How Four Chambers turned porn sets into an art form

Four Chambers films are dynamic and you’ve created all of these universes that invite the viewer to explore porn in different ways. How do you design to manage your relationship with your audience and other performers?

Vex Ashley: Because we didn’t come from a background in shooting traditional porn, we never really absorbed the idea that you had to light or set a scene in a way that was explicitly graphic. When you think about porn there is a kind of aesthetic and a type that maybe comes to mind and that type tends to be focused on shooting something in a way that gives you this instant gratification. It’s lit in this incredibly flat, descriptive way.

For me, the kind of films that I want to make [encapsulate] this idea that there’s something more erotic about the idea that you actually can’t see everything – that it requires your eye to kind of grab little bits of information that might be being given to you. We might shoot through glass, or from behind a curtain, or with certain parts of the body being obscured. We light stuff either very weirdly, or very darkly and atmospherically compared to what would be considered ‘traditional’ within more mainstream filmmaking. We will shoot some stuff with tights over the lens or some Vaseline rubbed on the lens, and we will use a lot of filmmaking and lighting techniques that obscure rather than depict graphically. I’m trying to communicate less the graphic descriptiveness of sex, but more the atmosphere of what having sex feels like, or even what the idea of having really good sex might feel like in your head when you’re imagining it.

When you’re designing your sets and planning your shots, are you thinking about how it’s going to make the performer feel, or are you more focused on how it will be perceived by the viewer?

Vex Ashley: I think those two things are in a loop. If you create a set that’s lit and dressed in a way that evokes the atmosphere that you want the viewer to experience, I think that as a performer, yo’’re also picking up on that. It’s the difference between shooting it at 10am versus shooting at 9pm. It’s a single red light and what that signifies and how that makes you look, and how fucking under a single red light feels compared to shooting in the bright daylight.

What comes first? The acts that you want to portray, or the way you want the set to look?

Vex Ashley: Honestly it varies film to film. The genesis of our breastfeeding film came from a conversation with me and my friend, where we are talking about the act of breastfeeding and what it signifies to us, and then we started thinking about whether or not that was something that we could turn into a film, and then we start thinking about what the aesthetic and design signifiers of that are. So then we started thinking about the womb and we started thinking about the colour pink and what particular colour pink – like that fleshy pink you see when you see a camera going down someone’s throat. There’s a horror in that in the sense that it’s very bodily, rather than this like clean pink. So sometimes it will be the act and then other times, it will be more like the acts lead on from the set. It’s not just like we have an idea and people are fucking. People are fucking because of the idea.

There’s a strong but unspoken relationship between sex and furniture, so I want to ask you – as someone that makes films about sex for a living – how would you describe that relationship?

Vex Ashley: I haven’t ever really thought about that, but immediately as soon as you said it I was like, huh! Because a lot of furniture is so deeply related to the body. It’s the negative space of the body. When you think about the sofa, it’s designed to be filled with flesh – to be a bodily space. It’s almost the imprint, ergonomically, of human bodies. How something is held or used, or what position you’re sat in, all of those things are deeply related to erotics. We all know the tactility of furniture; the shininess, the way leather is actually skin that you’re in connection with. There’s this feedback loop between the way furniture feels on your body, whether it’s beautifully polished wood or a buttery soft leather couch. They’re all signifiers of different experiences that you’re going to have, which I think is very erotically tantalising.

Have you ever walked onto a set and been immediately put off by its design?

Vex Ashley: Yes, but I can really soldier through a terrible room. A huge proportion of the work that is currently on our site is shot in incredibly soulless Airbnbs in various places around the world. I’m genuinely at the point now where I feel like I can make a beautiful film in any space, and the key things are the magic of cinema. Lighting is so important to changing the atmosphere and the feel of a space. Lots of our films are shot in my spare room, which is not huge, but the magic of design is basically this idea that if you’ve got a blank space, if you put up some backdrops, if you put some Mylar on the floor, or you hang a piece of latex in a certain way, the space just transforms because we want to believe in the fantasy.

In your opinion, who makes the sexiest films?

Vex Ashley: Claire Denis makes incredibly erotic, atmospheric, dark films. They can be kind of sparse in some ways, but they have this genuine sense of romance that I just love. Her film High Life had Juliette Binoche inside a what they describe as a fuck box, and she’s basically writhing and sweating in this sealed chamber and I just thought this was such an incredible visual that I went out and made my own fuck box porn. To be incredibly cliché, I also love David Cronenberg films. He’s just the master of dissecting how it feels to have a body – the horror like erotics and the captivating sensations of it.

You use set design to make a lot of cultural references in your films, but what are your favourites?

Vex Ashley: The fuck box is totally that. I basically became obsessed with this box. From that I then started looking at a philosopher called Wilhelm Reich who made these things called organ accumulators which he believed would channel this erotic, life-giving energy, and you were meant to jerk off inside this metal sealed box to prolong your life and give you this like erotic energy called like orgone energy. It felt very much like the fuck box, so then we made a film called Orgone Theory when we were in Berlin for the porn festival. With two weeks’ notice we managed to have this whole box fabricated and brought to some random person’s apartment in Berlin. We had about ten people come separately to fuck in the box and we made one of my favorite films that we’ve ever made.

How did it feel to fuck in the box?

Vex Ashley: Being in it was so good, and again that relates to the relationship between space and design and the body. Often, for me as a performer, when I’m shooting porn I find it very difficult to switch off the idea that I’m essentially fucking the camera as much as I’m fucking the person that I’m with. But the thing about being in the box is that it felt the most like fucking in real life because you couldn’t see the camera and you felt alone.

I’m sure you’ve come across a lot of furniture in your career. What’s the horniest piece of furniture?

Vex Ashley: It is undoubtedly the Le Corbusier LC4 chaise longue. It’s just horny. It’s got that leathery, skinny shape, and when you’re laying in it it mimics the curve of the body really well. It feels like a chair to fuck on and we made a film that’s just called Fucked, which was like the writing of poetry about the essence of just being fucked. Not in the complex sense, but just wanting to like lose your mind getting fucked. I needed the LC4 for that. It just feels like it’s designed to be uncomplicatedly horny.

Vex Ashley: I always think of bodies of water such as pools or baths, but I will say the bath is very sensual, but not actually very good to shoot porn in or have good sex in. For me though, it tends to be less about spaces and more about lighting. The way a space is lit is what makes it more erotic. If you go to somebody’s house and they just flick the big light on and expect you to hang out, it’s not happening. My pussy is dry. It’s arid. We’re not coming back from that.