Greek Pete: The Real Hustle

“If you pick up any gay magazine,” Andrew Haigh points out, “you’ll find hundreds of adverts for escorts renting themselves out.” Haigh is a filmmaker who plied his trade as an assistant editor for directors as diverse as Ridley Scott and Harmony Korine, and as someone based in London, he’s at the hustler heartland of the UK. Along with Los Angeles and Manhattan, London is the most profitable terrain for male escorts, yet for all its profitability, the world of male sex workers remains fairly untapped, generally ignored by academic researchers and treated in popular culture with either revulsion or exotification. That’s one of the reasons first time feature filmmaker Haigh decided to make Greek Pete. Covering a year in the life of escort Peter Pittaros and his quest to win the Escort of the Year award, Haigh’s film is a frank, compassionate and at times poetic work: a freewheeling drama drawn from real experiences and played out by real sex workers. We enter Pete’s business and social circles, hearing their histories, desires and attitudes to their trade and even the existence of God, all the while following Pete’s progress in the awards race and his awkward relationship with fellow escort Kai. Told with such verisimilitude, it’s surprising when Haigh says, “It’s a world I knew nothing about. But I was intrigued by it, and I wanted to explore it on film without resorting to sensationalism or exploitation. It tends to be shown as either glamorous and sexy or violent and tragic.”

Anyone familiar with depictions of male sex work in movies will know what the director is referring to. Many critics, in fact, have referred to Greek Pete as an update of Paul Morrissey’s seminal Flesh, though Haigh is quick to assert that “I hadn’t actually seen that till after making this film, but I could see that it had been an influence: despite me not even having seen it! That’s because of the influence it had on other films set in that world and underground cinema in general, of course.” I suggest other films in this tradition, like Midnight Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho and Mysterious Skin. “Oh yeah, they were definitely big influences. But if you look at a lot of those films, they still have a gloss, an adherence to traditional narrative form and such. I wanted to make something much looser.

“I also think a lot of those films have problems in that they appear to idolise that world but that they also condemn it. There’s a real mixed message, and that was something I wanted to avoid.”

Haigh’s first step in making Greek Pete was to contact sex industry workers. How did he do this? “I just put an advert on Gaydar. I was hoping to get about twenty people, but only two got back! Pete was one of them, and it was through him that I heard about and came into contact with other escorts and sex workers.” Did he have any contact with unions, charities, vice squads or other organisations? “I wanted to keep it as ground level as possible. I wasn’t trying to explore the rights and wrongs or legalities of it, because then I’d have had people questioning me as to why I wasn’t showing enough of the bad side or the good side. I just wanted it to be about the guys: their stories, their lives.”

Pete himself is a magnetic presence. A handsome Greek-Cypriot, he takes great pride in his work, displaying a consummate professionalism befitting of a Michael Mann protagonist, and talks candidly and objectively about his childhood, his working methods, the requests clients make of him and his own limitations, and his ambition to save enough money to retire to the kind of big house and garden he’s never had. Haigh explains, “From our first meeting I could see that that he had something worth capturing on film, that his was a story worth telling. This was also because I didn’t want to resort to the usual story of the rent boy who’s fucked up and hooked on drugs. Once Pete understood that I wasn’t out to exploit or judge him, everything started to come together.”

The film features candid scenes of drug use and sex (from paying clients to porn shoots), but the director’s gaze remains commendably neutral. “It was just a matter of switching the camera on. I just set it up and let it be. I gave the guys a brief description, shot it documentary style, and they went for it. Everyone was so used to performing that it was no huge task for any of them. You have to understand there was no crew, just me with the camera on my shoulder. It was quite an easy process.”

This approach, something we now see frequently, was born out of Haigh’s respect for the men and for sensitivities surrounding the sex industry: “I was always concerned about how I was portraying the guys and I didn’t want to stem any trouble for them. They had some things they wouldn’t talk about, things about their lives they didn’t want shown, so that’s where the whole docu-drama style came from.”

Could this not also prove dangerous, however? “It’s a slanted take on reality. All the stories the guys are telling, all the situations and set-ups you see, are all real. It’s just the presentation is different. It was interesting watching how the guys wanted to present themselves, knowing their stories. I wasn’t worried about this damaging the film or manipulating the audience. Every film does this to some extent, and it gets the audience talking about it, questioning what they’ve seen and trying to find out more.”

The film has already been met with rapturous applause and festival awards, though the public reaction has been mixed. “Sex workers are very happy with it; they say it really represents them. Clients on the other hand haven’t been so kind. The peculiar thing has been from audiences not from that world. Straight audiences seem to respond better to it than gay audiences. But many people have recognised the film for what it is, neither a celebration nor a condemnation. It just shows the lives these guys live.”

What do Pete and the guys think of it? “They’re really pleased. Pete loved it. He’s been given lots of opportunities now so he doesn’t escort anymore. It was strange at the premiere: I was sitting with my mum and my family with an entire row of escorts in front of us. But my mum loved it: I can’t think of a more ringing endorsement than that!”