Knowing that you return to the topic with Videodrome and Blue, was the casting of Marilyn Chambers any sort of statement on pornography?
Well, of course I didn’t know that I was going to be doing Videodrome and Blue at the time. (laughs) No, it wasn’t meant to be a comment on any of that. When you go to the Cannes marketplace you find thousands of films being sold. It’s shocking because most of them you had never heard of before and you never will hear of them and you’re aware of that and it makes you afraid, because you’re worried that your film will also sink beneath that sea. So the question becomes how do you get distributors from every country to come and see your movie when you don’t have a big budget and can’t afford Mel Gibson… The answer, and this was [producer] Ivan Reitman’s brainstorm, he’d heard that Marilyn Chambers–the Ivory Soap girl who’d turned into a big porn star, it was a very big scandal–was interested in doing a straight movie to prove that she could act. Was I interested in her, would I audition her, knowing that when we go to Cannes if we have a movie starring Marilyn Chambers, people will c
