An Interview with Elliot Tuttle, Director of 'Blue Film'
- August Hammel
- 7 hours ago
- 8 min read
A camboy and a pedophile walk into an Airbnb. Stop reading if you’ve heard this one before. I imagine you'll keep reading because Elliot Tuttle’s Blue Film is like nothing else out there. Tuttle’s debut feature is something of a miracle: a chamber piece that never feels made-for-stage in an act of transgression that never feels cruel.
Set almost entirely in one house, Blue Film explores one night between Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore), a financial dominant camboy, and a client (Reed Birney) who paid $50,000 for one night with him. In the first 20 minutes, Aaron realizes that the client is his middle school teacher, Hank Grant, who was arrested for trying to sexually assault a student years ago. After realizing this and confronting him, Aaron decides to stay. The film unfolds through the conversations between two men whose lives converged and diverged.
Tuttle’s debut is unflinching in its approaches to pedophilia and perversion. Blue Film is not about the shock value of invoking pedophilia or even the inherent evils of the world, but it does consider what brings evil deeds into the world, and asks its audience to listen and sit with it. As provocative as it is human, Blue Film is one of 2026’s early must-watches. Tuttle sat down with Buffed Film Buffs to talk about the film’s creation, performances, and a bit about Lana Del Rey.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
AUGUST HAMMEL: When you were writing the film, was there ever a moment where you made yourself sit back in discomfort, or consider if this is where you wanted to go? And did that make you know that you were on the right path?
ELLIOT TUTTLE: I don't think I had a moment like that. The film came out of me pretty quickly with lots of revisions, but I don't think I can recall a moment where I was unsure [where] that uncertainty fueled me. I always felt fueled during it. I was writing as if writing it would simply make the movie and that I could be satisfied with that. I don't know if I've ever really had a guard up with myself when I've been writing something. Blue Film maybe would have been the one to start it, but it didn't.
AH: Why do you think that is? Where do you think that comes from, that kind of willingness to go wherever you have to to take whatever piece you're working on?
ET: A lot of my favorite filmmakers do that. I respond to their work because it feels very unafraid. I don't think I ever feel as good about anything as after a first draft of the script. After every first draft, I'm always like, “This is brilliant and all of my friends need to read this,” and then I'll get a million notes back that are like, “This is not great.” Then I will revise it a million times, and I will really strengthen the film, but I don't know if I ever feel as blindly confident about something [as] I do when the first rough draft is done. And I just assume that it's perfect until told otherwise. That is not to say I don't have doubts, of which I have many, but I just love writing so much. It just helps when it's really fun.
AH: When you're writing for such a controlled piece that requires [only] these two characters, I'm sure it's such a task to go out and cast the right people. I don't want to ask you “How did the casting process go?” But when you found Kieron [Moore], what was that initial meeting like? He embodies these two personas, Aaron and Alex, so well.
ET: He's so great at playing both of those parts, and it was so fun. When we went into our first chemistry read together, he had just read this book called Perv and he was describing this non-fiction book about perverted ideology. He was so immediately engaged with the material and so immediately down that it was exciting to be on the Zoom with him. I feel like I fed off that energy. That was one thing about Kieron: he's a fabulous actor. He's so great and he's very intelligent. He thinks about his work in such a smart, emotional way. He's really gifted.
AH: The opening scene of just the cam show was immediately striking to me and [I found] the comments that keep popping up at the bottom of the screen [so funny]. But Kieron's extra-masculine performance in that is so familiar to me because I feel like every queer person knows someone who, in sex work or not, puts on that extra layer of bravado.
ET: I think most gay men have probably stumbled across this findom [financial dominant] form before. Whether they watch it or not, they've at least seen it.
AH: I know that persona so well, but [Kieron’s] English-ness also adds something to it because – his accent's amazing, but there is this level of, “He's putting on a performance for a character who is performing.” Was that something you were conscious of when you were casting?
ET: So much of the film is like a dissonance between your true self and the self you put on, and I never see that represented as singularly as in these findom porn videos when some guy’s flexing and being an alpha and then he's in a dirty bathroom.
There's already an immediate irony to this kind of thing that lends itself to telling that story, that lends itself to telling this story of a slippy identity. Kieron's Britishness, I just think he probably had to work a little bit harder but his American accent's good! It's perfect for that part. That's actually something I haven't thought about before, how his Britishness factored into his performance, I'm sure it made his job harder. Maybe he's doing three performances.
AH: Reed [Birney] is just amazing in the movie. I first came across him in the film Mass from a few years back, where he completely blew me away. I didn't know him before.
