Three years ago, I was on vacation in Sweden, not yet knowing that my voice mail back in the US had a message waiting that PD, the founder of Insex, no longer could afford to keep me on the payroll.

I had started working at Insex.com in 1999. It had been an amazing journey from horror, through excitement heavily layered with gruelling work, to resignation. In 2004 it was forced to shut down, but PD and the team started up hardtied.com, a very watered down much lower budget version. Having been there during the Insex glory years, hardtied was just a very repetitive way to make money for me. I was very happy to be let go. I was going to take one full year off, to just spend time with my young son, and practice yoga.

Of course that didn't last. Barb and I knew each other before, but had really connected when we spent three weeks shooting a 40-min film that PD produced and she wrote the script for. I was directing, and Barb was on set to help with dialogue, but ended up co-directing, as every time I couldn't put my finger on why a scene wasn't working, she knew what was wrong and fixed it.

We had been talking about doing a project together, and now that I had so much free time, we started discussing different ideas, but always ended up talking about the crazy things that happened at the Insex studio. It was in the way of everything else, and we realized that we had to do something with it. Our original idea was to write a script for a feature, based on real events. We didn't need to make anything up, it was all there. Except the money. With no contacts in the business, we could spend years trying to raise money, or just make a documentary, that we could afford. We would need to interview a lot of people for the script anyway, so why not get it on tape.
So we started to contact people that used to work for Insex.

More about that next year, tomorrow.