Interview: Director Tony Dimarco on The Visitor

BY VINCENT LAMBERT

How do you follow up a multiple-award-winning monster smash like To the Last Man? Well, for writer/director Tony Dimarco and Raging Stallion Studios, you take a futuristic sci-fi plot and cast tattooed porn star Logan McCree as a space alien who visits Earth to study gay men’s energies during sex. The Visitor is just the latest ambitious production from RSS, and Dimarco recently gave VincentLambert.com an exclusive look at some images from the upcoming release. He also told us what inspired the movie, which was produced by Chris Ward and also stars Bruno Bond, David Taylor, Damian Rios, Lucky Daniels and new exclusives Junior Stellano and Angelo Marconi, and how it breaks all the rules.

Sounds like a cool concept, Tony. Tell us how The Visitor came together.
The Visitor is a cross between The Man Who Fell to Earth and Wings of Desire. It’s a voyeuristic view of gay sexual behavior seen through the eyes of a man from another planet. The film came from a few different ideas that I wanted to make into a movie. I always loved the beautiful images in Wings of Desire, where angels mingled among mortals and viewed human behavior. I thought, What if they weren’t viewing the mundane lives of these people but their sex lives instead? I think we all have a voyeuristic side and I wanted to expand on that to see what goes on behind closed doors. The Visitor is about observing sex and is a story that’s told through visuals. There’s only around four lines of dialogue in the whole movie.

I bet that helped the models! So how did The Man Who Fell to Earth come into it? Are you a Bowie fan?
I like David Bowie’s work as an actor and an artist, but I wouldn’t say that I’m a Bowie fanatic. Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth is an esoteric film with very iconic imagery. I hadn’t seen the film up until this year, but I had seen images from the film when I was growing up and they always stuck in my mind. In Roeg’s film, Bowie’s character has an emotional journey while in this film Logan has a sexual journey.

What are the production values like? Is this another big-budget RSS production, like Grunts and To the Last Man?
No, it’s more of a big-concept film with a modest budget. The budget is closer to the scale of The Drifter, which I made the year before. Only one set was built in the studio, which is the alien laboratory where Logan’s character works. Most of the scenes in this film are in actual locations, so in that sense it looks like a larger movie.

Logan McCree has an otherworldly quality about him. What made him right for this role? Was he your first choice?
I actually created this role specifically for Logan. I’ve worked with him several times, and I wanted to create a role for Logan that would show a different side from what we’ve seen of him. Working with him for a year I learned more about him as a person, and this role came out of that. Logan is a very interesting and intelligent person. When you look at The Drifter and The Visitor, they are two distinct sides of his personality. Both films are about who he really is as a person and not his perceived image. Logan talks about this on the behind-the-scenes interview on the bonus disc for the film.

It’s rumored that Logan and Vinnie D’Angelo fell for each other on the set of The Drifter. Are you putting something in the water?
I guess you can call me a matchmaker [laughs]. When casting The Drifter I asked Logan, “What’s your idea of the perfect man that you’d fall in love with?” Because that’s what the story is about; it’s a love story. He told me what his ideal man was and I said, “Great! I have the perfect guy for you!” Little did I know how true that statement was. I was just trying to make good casting decisions, not pairing boyfriends. Who knew? What’s ironic is that The Drifter is a film about two guys falling in love and that’s what happens in the movie and that’s what happened in real life. We were lucky to be able to capture what was going on between them on film.

Tell us about RSS’s new exclusive Junior Stellano (bottom picture, left), who debuts here. Did you discover him?
Junior Stellano applied to us through our Web site, so I can’t claim discovering him. He’s Italian and Portuguese and lives in Staten Island. So although we grew up close to each other and went to the same clubs, we never met before. He sought out Raging Stallion on his own. He felt that he was better suited to Raging Stallion than any other studio, and I couldn’t agree with him more. Junior is going to have a big career. His scene in The Visitor was his first, and he’s a natural-born performer in front of the camera. His scene with another new exclusive Angelo Marconi was smoking hot to film. I think people are going to like it. It got me going!

Is The Visitor the next logical step in your work?
At this point in my career I’ve done various types of films—drama, comedy, love stories, a murder mystery and now, with To the Last Man, a Western. I thought, I haven’t done a science fiction film yet. I always wanted to do one. It’s a great genre, especially for porn, because you can break the rules of reality and make up your own. The audience is more willing to believe extraordinary circumstances. But The Visitor is not your typical sci-fi porn. There’s no big-headed aliens, no anal probing, no huge alien spaceships. I considered it to be more of a sci-fi/art film/porn. To do a sci-fi film with all the special effects like what we expect to see in the theaters, you would need a huge budget to do it right. Those kinds of budgets don’t exist in porn, so you have to be creative with it conceptually.

How do you top a megahit like To the Last Man? Do you even think about that?
By the time you finish a blockbuster like To the Last Man, you’re already onto the next project, so you don’t really have time to think about what you’re going to do next, which can be a good thing. I finished working on Last Man back in November, since then I’ve worked on five more films, so to me it seems like a long time ago. Also as a creative person, once I’ve completed one project, I’m always looking for the next challenge.

The Visitor is slated for a July release. For more information, visit ragingstallion.com.