MUFFPick: Morgana
“I don’t go into a film trying to apply a feminist framework, however as a filmmaker your worldview is going to influence your decisions and processes.”
Listen, it’s hard enough to be real about sex and sexuality at any age but there is an extra-vicious stigma around sexuality in middle-aged and older women. Mainly: older women aren’t supposed to be sexy. Or have sex! Or even think about sex! This sentiment is quadrupled for mothers — as if having a child means you are no longer allowed to be a sexual being.
Projects like Morgana are challenging this absolutely bananas notion and it’s essential. Our attitudes toward sexuality in women and mothers needs to be challenged. Society deems only a handful of women of a certain age “sexy” and all women, regardless of how old they are, deserve to be seen as sexual and sexy.
Filmmakers Josie Hess and Isabel Peppard are exploring these concepts by sharing their film subject Morgana’s story. In three years Morgana went from housewife in Australia to famed pornographer and creative director of sex positive erotica site Permission4Pleasure. Seriously. True story. Roll all of that up with documentary storytelling and unique, gorgeous animated visuals and you’ve got Morgana. Yup, so now you realllyyyyyy want to see this documentary, right?
Hess and Peppard make quite the team as well. Hess is an award-winning filmmaker, recently winning Best Fetish Film at the 2017 Toronto Porn awards. She works extensively in film marketing as the social media manager for Monster Pictures and she shoots and edits indie erotica for studios in Australia like Permission4Pleasure. Peppard is a multi-award winning director, animator, and visual artist. Her most recent animated short Butterflies has screened at over 50 international festivals and won the Dendy at the Sydney Film Festival for Best Short Animation and was nominated for an AACTA (Australian Academy Award).
There are a few days left (eeee!) for their Kickstarter campaign so please consider donating or spreading the word to help this documentary get fully funded!
Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved with filmmaking.
Josie Hess: I started off getting a degree in history, which made me realise the thing I loved was stories. So I went to film school and learnt how to deal with my obsession with narratives that way.
Isabel Peppard: I started out as a makeup/spfx artist and horror freak who had also done some work in stop-motion animation studios. After stumbling on a film about the song “Gloomy Sunday,” also known as the suicide song, I developed an unhealthy obsession with it. I’d get the song in my head and started to have visions for animated scenes connected to the lyrics. Those visions formed the bones of my first short film, Gloomy Valentine. I happened to meet a producer on the set of a children’s film I was working on and pitched him the idea and he loved it! Bit of a weird story but that’s how I started directing!!
Tell us about this project! Where did the idea come from?
JH: It’s a bit of serendipitous thing really, I was a PA (production assistant) for a shoot Morgana was conducting, which is where I met her, she had been collaborating with Anna Brownfield, a fabulous Australian pornographer. When Anna couldn’t work on the next film Morgana had planned, (her 50th birthday gift to herself) Morgana asked me if I wanted to do it. I was in film school at the time so I was like super not ready to be in charge of anything. I had been collaborating with the genius director and animation gun Isabel Peppard helping her on some of her projects, so I put it out there to see if she wanted to do it and Isabel knew straight away that there was more to Morgana’s story, so she pitched to Morgana that we make a documentary, and Morgana accepted!
IP: I met Josie when she was working at Monster Pictures and we instantly clicked! She told me about Morgana and I was intrigued by her journey into porn and what motivated her to make such an extreme shift in her life. I was developing a few projects at the time but had a very strong gut feeling about our subject and her story and as we followed her over the last three years, she drew me in more and more. I also loved the documentary format as it was so intimate and was something we could chip away at independently rather than having to wait around to be picked by financiers and funding bodies, in that way it was very liberating.
What excites you about using crowdfunding?
JH: Our whole team is really interested in new models of distribution, crowdfunding gives filmmakers and creatives the chance to connect with the right audiences as the film gets made, Its an amazing, supportive way of working on a film project.
IP: I’m excited about the independence and agency that the crowdfunding model gives the filmmaker. Dealing with this type of material, which is strong in sexual and transgressive content, we didn’t want to have any sort of censorship to water it down in any way. After 3 years of putting our blood, sweat and tears into this film, we also felt passionately about maintaining creative freedom to tell the story our way. The crowdfunding model allows communities to invest in artists that they trust to tell stories that they want to see without anyone in the middle trying to dilute that vision or steer it in a certain direction based on their prejudices or market interests.
Tell us about some/all of the other amazing women who worked on this film!
JH: we are both often drawn to really strong women, we didn’t set out to have all the roles filled by women, it’s just turning out this way. At this point in the production, we have been a pretty small team: Isabel, myself and Karina our producer who is an amazing, supportive and creative documentary producer.
IP: It’s really just been us and our producer Karina Astrup for most of the production. I first met Karina in Spain at the horror/genre festival Sitges where she was presenting her previous film Despite The Gods and I was showing my short animation Butterflies. Karina’s documentary was about Jennifer Lynch (David Lynch’s daughter) making a horror film in Bollywood and it was fantastic! After seeing it I totally fell in love with Jen Lynch as she was such an amazing character — this incredibly tough female director and single mother, fighting her way through the Bollywood system! It really spoke to me! After the screening I sidled up to Karina and Jen like a total fan girl and was lucky enough to spend some time chatting with them both. 2 years later I did a mentorship with Jen in Los Angeles and now I’m working with Karina on this documentary so it was definitely a fortuitous meeting!
Tell us about why you are a feminist and why it’s important to your filmmaking.
