Elliot Tuttle Talks About ‘Blue Film’: Colour, Findom, Queerness, and Writing Sex Workers

Blue Film, a beautifully-made film about a conversation between a sex worker and a former middle-school teacher and convicted pederast, premiered last year at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. As the film is released digitally, SNACK sits down with its director Elliot Tuttle to discuss colour, queerness, and filmmaking.

Why did you call the film Blue Film?

One, there’s an obvious pornographic reference: throughout time, porn films have been called blue films. I like that reference, but there’s also a historical reference, especially in the film industry: a blue wax pencil was used during the Hays Code to mark something that might not pass the censor, something that was culturally taboo for the time. 

Some people think that’s where the term ‘blue film’ comes from. I liked both of those references, the pornographic one and the one about something culturally taboo. And it was the first title. I called it Blue Film from when I was writing it, and it always felt right.

Which queer filmmakers have influenced your approach?

There are a lot of queer filmmakers that inspire me, but mostly from the 70s and 80s. I think of Pier Paolo Pasolini as a big inspiration. I love his films, and a lot of what I find really interesting about his work is how it was made. He was a queer filmmaker and you can see his queerness in his films, but a lot of what he was responding to was the issues of his time. It was fascism, or I also think of his film Porcile, which is a capitalist nightmare. 

He was queer and that influenced his work, but he was also responding to lots of other things about the world. That was just his lens. So I take a lot of inspiration from those kinds of filmmakers. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, I love. It’s harder now for me to name queer filmmakers working right now who inspire me. That’s no hate to any queer filmmaker working right now; it’s just not really what I look to for inspiration.

How did you develop the film’s visual style and colour palette?

It was really important to me that the film have a look. When I look at a lot of other first-time filmmakers, I see films that are afraid to try something visually. I took a lot of inspiration from Aki Kaurismäki. I love the way he uses colour. I think it’s as expressive as Pedro Almodóvar, just not as in your face. But I love Almodóvar too, and I took a lot of inspiration from him. I really wanted to play with these icy blue tones and reference this one specific Yves Klein blue that I felt very inspired by. 

I wanted it to feel melodramatic. I wanted lush greens and reds, and the bed that they fall into in the climax of the film is that dark blue. I wanted to be really intentional, and I worked for a really long time with my production designer on how to cultivate the world of the film, the mood of the film. 

I wanted the audience to have this feeling of being trapped in an echo chamber with these two disturbing figures. How do you create that vibe for the 90 minute experience? Texturally, what do you give it? I wanted it to be dark and lush.

How did you shoot and edit the conversations to build tension, and when did you know the edit was finished?

Creating the tension always felt like something I knew was going to happen in the editing room. We shot this on a tight budget, which also means a tight schedule, so I wanted to give us as much material as I could to rearrange in the editing room. 

On the actual production days I was so focused on getting the best performances out of them and capturing their performances as best I could, so that later in the editing room I could build the tension I was witnessing on the day in how they were speaking to each other. But you really need to refine and cut to get a film. 

So it was more in the editing room, and it was a constant process of trial and error. There were so many cuts of this film. I worked with my editor virtually, so I would give notes, go about my day, and wake up to a new cut of the film that I’d then watch. It felt like I was watching a cut a day. It’s constant trial and error: do I feel riveted enough? I’ve seen this film 200 times now, and I need to still feel riveted when watching it. 

So it was a very long edit. We filmed in March 2024 and had our festival premiere in August 2025, and we were editing throughout most of that time. It was a long process. I think you could spend forever editing a film. Once you feel good about the film, you’ll submit it to a festival, and once the festival accepts it, you’re like, ‘All right, I’ve got to be done when I deliver the final film to them by the day they need it.’ So in a way I’m very grateful for external pressure, because it makes you finish the film.

How did you cast the two leads and establish their chemistry?

I got very lucky, because Reed Birney and Kieron Moore had an immediate chemistry from casting. It was also helpful that we had cast Reed, so we were able to do chemistry reads with a bunch of different actors. When he read with Kieron, the chemistry was already there on Kieron’s first audition. I didn’t have to do anything. 

They immediately built a rapport, and felt very comfortable with each other. When we got on set, they already had the characters. I didn’t have to guide them to the characters, because they seemed to already have them. So in that way it was very natural and quite easy. 

It would have been very tough if I’d cast two actors who didn’t get along or didn’t like each other. That would have made my job really hard, and the film relies on these two actors having great chemistry. It happened organically, and Reed and Kieron are just best friends.

How did the idea for the film, particularly its portrayal of a sex worker, develop?

