Justin Kelly on gay porn drama King Cobra

We speak to filmmaker Justin Kelly about true-crime tale King Cobra, in which James Franco stars as a porn producer ready to kill to work with the hottest new porn star on the block

Filmmaker Justin Kelly is sitting in the corner of a red function room recalling the time he was batting around some film ideas with James Franco, with whom he made his first movie I Am Michael, in which Franco plays a gay rights activist who finds God and becomes a conservative pastor.

One of the ideas Kelly suggested was a lurid true-life tale based on the murder of gay porn tycoon Bryan Kocis by a pair of rival pornographers, Harlow Cuadra and Joe Kerekes, who were eager to have Kocis out the way so they could work with his money-making protégée Brent Corrigan, whom Kocis had tied to a water-tight exclusivity contract. “Of course James like the gay porn one,” laughs Kelly.

We know exactly what Kelly means by this statement: Franco is the LGBTQ-friendliest straight actor in Hollywood. His past roles include the lead in Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl, activist Scott Smith in gay rights drama Milk, and a lead role and co-director credit on Interior. Leather Bar, a re-imagining of the infamous 40 minutes of hardcore gay scenes edited out of William Friedkin’s Cruising. We indulge our curiosity, though. Why do you say “of course”, we ask.

“Well, you know, he’s known for doing a lot of gay content,” says Kelly. We tell the director that we know that. We just wondered why he thinks Franco has taken on so many gay roles? He wrinkles his brow and thinks for a second, as if it’s the first time he’s considered it.

“I see it as a genuine interest in stories that are different,” Kelly suggests. “And it just so happens to be that James ends up doing a lot of gay stories because there are a lot of interesting queer stories that wouldn’t see the light of day without someone like him agreeing to help get them off the ground or agreeing to be in them. It’s just a genuine interest in these characters.”

The result of this latest collaboration is King Cobra, with Franco on both producer duty and playing the role of Kerekes, which he imbues with the same off-the-wall energy that made his turn in Spring Breakers so memorable. “James has played some phenomenal characters over the years, but I think he was excited to have one that’s totally different,” says Kelly. “Joe’s almost like this mafia-esque guy who wears bedazzled Ed Hardy-esque jeans and Affliction t-shirts and gold necklaces. He has a lot of fun with it, which meant having a lot of great ideas, a lot of on the moment suggestions. During the middle of a take he’d come up with an improv that would end up in the movie because they were often better than what I'd wrote.”

Franco’s isn’t King Cobra’s only memorable turn. Christian Slater is both chilling and tragic as the ill-fated porn producer Bryan Kocis – renamed Stephen in the film – while former Disney star Garrett Clayton is simultaneously naive and gallus as Sean Lockhart aka Brent Corrigan, the 17-year-old who takes the Greyhound bus from Idaho to LA to take his first steps on the rung to gay porn super-stardom.

“Of course there have been a few giggles during Q&As with people talking about Garrett being in Disney movies," notes Kelly. "But if you’re looking for a breakout role it’s pretty cool that instead of the run-of-the-mill adult drama he chose a gay film, and not just a gay film but gay character, and not just that but a film about gay porn. How much further could you go from Teen Beach Movie 2?” We’ve not seen Teen Beach Movie 2 (it actually sounds a bit like a gay porn movie) but we take Kelly’s word for it.

Unsurprisingly, given the nature of its content, King Cobra is not without its controversies, although the biggest objections seen to come from Brent Corrigan himself. On Twitter, the porn star and Hollywood actor (he has a small role in Milk, alongside Franco) has been more than sceptical. “It’s not about me,” he wrote. “It’s Hollywood’s attempt to bastardize my early years in porn, one man’s murder, blah blah.”

“It’s probably going to get awkward at some point,” Kelly says of Corrigan's objections, but he insists he did get his approval at the outset. “I gave him the script. He read it. We met. And he agreed to let us make it and to use his name,” Kelly explains. “But he didn’t want to be involved. He kind of felt like any film version of his life is never going to be accurate in his eyes. I don’t think he was fully willing to accept the kind of process of taking a true story to the screen, with the things that have to change, the artistic license. He wasn’t willing to be on board with that. He’s writing his memoir that’s going to be his official story as opposed to this.”

It’s hard to see Corrigan's objections. Uniquely for a tale of manipulation and murder, all parties come out of the film looking rather sympathetic, such is the humanity of Kelly’s approach. “My first film, I Am Michael, was tricky,” explains Kelly. “It’s about a gay activist who becomes anti-gay, so as a gay person I don’t agree with anything he does or says. But I thought it would be much more interesting to tell his story in a non-judgmental way – in the same way that we ask not to be judged ourselves.”

With King Cobra, Kelly took a similar approach: “Instead of making Stephen a sleazy, terrible person, we see that he was a human being and had his flaws. Even with Harlow, even though he does a terrible thing [he stabbed Kocis 28 times before burning his body], we don’t show him as some maniac murderer but that he did have a dark past that led him to that moment.”

Even Corrigan's star-is-born tale of innocent Idaho boy to the world’s most famous gay porn star is told in the positive. “I feel that people are almost expecting the character with a dark past of daddy issues or something,” says Kelly. “Doing porn for some Psych 101 reason. I thought it was kind of refreshing to show that, even though he’s taken advantage of in the beginning, by the end he wants to make his own porn and has succeeded in a way.”

Corrigan’s narrative makes King Cobra bittersweet, but this isn’t to suggest there’s any attempt to shy away from the darkness at the heart of this tale. Kelly is unapologetic in this regards as he see it as being similar to the great work done by the New Queer Cinema directors of the 90s. “People like Gus Van Sant with Mala Noche and Todd Haynes with Poison weren’t afraid to tell stories that didn’t have an uplifting LGBT angle. They weren’t making films to fit in or be normal or appeal to straight people.”

This punky attitude chimes with Kelly. “That’s what drew me to I Am Michael and King Cobra,” he says. “I like making films that show there are lots of different kinds of gay characters who do exist in real life and have different kinds of stories, and, for me, they are as cool to show as those in Milk or Brokeback Mountain or some of the more uplifting ones.”