Susan Sarandon is about done with acting, she said while at Cannes. Instead? She wants to direct porn. Specifically, she wants to direct female-friendly porn.
Sarandon was at the festival to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Thelma & Louise alongside Geena Davis, so it’s appropriate that she took the occasion to announce her new career goals to the world. She said that she is “threatening” direct porn when she’s in her 80s, though insists she hasn’t watched enough of the stuff to know exactly what the problems are. “Most pornography is brutal and doesn’t look pleasurable from a female point of view. So I’ve been saying that when I no longer want to act, I want to do that.”
She made her case by playing up the fact that she’d worked in collaboration with male directors to make sex scenes more realistic, and more from the female point of view, on her prior films. She talked specifically about her experience with Tony Scott, whom she worked with on The Hunger. “First of all it was written that I was drunk and I said, ‘Seriously? You have to be drunk to get into bed with Catherine Deneuve? I don’t think so. Isn’t it more interesting if it is voluntary?’”
Just to hammer her point home, she went on to pointedly say that, in films, the most important part of the sex is the way it’s initiated, and the way it’s resolved. This is very true, as the acts themselves, regardless of conventionality, can only be justified by context that surrounds them.
Sarandon was previously in the news for comments made about the 2016 election, though let’s not forget that she’s also starring as Bette Davis in Ryan Murphy’s upcoming anthology series, Feud.