DUMONT: Yes.

SH: And what about now, whom do you call family now?

DUMONT: I live in an orphanage, now.

SH: Poor thing.

DUMONT: A Dickens-style orphanage –

SH: Where you get beaten regularly –

DUMONT: (Jokingly) I have to go out – mornings eight to twelve; that’s pickpocket time. (Both laugh) No, now, I’m just out here on the planet, I’m married.

SH: And have you got any kids?

DUMONT: I have a grandson. I was very young when I had my first – my only child.

SH: And that was clearly not with the person you’re married to now.

DUMONT: No. (Pause) You can sense I’m avoiding this part of the conversation.

SH: So you try to keep your family a bit separate from the business.

DUMONT: Well, it is, by nature. I’ll tell you – actually, I married recently, and – do you know who Alex De Renzi is?

SH: I don’t.

DUMONT: He made a lot of dirty movies, porno movies, and he died a couple of years ago. I was friends with him and his family, and somehow I ended up marrying his widow.

SH: That must have worked out nicely.

DUMONT: Well, I’ve been in the adult world now for almost 30 years, and it’s…because of the nature of my work, I have girls coming up to my office all the time getting naked. And it’s difficult for people outside of the industry to understand. So there’s a certain shorthand involved when you’re involved with people in the industry, in terms of what one does and how one lives. Where you don’t have to explain everything.

SH: With that in mind, do you ever find that you need to escape that world for a while, and get out with the ‘normals,’ or –

DUMONT: Uh, one of the things about what I do which I appreciate is that it allows a certain freedom, in the sense that I don’t really have a structured life. I have a structured life when it comes to what must be done, but I can do it in my own timeframe, as opposed to conforming to a time clock. I find I go to the movies three or four times a week. Movies to me are the literature of our time. Oo, there’s a good quote. (Both laugh) Yeah, I go to the movies a lot.

SH: Do you have a favorite all-time and a favorite recent movie?

DUMONT: Kill Bill. Have you seen it?

SH: I haven’t yet.

DUMONT: I’ve seen it twice now. It’s a movie with hardly any story, it’s pure style and craft. Really well done. Favorite movie? I don’t know. Yojimbo.

SH: What is that?

DUMONT: It’s a Japanese movie. When I was a kid, my father had a pass to the Museum of Modern Art, and so we went to the movies there a lot. I saw this movie when I was a little kid, a Japanese movie in black and white; it opens with a dog walking across the screen, and he has a human hand in his mouth. And me being ten years old or eleven going ‘wow, that’s really cool.’ Many years later I was able to track down the film, it’s called Yojimbo, starring Toshiro Mifune and directed by Kurosawa.

SH: So warrior, fighting, stylistic films appeal to you.

DUMONT: It has a certain elementariness to it. These are bad guys, and these are good guys, and the good guy - he’s not clearly a good guy till the end. Stranger comes to town, stranger cleans up town, stranger leaves town. So the stranger doesn’t get cluttered with relationships or anything like that. Like the Hud character that Paul Newman portrayed. There’s no emotional content, just, he’s a loner. You should rent it, it’s a great show.

SH: Do you think that appeals to you for any personal reason?

DUMONT: (Laughs) Well one thing you could say for sure – I’m not cleaning up the town! (Both laugh) Sure, I relate to it, but do I live that, no. If I did I couldn’t have a business or a family!

SH: So you had an interest in movies from the beginning, from when you were a kid?

DUMONT: Yes.

SH: And how has it turned out compared to what you had thought when you were a kid?

DUMONT: It’s funny; I’ve had this conversation with a lot of people in adult. Adult tends to make one a bit lazy. It’s hard to fuck up. As long as you get the image, it’ll sell. I was in a position where I was able to start making adult pictures in relative economic safety, and it’s evolved into a career. I’ve made a couple of movies that were non-X-rated, and they did well, and I was offered jobs doing other straight pictures, but economically, it just wasn’t there.

SH: But do you ever have yearnings to do more artistic fare, even without the economic incentive?

DUMONT: When I was a kid, I would’ve killed to have a camera and be able to make a movie. I now own a few cameras, and I have a whole editing bay. I never pick up a camera unless I’m working.