I was really interested in this figure of the findom, the financial dominator, which I feel is really prevalent on gay Twitter, or in gay porn. I think there’s an inherent irony to that figure. A lot of the time it’s a guy in a dirty bathroom saying he’s better than everyone who’s watching his video – ‘Give me money, faggot, I’m better than you’ – I was really interested in the inherent irony of that figure. 

When I started writing it, I was very inspired by these fringe figures. That felt like a fringe porn figure, and the character of Hank felt like a character on the fringes of society. He’s very rejected. I was trying to create a film about loneliness, and I felt I could make a film between those two kinds of people. 

I also tried to be as diligent as possible in my research, hearing about the real experiences of adult performers, especially people who perform mostly on the internet and are in this gay space of findom (but findom is everywhere, I think). It was about getting as close as possible to real experiences. 

Even in your writing, you have to do as much research as you can, so that while you’re writing you have second-hand knowledge of what they would say or how they would move around. You want their entire personal history immediately available to you, and that requires a lot of research depending on what character you’re writing.

How did you approach writing Hank, a convicted paedophile and sex offender?

Writing the character of Hank was a really difficult tonal line to walk. I did a lot of research, listening to personal testimony of paedophiles and other sex offenders. There’s tons of stuff on YouTube of people anonymously giving their personal history. But there is a cinematic precedent for it. Lots of paedophile characters have been written before. I think of Happiness and Little Children. 

So I had all of those films to see how this has been done before. And I had this huge wealth of personal testimony I could draw on from YouTube, and there’s one documentary, Pervert Park, that I felt was so important to how I understood the character of Hank. Again, it’s trying to be as diligent as you can in your research, so that when you’re writing you can hope to write the character as authentically and honestly as possible. 

I would hope that we all go into the movie with the knowledge that paedophilia is wrong, and then we can watch the movie. There’s never any question to me: the film is not at all sympathising with the act of paedophilia. It is just trying to meaningfully engage with that character.

What is the significance of the camera as a means of recording and exposing the self?

When Aaron’s doing it on his own, he’s playing a character, and he feels very comfortable having that character captured by the camera. But when he first enters the living room and Hank asks him to answer these questions honestly, that’s when he feels uncomfortable with the camera on him. 

When he’s asked to be totally honest, that’s when he doesn’t want it captured. I think the camera always implies a sense of danger, of being captured and made permanent. For Aaron to tell the truth and for that to happen is very scary to him. That was a lot of how I thought about the camera: as a threatening object. It can help Aaron live his fantasy, and it can also threaten to destroy the fantasy. It’s a double-edged sword.

Was the amount of nudity planned from the beginning?

It was always the plan to have exactly the amount of nudity that is in the film. When you’re dealing with an intimacy coordinator and the actors, you have to have so much of it specified before you even get to set. So everything we filmed was the plan from the beginning. 

I liked the idea that the conversations in the film, the themes of the film, would be what earns it any controversy. It felt almost like a hat on a hat to have them naked at the same time. To me it didn’t achieve anything creatively. So I felt silly asking that of them when I wouldn’t really have a good reason to ask it, because I didn’t feel that strongly about it. 

Any creative decision you make has to come from an honest place. You can’t ask your actors, or anybody on your set, to do anything if you don’t really believe in why you’re doing it. It always has to be intuitive decision making, something you believe in asking other people to do. That’s why it’s not a very sexually explicit film, honestly. There are a few sex scenes, but they don’t really have nudity in them. No acts that happen in the film are illegal. But I feel like you still walk away feeling kind of gross afterwards, and I think that’s because of the ideas in the film.

How did you approach the film’s sound design?

That was a really fun part of the process. I worked with three great sound designers. Vern Hass helped us with a lot of the first passes of the sound. Then we went with Matt Rollins and John Keville to deliver the film and really build out its sonic world. You get to build a world from the ground up when you’re doing the sound. 

Again, it was about creating a sense of intimacy. Even something as simple as: do you want pipes clanging in the back or not? How do you want the world of the house to be? Do you want it to be still? An old house, a new house? It’s all about making a bunch of little decisions that cultivate the feeling you want the audience to have. The feeling I wanted the audience to have was that they were trapped somewhere and had no choice but to listen to these two characters. How do you create that tension, that dark feeling? It’s a bunch of little choices. That was a very fun part of the process, because it’s one thing you really get to build completely from scratch.

Why did you choose the brighter colours for the ending?

Because I like the idea that you’re replicating the feeling of the morning after, where you have clarity and you can keep going on with your life. I feel like the morning after always sheds light on everything that happened the night before. So I liked the idea that by including a morning-after epilogue, it recontextualises everything you just watched in the light of day. 

It reminds you that there’s a light of day after the dark night of the soul, and that can change how you feel about everything that just transpired under the shroud of darkness.

Blue Film was digitally released in the UK on 19th October via Peccadillo Pictures