Making a ‘Marxist porno’: Talia Shea Levin on ‘Make Me a Pizza’
by Brooklyn Enriquez
@brooklynenriqzfilm
Make Me a Pizza (2024)
“I think people are more ready to see someone's head get blown off than someone have an orgasm on screen.”
Make Me a Pizza, directed by Talia Shea Levin, is a recent short film that explores and pushes the boundaries of sex on screen through the classic sex-for-pizza porn trope that guarantees a hot and fresh viewing experience that is funny, fun, and messy.
The short has had a very successful festival run, from its world debut at SXSW Film & TV Festival 2024, to being amongst the official selections of Fantasia, Sitges, Beyondfest, and many more.
After catching the film at Mayhem Film Festival, BGFC’s Brooklyn Enriquez had the opportunity to speak to Levin about how Make Me a Pizza came about.
Hi Talia! I’m very excited to finally get to speak to you about Make Me a Pizza. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before, so what inspired you to make this particular film?
It really started as a joke between the lead actor, Woody Coyote, and I. We weren’t taking it too seriously until we were. We were both interested in porn. And I wanted to explore the orgasm as a filmmaker and what excited me about that. At the time we were working on this experimental, immersive theatre show that was steeped in political messaging, and so that might have been some of our inspiration between combining the two. And we were like, let’s make a Marxist porno.
Very quickly that lead us to the pizza trope because you already have labour and goods and value wrapped into that from the get go. And we kind of love comedy that’s performed very straight where the circumstances are only strange to the audience, but the characters are taking it 100% seriously. So just pushing that to the most extreme, and with the pizza boy delivery porn trope, just figuring out the circumstances for someone to consider having sex as payment for pizza because that’s clearly not payment. You need money for pizza. Like that’s the world we live in. That pizza boy doesn’t have the power to make that call to give someone pizza for free.
At the start there’s the VHS look, corny acting, jazz in the background, and I was like, OK this clearly looks like a porno. I know what to expect. Then it slowly starts to turn and get weirder until it strays far from where it began, creating a load of surprises that I personally loved.
Yeah, we sort of thought the more that you think it’s a porno, the more that you think you know what’s going on, the more excited you are when it starts to subvert itself. And we tried to do that a couple times in the film. Like you get comfortable even as it gets crazier, but then we add another turn where we’re just playing with surprise. How much more fun can we have with it? Can we explore how crazy we can get? But I think particularly now, it seems like everyone has seen everything, like nothing is new. So how can we kind of play with that by acknowledging that and paying a very direct homage to something like porn while doing it in a way that's new or adds an element of surprise or fun.
Make Me a Pizza (2024)
A lot of stuff now just seems to be trying to get a shock out of the audience. For instance, Triangle of Sadness and more recently The Substance, with the amount of sick and gore on screen. In your film, the mess and sauces almost felt like gore. I wanted to look away but I couldn’t.
We didn’t intend and didn’t know we made a horror movie. Until it started to get solicited by all these great horror leading film festivals. The horror community has been so accepting ‘cause I guess the film shares some elements of horror and definitely of genre stuff.
I mean, I love The Substance, but that’s for a horror conversation. It’s never been that I can’t handle gore or the fluids, but that’s never been what motivated me. And with this film, I knew that we needed it to be messy and gross. It was never about the effect, it was about the story. And the story necessitates that there’s an effect, but it’s not driven by effect.
We knew it needed to be cheesy and saucy and gross, but we never thought “How can we make this more gross and gonzo.” Our makeup and effects person, Asia Cataldo, did an amazing job with all that stuff working with our production designer, Amelia Steely. But the story for us was playing it very straight forward. How can we tell the story of them becoming pizza? I take these things very seriously. Maybe too seriously.
Beyond the mess and the comedy, my personal take away was feeling empowered by seeing the leading lady as a woman very comfortable in her sexuality and really being powerful with it. Is this something you wanted to portray on screen, or is this just me reading into it?
