The Indie Film Depicting Love, Relationships, and Coke-Fuelled Teen Orgies

That's the basic premise of Eva Husson's debut film Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story), a French coming-of-age movie with echoes of Larry Clark's Kids. It sounds far-fetched, like a cautionary tale about STDs dreamed up by Daily Mail columnists, but a similar story did happen in 1996: In the sleepy suburbs of Atlanta, over 200 teens who had engaged in group sex were affected in a syphilis outbreak. Husson's film, partly inspired by that story, doesn't sensationalize such an event. She sharpens her focus instead on the teen drama and the more relatable adolescent scenes—like getting grounded for staying out too late or being given the cold shoulder by someone you've fucked.

I sat down with Husson to talk about the story's genesis, how she avoided wagging a moral finger, how she approached filming sex scenes with her young cast, and why she could never direct porn.

BROADLY: Bang Gang investigates the under-explored world of teen orgies. Where did the idea come from? Was it your own experience?
Eva Husson: No, my own teenage years were filled with drugs—the late 90s EDM scene, trance, techno—not collective sex. Which is why I was interested in the notion of exploring something extreme during adolescence. The collective sex was a real story that happened and I had heard and read about in 1996. That story stayed with me. I read news articles about it and thought: How did that happen? How did it go that far? The syphilis thing was real. I got fascinated by the subject and I just felt like there was something I could relate to in terms of kids mastering their adolescence. I thought I got out of it OK and the people around me too. The fact that you could have an intense adolescence, pushing the boundaries, and still build your young self and have no regrets.

Despite the gloomy subject of STDs, you don't moralize or suggest, "If you do this then this will happen to you."
I wanted to show that you can go really far and still be okay. Most coming-of-age stories about really intense moments end up in chaos or drama. Kids—which is a film that I love—really reflected my generation; you had the spectre of death hovering over your head. You couldn't even think of having sex without a condom at the time; it was unthinkable. And for these kids now, it's not even in the landscape, because you always have a pill, or something, to make things better.

You think these kids don't think about STDs?
Not so much. Because they have a way to make STDs disappear. It's the "second chance generation"; they always have something to get out from.

Teen orgies happen all the time in porn. Were there things you did to make your representation more realistic, less tawdry?
The one movie I had in mind when I was writing, shooting and directing was Boogie Nights by PT Anderson. Because, whatever you think about that film, you never think: Oh that horrible movie about porn actors, tits and dicks all over the place. You think about a great movie with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julianne Moore and incredible characters who have intense lives. I have a tender feeling about that film, and that's more what I wanted to achieve.

Do you subscribe to the notion that porn is affecting kids' sex lives, giving them unrealistic ideas about how sex should be?
I think the problem is that parents tackle that question as being whether they should watch porn or not. The problem is that it's a fact—it's there. So if you try to pretend it's not happening, it's gonna be a disaster. The biggest challenge is how you introduce it into your kid's life in such a way that they'll be aware that it's part of the landscape but they don't get traumatized by it because they see it too young or in the wrong context. But of course it affects kids. I remember the first picture of a penis that I saw. It was a picture in a porn magazine that a kid at school had shown me. I was like, What the hell is that?

Shooting the sex scenes must have been awkward for your young actors. What kind of things did you say to help them?
Get naked now! No, actually the naked part came really late in the game. I warned them from the first conversation that it would happen, but then I said immediately after: this is not a movie about that; it can look like it but it's really not, so we're not going to focus on that. The main part of the work is going to be about us finding the characters, finding how they move, how they talk, and then learning to navigate the sex scenes as dance scenes, because your bodies are like tools and you're going to use your bodies to move in space. Once on set we'll do exactly the same thing as we did in rehearsals but you'll just be naked.

During the closing credits, all the teens strip off on the open road. It seemed like the last goodbye to production…
It was quite cold that night! And they really didn't want to get naked again. But actually we shot all the nude stuff at the beginning of the film and this was the last scene.

Was that just to get it out the way, the nude scenes?
Yes. Because I didn't want it to become a subject, a power play between the actors and me and the production; the stakes were so high for all of us, at all levels that I wanted it to be done. So we did the nude scenes in the first two weeks. Then the six remaining weeks were just regular filmmaking. Which was funny sometimes because we were just like, This is boring! Nobody's naked!

Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) comes out in the US today.