SH: It’s become a business.

DUMONT: It’s become a business, and right now with Jaime we’re toying with a non-X-rated product. Will we actually do it? I don’t know. Yes, I would like to do things, but the realities of life and economics preclude a lot of things I’d like to do.

SH: Well, there is a stigma, obviously, attached to pornographers. You know, the typical accusations I imagine are, ‘oh, you’re exploiting women,’ or ‘you’re just churning out filth,’ or ‘there’s no art here,’ whatever the accusations are – how do you respond to, or rather just live with, that?

DUMONT: There’s no valid response when someone approaches you and says, “You’re doing this.” Okay, that’s what I’m doing from your point of view. Here’s a topical point – we’re in Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction. Some people would say we’re not, we’re doing other things. Is there any response - I guess, it’s all subjective. So I guess if it’s someone I care about that’s approaching me with questions about what I do and the morality or the correctness of it, my response is, I am making adult entertainment. I don’t feel I’m doing anything that’s morally incorrect, and I don’t want to hurt anybody; I do go out of my way, particularly during production, to make sure no one is psychologically or physically damaged.

SH: What kind of people do you think come to Redboard, come to you and want to be in these movies? What motivates them?

DUMONT: I’ve always said, even before doing S&M movies, just doing hardcore – no one I’ve ever run into does it just for the money. There’s always something else going on there. And what that is, I don’t know. I don’t feel a particular desire or need to be in front of the camera. But many of the people I’ve noticed, especially in S&M, just do it one time – they just want the experience. But no, there’s still a certain stigma involved in this. Which I find a bit odd, even when I started Redboard, there was a bigger stigma doing BDSM movies than having sex. From the standpoint of society, it seems at this point, doing the kind of pictures I do seems to garner more scorn.

SH: But with S&M films you do touch on difficult issues that regular adult features don’t, like the feminist and race questions we were discussing earlier.

DUMONT: If you go to the Columns section [of Redboard’s site], I wrote something about it being uncensored. The reason I wrote that was because of Jaime’s article [about race play]. And I wasn’t going to publish it for about a week, but I realized I just really didn’t want to be a censor. And I find it offensive. I do, it is offensive. But it is his view, and I think that that’s the essence of what we should be – to tolerate things that offend us. If they harm us, it’s another thing. And now that some time has gone by, I’m glad I did [publish it], but I’m sure it really alienates probably a lot of people from the site. But so be it.

SH: I saw a quotation once, with regard to feminists and BDSM – “Unfortunately, women’s liberation tends to mean that women are free to do anything except give up their freedom once in a while.” It seems to apply here as well.

DUMONT: I think the question is bigger, in the sense that, especially in terms of S&M - even sex movies - but I think especially S&M because it gets into more confrontational stuff like should you be viewing the people in front of the camera as human beings? I think ultimately, these are people who are doing what they want to do, for whatever reason they’re doing it. So another view might be that ultimately they’re expressing their freedom; even though they’re doing something they may be uncomfortable with, they’re doing it because they’re expressing something.

SH: Yes, even if that something is a subject that is very taboo or uncomfortable.

DUMONT: We live in a world where the tolerance is just evaporating. If what you’re doing, or your ideas are divergent, it’s not tolerated anymore. That really becomes problematic on a much bigger scale. I know people who are extraordinarily bright and extraordinarily open, but you can still offend them, and they don’t think it should be allowed. What we need is education, and let people make up their own minds. Again, it’s tolerance – you have to allow room. And some people end up hurting themselves – there was a great line, it was [Ben] Franklin – democracy is dangerous. Life is dangerous.

SH: And of course humiliation tends to be much more difficult to take than pain.

DUMONT: If you watch the movie Uncut 1, it stars Missy and Kym Wilde. That’s the first one. It was an hour take, we had no idea what to expect. About 45 minutes in, Kym just kept saying, “You’re a whore, you fuck for money, you fucking whore,” and she’s whipping her. And at one point – I knew Missy quite well – and she literally flips out and she’s no longer Missy, she’s who she is, and she takes the whip and says, “don’t call me a whore,” and starts whipping the hell out of Kymmy. And it happens more than you’d think in these movies. Women aren’t used to being whipped, degraded, made to crawl around, suck boots, whatever. Somebody like Kym and Jaime, to get back to them again, they’re smart enough to know and to see and feel what buttons to push, and they do break through, much more often than you think.