I love that. The main thing I wanted to explore was the orgasm and how it was depicted on screen, or even just the way sex is depicted on screen. I feel that it's a frontier that is under explored, especially from the perspective of women. And at the time, I felt like sex was being depicted as this end-of-film destination where everything was beautiful and they finally got to have sex and then the lights fade and everything is perfect. Or it’s somewhere in the middle of the film like it was this goal and then we don’t see what happens after, or it was being portrayed as this really negative, scary thing and you have to protect yourself. I just think that so much of our life is spent in intimate situations and there’s so much storytelling that goes on there. But I think people are more ready to see someone's head get blown off than see someone have an orgasm on screen. And I don't really understand that because we can all relate a lot more to people having sex.
It's by no means a universal statement on sexuality or anything, but it is a specific interaction between these two characters that I wanted to be really real. I wanted them to both be really excited and empowered in different ways. It was intentional in that I wanted to kind of play within the setup of porn and all of that entails. Especially in the 70s with male gaze. I wanted to make sure that there was a balance and that it was very clear that she was having a great time, if not leading the charge in a lot of ways.
I understand, like why does it feel uncomfortable to show somebody feel pleasure? Because let's be honest, sex is for pleasure. It’s an intimate moment between two people. So I think that even though there’s funny visual gags, like when he licks the pizza that’s in place of her crotch, we really do get to see the reactions of them having sex. We witness their euphoric feelings, and that’s the part of a sex scene we should be seeing.
Yeah, I think that’s what was so fun, and because we had this proxy of pizza, we had this layer of absurdity. We could actually show more than you would normally show in something that is not pornographic. It’s not, it’s simulated sex with an intimacy coordinator and all that. But because there’s pizza, you can show someone licking a pizza or putting a full pizza in their mouth. Like you can do all these things that you would have to search on the dark corners of the internet for to find someone doing that with an actual body part. But with pizza we could go a lot further, but still have the two characters with a very real encounter with pleasure. And yeah, it’s interesting to see how that makes people squirm as much as something horror might.
Talia Shea Levin and Vittoria Campaner
“There’s a pressure, especially with big artistic communities, to just kind of say yes to everything, especially if you like the person making it.”
Many of the crew members on this film are women or non-binary. Was this intentional? Do you find it important to have this type of representation behind the camera on your film sets?
I think it’s always the person that’s best for the job, first and foremost. I feel lucky that the people that were best for the job in this case that I knew were all women and non-binary.
The whole hiring process kind of took its cues from what we were learning about intimacy coordination and consent-based hiring. Enthusiastic consent-based hiring. We didn't want anyone working on this who was like yeah, I’ll just show up for the gig this weekend. We wanted people who were like, hell yeah I want to be a part of this! And that led to just finding this amazing team of people who, for reasons that were shared with us as a community or their own, we’re excited to explore this and figure out what was underneath the surface of our pizza sex movie. And yeah, that just created this great team that happened to be all women and non-binary.
There were some considerations where, like, because of the intimate nature of it, I did want to have someone who at least had a lived experience as a woman behind the camera. That was actually a specific request from one of the actors, and I think it added a level of comfort. And there’s only so much that I can do for trying to swap a gaze, visually. The person behind the camera as well as me, it should be the opposite of what that gaze has historically been. But other than that, it was really just who's going to be the right vibe for this set and who's bringing their own energy to it.
I know there's a pressure, especially with big artistic communities, to just kind of say yes to everything, especially if you like the person making it. But actually making people kind of consider what they were becoming a part of and whether or not that was something they were excited to be a part of, I think made for a much more enjoyable experience with a team that I'm now excited to keep making stuff with and keep pushing boundaries with.
How amazing to have a crew that really put their heart and soul into this. I know you've had quite a successful festival run with this film so far, do you have any further plans?
I mean, it’s been a dream festival run. I cannot have asked for a better one. There is a feature, a feature version of Make Me a Pizza that we are working on. It takes things to an even crazier place and keeps going. It also kind of started as a joke because someone was like, “There’s no way you can expand this into a feature.” And we were like, “Oh, really?” And what’s a better motivator than spite, really?
And then there’s this feature that I think I’ve been making in some former fashion for a long time. Just kind of the sci-fi adventure action story epic I have always wanted to make.
It all sounds very exciting! I will be running to the cinema when I see the pizza feature make its debut! Thank you so much for speaking with me today, I look forward to all you make in the future!
For more information on Make Me a Pizza or to keep up with director Talia Shea Levin’s work, check out @thepizzamovie and @taliashea23 on socials or visit taliashealevin.com
