One Wedding and a Feature Film

By Staff

Behind the scenes with Caveh Zahedi, director of "I Am a Sex Addict," a film opening April 5 at the Balboa Theatre.

1. Rebecca photo (above)

We had been trying for months to cast someone to play the dual role of my French wife and the French prostitute who resembles my wife. We had been having a hard time finding a French actress who both looked the part and was comfortable with nudity.

I was standing outside the Castro theater when this beautiful woman walked by. I had an intuition that she might be French and asked my producer, Thomas Logoreci, to approach her right then and there. Thomas ran after her and came back with a name and phone number, exclaiming that she was, in fact, French.

She auditioned for us, nailed the part, and said she had no problem with nudity. She was a natural in front of the camera and incredibly easy to work with. We were struck by her lack of inhibition, and marveled at how much less puritanical French women were than American women.

Months later, when we were doing reshoots, I was looking online for a real French prostitute to play the other French prostitute in the film (see next photo). I stumbled upon an escort photo that looked remarkably similar to our lead actress. I sent the link to my crew and all of us were flabbergasted. It turned out that we had inadvertently cast Rebecca Lord, an internationally famous porn star, in the film.

Plan A was to hire a French actress to play a French prostitute. We were having a hard time because 1) there aren’t that many French actresses in San Francisco and 2) the few French actresses we could find were uncomfortable with the nudity the scene required.

Plan B was to hire a real French prostitute to play a French prostitute. One French prostitute agreed to do the scene, but was then denied a re-entry visa by the Bush Administration after leaving the country for a short visit to France to see her relatives. Another French prostitute agreed to come up from L.A. as long as she could take time out from shooting to turn a few tricks, but she ended up quitting before we could finish the shoot because she found the work too tiring.

As a last resort, I called a friend who was an editor at Hustler to see if he knew of any French actresses who might be willing to act in our simulated sex scene. His secretary happened to overhear our conversation and mentioned that her sister was a French actress and might be willing to do it. The only problem was that she lived in Paris. To make a long story short, we auditioned her over the phone, she flew in from Paris, and I think her scene is one of the best in the movie. She is currently a VJ for French MTV.

Mandy and I had been talking about getting married for quite some time, but she hadn’t felt ready. We needed to shoot a wedding scene for the end of the film, so I had suggested we get married on film and use our real wedding. Mandy was against this because 1) she still didn’t feel ready to get married and 2) she didn’t want me being distracted by the film shoot on our actual wedding day.

But it took us so long to complete the film (3 and 1/2 years), that by the time we were finally ready to shoot the wedding scene, 1) Mandy was now ready to get married and 2) we were too broke to actually have a wedding. It would have cost us a small fortune to stage a fake wedding, so I arranged to have our actual wedding paid for by the production as a film expense, arguing that this would cut costs. I was able to persuade Mandy to agree to the filming, arguing that this was the only way that we could actually afford a wedding.

I shot the entire opening of the film immediately before the wedding began, and included a continuous tracking shot into the church as the wedding begins. It was the happiest day of my life, not only because I was getting married to the love of my life, but also because I had just shot the ending of the film that I had been struggling to make for ten years.

03.29.2006