JH: I wish this answer was more simple. I think many of us go through ideological evolutions in our life, only a few short years ago I’d just quote Casey Jenkins (the amazing artist and vaginal knitter) who put it simply, “I am a feminist, because I am not a shithead,” but the more I learn about the various tenets of feminism, the more complex my thoughts on the topic get. I’d prefer to say that I fundamentally agree with a large portion of feminist theory. I’m not convinced, except for the political power of collectives, that it is useful to define oneself by the ideologies they ascribe to, given the current fractious nature of identity politics. For simplicity’s sake, I’d say sex positive feminism makes sense with what I have seen to be true in the world so far. I don’t go into a film trying to apply a feminist framework, however as a filmmaker your worldview is going to influence your decisions and processes.
IP: I’m a feminist because I believe that we all deserve equality as human beings and unfortunately we are not there yet. The film industry is still overwhelmingly male-dominated, especially in regards to directing and women are just not getting the same opportunities to advance their careers that men in the same position receive. Statistically it is still grim and in some instances it has gotten worse since the 1980s! Although my work is not overtly political, I tend to write only women’s stories and often these stories are about female characters finding their power within extreme/damaging situations. As a horror filmmaker, I’m interested in the monstrous feminine and the feral, animal side to women that is always just beneath the surface but has been systematically sanitised and denied by our patriarchal society.
Who are your favourite women working in the industry?
JH: Short of a list of every woman’s work that I’m into at the moment, I’d say that their is really interesting work being done in comedy and ethical porn, so I’d say the women (including female identifying people) working in queer porn, both in front and behind the camera and women doing weird hilarious work in indie comedy.
IP: So many of my favourite films in recent years have been directed by women! Raw by Julia Ducournau is a work of art and Toni Erdmann by Maren Ade absolutely blew my mind when I saw it on the big screen last year. There are so many great women writing and directing in genre film! I also want to mention Prevenge by Alice Lowe because it is not only brilliant but she wrote, directed and starred in the film while heavily pregnant and the film is about her unborn baby telling her to kill people! So good! She is a legend!!
What’s the best advice about filmmaking you’ve ever received?
JH: Probably that if you want to make film, just do it. Because if you don’t do it, some other person will do it and they will do it worse than you were going to, so you should have just done it.
IP: I can’t think of any exact quotes but basically the advice to just keep going! One foot after the other. This is an incredibly tough business for everyone involved and I have felt like giving up so many times but I always come back to, “Well, what else would I do?” There are plenty of hardships in choosing a creative life but there is so much joy in the experiences you have, the people you get to work with and the process of making art that it is totally worth it in my opinion.
Your Kickstarter video gave us a little peek at the creative/artistic elements you are adding to the doc. Can you explain a little how they came about? Did Morgana have any input in the concepts?
JH: We wanted to come up with a way to illustrate Morgana’s story poetically, and Isabel hooked onto something Morgana said about “facade living” which is where the cardboard miniature idea was born. The idea of creative a visual artifice, to aid what is essentially a dark fairytale really clicked with the material we already have. Morgana isn’t involved in the documentaries creative process, but we are totally inspired by her life and work.
IP: Because I am an animator and visual artist, I am always looking for creative ways to tell stories. Morgana had this rich personal mythology around her rebirth as a Phoenix which inspired me to think about how we could illustrate that in an imaginative way.
Has working on this project challenged or evolved your own feelings about sex and sexuality?
JH: It’s certainly opened my eyes to how repressed things still are, at the outset, I thought Morgana’s story was really unique, but the more we explored it and talked about it with all sorts of people we realised how pervasive sexual issues within marriages are.
IP: Yes, like Josie, I have always been very open minded about sex and sexuality but what surprised me about working on this project is how repressed big chunks of society still are around this stuff. Particularly around motherhood and sexuality. In Morgana’s experience, once she was a mother she felt that she was socially denied the right to still have a sexuality as her role in life had changed. After talking to other women and reading more about it, this seems to be a common experience.
If you had your own talk show, who would your first three guests be?
JH: I’ve thought about this for way too long and am taking this way too seriously. I’d want to do a long-form show on Youtube or Twitch and have all the guests panel style, to mix interesting ideas together something maybe like: Camille Paglia, Patrick Stewart and Justin Roiland.
IP: Ha ha, well if I can choose from any time in history it would be John Waters, Dorothy Parker and Elizabeth Bathory! Bound to be lively/bloody!! :)
If you were reincarnated as an ice cream flavour, what would it be?
JH: I’d want to be that weird ice that grows when you leave ice cream in the freezer for too long and tastes like the air in the fridge.
IP: Human Blood flavoured! Can’t shake that vampire obsession of mine! Ha ha!
Recommend one #MUFFApproved film for our blog readers!
JH: I haven’t watched anything longer than 5 minutes since this campaign work started, so I’m trying to cast my mind back to when I was watching films. Last thing that stood out were the documentaries Casting JonBenet and Mommy Dead and Dearest, both by talented female directors.
IP: I recently had the pleasure of seeing comedy/thriller Mr. Wrong (1984) by Gaylene Preston which was all but forgotten about (typical) until Quentin Tarantino told the press that it was his favourite New Zealand film. For something modern I would highly recommend Raw by Julia Ducournau who is basically a genius! However it is hardcore horror and definitely not for the faint of heart! Something a little more soft core is A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, an Iranian Vampire Thriller by Ana Lily Amirpour. Highly recommended!
Follow Morgana on Twitter and visit the film website to stay in the loop!
