This is a pretty long story… and it starts April 2023, in my favorite place on earth: Craigslist. I put out a general casting call looking for actors who wanted to star in their own story. I received a ton of strange emails, a few interesting ones, but one stuck out from the rest. It was along the lines of “I’m a dominatrix and I’d like to tell the story of the toll my profession takes on my personal life.” We arranged a meeting.
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Kitty told me many stories, she told me about Pandora’s Box and that we might be able to use it as a location. I was intimidated by all of it to say the least, but that just confirmed the necessity to lean in.
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She gave me a tour of Pandora’s Box in the off hours. I found it quite disturbing, but there was something equally endearing about the safe haven of it all and the sisterhood born out of it.
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I came back a couple more times to talk with other Dominatrix’s, hear their stories and understand more. During this whole process, Kitty could be quite protective, rightfully so. I think it was important that I was vetted, proved I could hold my own and was not out to simplify or sensationalize.
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Eventually I met Kristin. Being a real punk rocker, she seemed to be a perfect fit for the film.
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AMBITIONS: My hope was to create a wholistic dose of the life of a Dominatrix tailored to those who have no clue of the world. Show them the mundane, the intimate, the morbid, and the pure amount of creativity exercised in the spaces and performances. It was K’s idea to circle the interview/tour in order to hit all those notes, bright mind as usual.
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It also seemed like an amusing opportunity to flash a **** in the first 90 seconds.

WRITING: We pursued an entirely different idea in August, but it ultimately felt too rushed and small scale. So we took a step back to get it right.
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Beginning of September, I produced the script in a few days and sent it off. They gave it the green light pretty immediately without asking for alterations. I was surprised. We proceeded.
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EXECUTING: It was nearing the end of October when we finally began shooting. We had a handful of hours every weekend when Pandora’s Box was empty, so it took about a month to capture everything.
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I definitely became a better director throughout this process. Sometimes a scene wouldn’t be working and we my focus split on shooting it was hard for me to decipher why. I eventually realized I had not studied the script (I’d written myself) closely enough. Scene to scene I was failing to understand and therefore communicate the goals of the characters. If I figured out what the audience was supposed to learn by the end of the scene, I could reverse engineer that as the goal of the character. This would get us to the ‘Aha’ moment.
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Throughout filming there were alterations to the script. Generally, it was when the actors would accidentally say something much more natural than what I had written. For the most part though, I learned to be quite protective of the script as there’s a sort of butterfly effect to any alterations.
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For lighting, I needed something soft, powerful, agile, and would fit into the tightest of the rooms; I decided on LED tubes. They are clear as day in the background of some of the shots.
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ASSEMBLY: This one was a big undertaking. For the most part I edited the scenes as I went and just sandwiched them all together at the end.

The mixing was extensive, trying to get a consistency across the film as well as dealing with my not-so-good lav mic’ing. While I greatly improved throughout the course of shooting, I extensively use the RustleRemover plugin by CrumplePop on many of the earlier scenes.
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The most profound moment in editing was deciding to keep in the shake on the subway shot. That proved to be an incredibly difficult shot to get and on the best take, I realized I was a whole train car down from where Kristin would get out, so I ran over to her. I was planning on jump cutting to hide the imperfections of the take, but I wanted to preserve the one-take. So..? Lean into it. I used the sound and a music queue to bring extra attention to the sharp change in camera movement.
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TAKEAWAYS: Fear is your North Star. If I had listened to my squeamishness whatsoever, this film would never have been brought into existence. When you feel fear that is not a response to actual danger, lean in.
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Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are a number of pretty glaring technical issues with this film, but I think it’s just proof that it was not made by a corporation. The subway shot especially, I believe it’s significantly heightened by something completely unanticipated and for anyone else, unacceptable.
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Protect the script. I was much more loose about this before making this film. It’s important to respect the deep intuition that goes into scriptwriting. If you or an actor does not immediately understand something, it’s worth doing a rigorous analysis and attempt to find understanding before considering any alterations.
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- Mory