On the Set: Brad Armstrong's 'Lost Love'

A version of this on-the-set report ran in the October issue of AVN magazine. Click here to see the digital edition. Above, Jessica Drake and Small Hands. Photos courtesy Wicked Pictures Anyone who’s seen his dramatic features knows that Wicked Pictures director Brad Armstrong isn’t afraid to mix sex and death in provocative ways. The plots of the sci-fi movies DNA and Takers involved, respectively, cloning dearly departed loved ones and harvesting human organs. And in Underworld, which won Movie of the Year at the 2014 AVN Awards, the lead character, played by Jessica Drake, spent the movie suspended between life and death, encountering various supernatural characters. And in this year’s big narrative feature from Armstrong, titled Lost Love, death is the starting point. We see the lead character, Beth, mourning the loss of husband Eric (Ryan Driller). But it turns out that the person who’s being put to rest is not the only character who has passed on to the other side—and part of the storyline is figuring out who’s still among the living. Drake is on set today to do a dialogue scene with Jessie Lee—the lead-in to a sex scene they shot a couple days ago. It’s the eighth day of production, and there’s also one more sex scene to shoot today. Then, she says, “We’re doing one more day just for some exteriors. … It definitely adds production value. So nine days total.” Drake shares a detail about the art direction: a certain color will appear in the frame whenever there’s a dead character present. “We did that really deliberately,” she says, ticking off the list of items: mock soda cans, snacks, beach trunks, a towel, flowers. She expects that some viewers will be able to figure out what's happening, but hopefully others will let the story unfold and let the mood sweep over them. “It’s creepy. It’s really creepy,” she says. “We went even darker.” Jessica Drake Aside from its paranormal premise, there’s something else that sets Lost Love apart. Her character tells the story in voice-over, interspersed by sessions with a grief counselor. “I don’t know that I’ve ever done a movie that had group therapy sessions in it,” Drake said. Armstrong wrote the script, but Drake contributed the dialogue for the counselor, played by Frank Bukkwyd. (“He was fantastic—he was so spot on,” she says.) “There’s a lot of death in the movie—there’s a lot of symbolism in the movie,” Drake says. “Each time a person tells a story about someone passing away, it was based on a real person. Kira Noir told this story of Brad’s dad passing away. Jake [Adams] told this story of [adult webmaster] Bill Fox passing away. So we inserted stories that are close to our hearts and frames of reference that we could speak to. Then Brad’s character—the story he tells is of his best friend passing away in Canada after he moved here. So he tells the story—it’s a real story. Everyone cried in this movie.” Overall, the project was “super challenging because it’s so emotional,” she explains. Knowing the real stories behind the anecdotes ratcheted up the intensity even more. “I had to go lie down the other day and just cry,” she says. “But I think it makes the connection in the sex much more intense and so much more meaningful and so poignant when it happens.” Jessica Drake and Small Hands. Her sex scenes in the movie are also out of the ordinary. One is a flashback with Ryan Driller. “It was a very odd scene. It was great, but it had a really weird feel to it,” Drake says. Even more out of the norm, she does a full masturbation scene up against a tombstone. And then she meets up with Small Hands. “I ask him to put on my dead husband’s suit—It’s too big for him,” she describes. At one point she blindfolds herself to get deeper into the fantasy. Today, before knocking out the dialogue with Lee, Drake takes food requests for Postmates. “Lunch orders coming,” she says. Lee ripostes, “I love when things come.” “I’ve tried really hard to take extra good care of everyone on the set,” Drake says, making sure they take breaks and get food. “Many people have cried on this set. To me it feels really cathartic. I go home more tired than I usually go home from a movie. But it’s good. I think it’s going to be really powerful. Super powerful. Especially in the end.” Jessie Lee and Jessica Drake For the scene, Lee is in a low-cut V-neck T-shirt, black jeans and ankle-high boots. Drake has on a black leather hoodie, black mini skirt and and thigh-high black boots. Barrett Blade and David Lord are capturing everything on two cameras. The two women talk outside of a group therapy session, agreeing they can only handle so much “doom and gloom.” Lee says, “When you’re all alone, you start to remember.” "And that’s when the tears start to flow,” Drake responds. “Get out of my head,” Lee says, turning toward her. The scene culminates with the two women heading off for a drink—which will lead to a sex scene in a junkyard, on top of a wrecked car. “It’s so goth,” Lee saying making note of the fact that she herself was in a very serious car accident in 2010. She’s known Drake since 2008 but this marked their first scene together. “It was 58 degrees out, and it was windy and we were on a cold car. Oh my god. We were so cold. Between positions we’d stand in front of the heater with a big blanket around us. It was so cold. I’m still not recovered from that night. I’m still tired. But we made it look hot! I’m a professional.” Kira Noir in Lost Love (Wicked Pictures) Today’s sex scene will be considerably warmer, though a tad cramped by virtue of its setting in a bathroom. Armstrong plays a grieving attendee at a therapy session, stops to chat before doing a scene with Kira Noir. He also talks about some of the props in the movie, noting that one scene features a water bottle given to Drake by Bill Fox, and another shows a footprint of her late dog, a tiny Chihuahua named Big. “We’re almost done,” he says. “We’ve got Kira Noir. … I’ve hired her before, but I’ve never had the sweet love with her before.” The bathroom is small, so he’s going over the logistics with his crew. Noir says, “My character is one of the people that is attending the grief counseling session. … Something that’s really interesting about the script is that I’ve been to group and what does end up happening is people start fucking each other because you end up bonding very quickly. You start spilling these deep dark secrets that you don’t normally tell people. And then you throw sexual attraction into the mix and that makes for really slutty people really quickly. My character had an eye for Brad’s character, and when he storms off to the bathroom I follow him in there to pounce on him and try a different way to make ourselves feel better.” She adds, “This is a really intense script. It’s really beautiful what they’re doing with it.” The movie is out now from Wicked Pictures.