A Film about Making a Film about a Film
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Interior.  Leather Bar.
Directed by James Franco and Travis Mathews
Written by Travis Mathews
Rabbit Bandini Productions

WHY did James Franco, rich and famous Hollywood actor/dilettante, want to make a graphic film about the gay leather subculture? That’s what everyone on screen is asking in the resulting sixty-minute film, Interior. Leather Bar., co-directed, written, and edited by gay filmmaker Travis Mathews. A lot of viewers will ask the same question, but nothing in the film will answer it.

Ostensibly, Franco wanted to recreate forty minutes of explicit sex that William Friedkin cut from his controversial 1980 movie Cruising in order to secure an R rating, but little screen time is devoted to replacing Friedkin’s allegedly lost, undoubtedly melodramatic kink-fest. Instead, Interior mostly shows how Franco and Mathews set about shooting those scenes, and the scenes that show them shooting those scenes.