ET: Yeah, our film and Mass had the same [director of photography], who knew how to shoot a contained location.
AH: Was that your connect to Reed?
ET: No, but I really loved that film Mass and I think our DP Ryan [Jackson-Healy]'s work on that is great. As soon as we got Reed on board, because he was like the first person to hop on, we talked to Ryan very quickly after.
AH: They're both so intimate and contained in one room between just [two] people. The character of Hank – you rarely see pedophilia talked about so openly in any media. It's usually used as a hammer or a cudgel or a plot device of, “This represents the great evil,” in the way a murderer does. But here, you as an audience have to sit with this. This isn’t going for shock value and you're not someone who's going for shock and awe at all. When did you know in the process or in thinking about this that you were going to tackle pedophilia so openly and directly and not as a boogeyman?
ET: It came from trying to do as much research as I could so that I felt like I could inhabit this character while writing it, so that everything could feel authentic. This is a real person in the film who speaks and moves through space and it should feel honest and as authentic as possible. The things that he says are just things that he would say. In terms of the thoughts that I had about simply including a character that is a pedophile in the story,
It felt really interesting to me to create this echo chamber of perversion.
This character of Aaron, who believes himself to be so broken and lonely and perverted, to meet someone who also feels that way in a much different sense – Hank is very self-flagellating, he feels very guilty. Aaron is overconfident and there's so much bravado, they are operating from these similar experiences of feeling guilt and isolation. Then they're able to put their own feelings in context when they meet one another. They see that that's it. It was never meant to be a twist. It was never meant to be shock value.
The subject matter is, yes, a kind of lightning rod, but there is a precedent for this kind of character. Regardless of whether I think people think the film is empathizing with him or not, it was always meant to try to get as close to honesty as possible.
AH: You switch between formats, you interject the camcorder home video during the [opening] credits and throughout the film in brief moments, but you switch to that format for a brief section of the film, and you switch out of it only when Alex snaps out of his reality and back into who he was [upon] coming into the house. What motivated that decision? When writing, [did you] know that you were going to do that?
ET: Yeah, I love it. From the very beginning, I wanted to do this mixed format film and I love this MiniDV aesthetic. To me, it really is this Venn diagram of either family home videos or snuff films that are using this aesthetic. Blue Film exists very precisely in the middle. I wanted this thing that created an intimacy, but also put the audience on their back foot. I needed something to mobilize the image. To me, it was always important and it was always about finding the right MiniDV, getting the right texture, how to use it sparingly enough at these moments when it is most important for the audience to feel this unease and intimacy. I don't think that we included any shots or got any extra or superfluous shots with that MiniDV camcorder. Everything we got was planned in advance. “These are the moments we're going to use it.”
AH: The last scene between the two of them really got me, I don't want to spoil too much for any readers who haven't seen it, but it's just so intimate. This is maybe a silly question, but I have been dying to know for weeks now. [Reed Birney’s] character is named Mr. Grant. Then he tells Alex, “I wanna take mine of you with me.” Was this intentional or am I just a Lana stan who's just seeing too much and trying to find brethren?
ET: His last name is Grant because Grant is the street that I grew up on as a kid. But that quote is, I think, very beautiful.
AH: I'll take that as a sort of, “Yes.” The sound design in the movie – just to get into more technical and less emotional parts of the film – struck me because it's a small independent film, but you feel like you're surrounded [by the sound]. The vape crackle was one thing, even the pitter-patter on the floor. I saw that you have the Vern [Hass] on your sound team.
ET: Yeah, that's my boy!
AH: Talk about him, but also about the sound design of the film, because I find that in independent films, sound design can take you out or really pull you in.
ET: You are building a world from scratch with sound design. You have the raw dialogue and you are building the sonic world around it. We had an incredible team of sound designers, their names are John [Michael Keville] and Matt [Rollins] and they run their post services lab, Eden Post, and they were so instrumental in helping us design that. Vern helped us with first passes on the sound design and he's also helped us with some stuff after post. He's a good friend of mine, I think Vern is brilliant and so talented. John and Matt did so much heavy lifting to help us cross the finish line and they’re wizards with,
“How do we create this house to feel lived in, in a way that if we're just dealing with like the raw dialogue, what sounds are just creating the interior of this house? And how do we want that to make the audience feel?”
It sounds so subliminal and slight, but it's like the opposite. It creates your film, how an audience feels. It was one of my favorite parts of the process.
Blue Film is now playing in limited release and available on VOD platforms.
-August