SH: So do you have a kind of goal, or agenda, of revealing – not just reality fetish, but real people?

DUMONT: Oh absolutely. To me, that’s the prize of shooting. But in terms of Redboards, to me, maybe it’s a certain pride in the product, because none of it is fake. And many times, if they’re talents who have experience, they won’t go there. But many times, they do go there. And every time that’s happened, particularly with professional people in the business, they always appreciate it. And can’t wait to see the product where you pierce the video façade, and you see who people really are. When I started Redboard I was very careful not to go out of focus. But now, if I don’t screw up and talent doesn’t say cut, there won’t be any cuts in the movie. If I lose focus, I won’t cut it out if the intensity’s there. The human reaction is more important than the craft to me. (Pause) It’s funny, I’ve never used the word ‘craft’ in terms of adult movies!

SH: Not many people do!

DUMONT: I’ve watched too much Actor’s Studio. I’m waiting for James Lipton to ask me some questions.

SH: What would you have done differently? Do you have any regrets?

DUMONT: I think…I would have started doing BDSM movies much earlier than I did. I do have…an enormous fascination with – not necessarily the content, but it allows me to see people in ways that I would never be able to see people. It does give me a window into who we are that I haven’t experienced in any other way through art or literature. Oo, that was good too.

SH: I like this sort of post-modern, self-reflexive interview style.

DUMONT: I don’t need to read the interview, I’ll just critique as I go! “Good question.” (Both laugh)

SH: Besides going to see movies, I’m thinking more along the lines of your life outside the business – what do you do?

DUMONT: What do I do? Dinner with friends. I love traveling. I snow ski. I’m sort of a junkie for that. I tried snowboarding; I wasn’t so enamored with that. But again, I put all of the years into snow skiing. The only sport I participate in by watching is boxing. I’m not sure what that says.

SH: Well it’s an interesting counterpoint to doing S&M videos, isn’t it.

DUMONT: Yeah.

SH: We have a genre in Fuckfish called Boxing. I thought, what does boxing have to do with porn? And we thought, well, I imagine it’ll come up at some point.

DUMONT: Yeah. Everybody’s fetishes are content-specific. I’ll tell you a story - When I was a kid, my father was a working commercial photographer. This was pre-Playboy, and he always had these black and white magazines lying around, and in those days, this was like the mid-50s, there were always these pictures of girls on beaches, with goose bumps. I was a young kid, eight years old, I would whack off to these pictures. And they always had goose bumps. To this day, goose bumps get me off. What that let me to believe, and I found it was true – by shooting pictures on a hire basis for individuals – I believe that whatever the particular quirkiness of our sexuality is derives from very early on in our lives.

SH: This is maybe a strange question, but, what has been your greatest loss?

DUMONT: (Pause) When I was a kid, I was a dodge ball champion. I was magnificent at it. That was probably the thing I excelled most at in life. But at a certain point, you’re able to throw the ball hard enough to hurt someone, so you can’t play dodge ball anymore. I still think back to those glory days of dodge ball.

SH: Seriously?

DUMONT: I’m serious, yes – it was the crowning – I peaked early. (Both laugh) I was so good at dodge ball.

SH: And again, it all links in – now you get to do things where you’re allowed to hurt people!

DUMONT: I liked the balls with the goose bumps on them!

SH: Have you thought of doing a dodge ball video? Pelt somebody with those little red rubber balls?

DUMONT: No, because you could really hurt someone! Jaime’s a strong guy, he throws that ball at somebody, he could really hurt them!

SH: So, what about your happiest moment?

DUMONT: Dodge ball. (Laughs) There are so many!

SH: You’ve got a pretty good life.

DUMONT: Yeah, I do all right.

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See the content discussed in this article in our Redboard review and at www.Redboard.com.