid that was funny and that could carry the movie emotionally. I didn't even want to see Dustin on callbacks. We saw like 200 kids and I said, "OK, here are four that I might consider to be in the movie." And the producer was like, "What about that Ingram kid?" And I was like, "Noooo." He's like, "He's good." And I was kind of like, "No, he's not good." She's like, "You gotta see more people, man. We gotta cast this movie." So I had him come in on the callbacks and we talked and we talked about what he ate. You ate like grilled cheese...

Dustin: Skittles.

Keith: And we talked about his family and whether he had ever been in love. And he was really an interesting guy and I felt like there was some emotion there. Then he did the scene where, I threw him a tough one, he did the scene where he's going to advice from Claude. And he nailed it. And my producer and I looked at each other and said, "That's him." And that's a hard scene because it's a lot about reaction. And he nailed it. So there was never a question in my mind after that. We saw some other people but it's interesting. When you put out a call for nerds, for boys, it's every weird... people with lollipop heads and people that look like anime with giant lips. I got the pictures of the biggest freak gallery. But when you put out a casting call for nerdy girls, like for the Amanda character, what it is, is beautiful girls with glasses on. It's so lame. It's so so lame.

So in the film, Tobe meets his hero and she's not all she's cracked up to be. There's something to be said about that disappointment, no?

Keith: I think that's just an inevitable part of growing up is being disappointed and realizing. You know what, you can be disappointed by you’re hero, but you can also be disappointed by the prom queen or by your first love. Or your parents. Like the reason teenagers hate their parents is because they're realizing what they really are. Whereas, when you're zero to ten, your parents are like gods. So when that all falls apart, it plays with you. But that's what adulthood is about. I mean, the reason I had a kid travel to see a porn star I wanted to talk about male fantasies of women. There's a whole industries of what women are supposed to look like and how they're supposed to act and sex with them. Well, if you get those things, what else do you get? What's in a real woman? There are emotions, desires and there's baggage and there's minds. That was the really important thing to do. Not only is he meeting his idol and the idol is completely different than what he had in his mind, he's getting a lesson in what human beings and women are all about. Because he's an isolated kid. Tobe has an old drunk grandfather and his parents are dead. He has a 10-year-old as a best friend.

Dustin: What does he know about life? I would rather idolize someone or have someone as my hero that I know completely. I would rather see someone's soul and idolize them rather than blindly idolize them and not know if they are a jerk or they were this or that. So I would love to meet my hero and be disappointed by them because then I could move on and find somebody else who would actually be worthy of being my hero.

Keith: [To Dustin] Who are your heroes? Who do you idolize? Who would you love to be?

Dustin: Pee-Wee Herman. [insert silence]. That was a joke. Although, I do have a Pee-Wee Herman ring on. Um, Meryl Streep is at the top of it, to be honest with you. And you.

Keith: Oh, stop. You bring serious to it. Dustin's a very serious actor and that's why he was so good. And that's why he got the job. Because he really really worked hard at that callback. He arrived on set and he had gone back and watched all the movies that were referenced in the script.   

Dustin: Listened to the entire Disco Merman album.

Keith: There was a scene cut where we referenced a bunch of pop culture stuff including the late Captain Beefheart.

How did you create Tobe?

Keith: I made a short film called The Raftman's Razor and the lead kid in that was a kid, he just came to open auditions in the summertime and he was wearing a three-piece suit. Like a vintage suit. And he had an Elvis hairdo. And he was 17. And he had never kissed a girl and he talked about how Dean Martin and Sylvester Stallone were his heroes. I was like, "Where did this fucking weird kid come from?" And I was like, "You're a weird fucking kid and you're gonna be in my movie." So I cast him in my short film and I got to know him and he was this little hothouse flower. He was this kid who, like I said, never had a girlfriend. He lived with his pot-dealer dad in the farm country. But he was really smart. He knew about pop culture. Weird old pop culture and he was very funny and charming and sweet. That's the seed of Tobe. And actually, one of the jokes in the movie is something Dylan told me on a long ride out to set, which is "I once drank a case of nonalcoholic beer and I woke up in a pile of fake vomit." And I stole that from him. When he came to our Seattle film festival screening...

Dustin: In a three-piece suit.

Keith: In a gold tux. I said, I based this movie on you and I stole that line form you. He's like, "I don't even remember telling you that joke." And I was like, "Well, I do."

Dustin: It was weird because I had never met him and after we shown, I was like, "Oh my God. I'm meeting Tobe." And it was a trip. It was really strange because he was just like him.

Keith: There was also a kid who I grew up with that could never make eye contact who was really smart and funny that I put into there. Everybody's based on real people. It's mixes of people. Monica is a woman I worked with when I first started in New York who was very, very tough. But eventually, we became close friends. The porn stuff is just millions of porn stars I talked to and did interviews with like Rene Bond and Long Jeanne Silver. All that stuff is as real as I could possibly make it. The thing about stick a grass, 50 bucks and a case of the crabs, that's a line from the late Rene Bond told me.

How was driving the hot dog van around? Did it draw a lot of attention?

Dustin: Which was stolen by the way.

Keith: The weenie was stolen.

Dustin: After it drove under a low underpass and had the hot dog knocked off on a freeway.

Keith: We were so isolated. The only issue was it could only go 40 miles an hour.

Dustin: Topped out at 30. I drove. Every time you see the weenie, I'm driving it. One Saturday, we took volunteer crew and we crowded in the back of weenie wiz and we drove about two and a half hours along the country. And I had never been flipped off or honked at more times in my life. It was a blast. We were hoping to get it, travel cross-country and do publicity in that.

Keith: But then it got busted up and stolen. And the cop trooper costumes were stolen too. Nobody knows where those went. I'd love to have those in my house.

Well, thanks for talking to me!

Keith, Dustin: Thank you!

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