Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

That was how Kay spoke to his brother, and in fact, eleven months later, they were sentenced to nine years in prison and a fine of 170,000 euros, including 120,000 to me as damages. To collect the money they auctioned everything those bastards owned. My revenge was to waste it on pointless things. I bought ten Louis Vuitton purses and gave them away to the girls I worked with at Eve Studios. I bought Kay a navy blue secondhand Porsche. I bought myself a John Galliano dress. I invited Kay, Dimitros, Laura, and Petra to dinner at the Tour d’Argent. The best thing I did was give away two-hundred-euro bills to those young gypsy women you see begging on the streets with children they claim are their own. It took me four days to spend everything, until I only had a few coins left, which I threw in the Seine. And I felt liberated.

I forgot to mention that the magazine Hot Vision called me again soon afterwards about the interview, as some clips from my movies were already showing on Canal+, which gained me a few points. The interview was excellent, and we were able to include Kay’s photographs, which were of outstanding quality, and the following year, for my role in The Tsarina of Sodom, I was nominated for the Golden Hot as best actress. Kay did everything he could to find out what kind of chance I stood. Through Eve Studios he discovered that seven of the thirty-five judges would definitely vote for me, but there were at least ten who leaned toward the lead actress in a movie by Wolfgang Brothers Productions, so when we arrived at the Cannes Festival, where the prize was being awarded, we had no idea what was going to happen.

The prize show began with the best American actors and actresses in the various categories: oral orgasm, heterosexual scene, anal orgasm, etc. Some time later, with the atmosphere heating up and cameras trained on the stage, the legendary Rocco Siffredi read out the nominees for the most promising European actress. I closed my eyes and when my name was called as prizewinner a warm wind lifted me above the audience. I went up to the platform while flashbulb popped and the music from the movie Rocky played, I don’t know if you remember it, the music that plays as he runs up a flight of steps.

When I received the statuette I cried, and said, I want to thank the organizers and the judges, and I want to dedicate this award to my love, the photographer Kay Staarsed. Also to the production company who made the movie, Eve Studios, to Petra Nove and Dimitros Aulica and all the colleagues who have worked so hard to make this distinction possible. I don’t suppose that in this kind of prizegiving it’s common to have someone mention their mother, but I will, wherever you are, Mamma, and I think you’re a long way away, in Mexico, I hope you feel proud of your daughter, because today she achieved something important, both in her profession and as a woman, many thanks, I dedicate it the women of the world who have had to fight to survive.

There was an ovation, and people came and hugged me. There I was, rubbing shoulders with Jade and Jenna Jameson, with Fred Coppula and Briana Banks and Kris Kramski, my God, the jet set of porn, I could never have imagined anything like this. That night we drank so much champagne that we forgot the name of our hotel, which of course wasn’t the Hotel Martínez or anything like that, but a modest Sofitel on the outskirts of the city, but we finally remembered it the next day, when Kay, I don’t know how, managed to find the key card to our room on the floor of the Porsche.

The next important change came soon afterwards, when Eve Studios joined forces with Pussy Films, in Los Angeles, and the budgets started growing, as did the sales figures. At that point Kay and I became partners and co-owners of Eve, with a 35 percent share.

We started to make pictures in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where there are more means, and a common language, and a more open attitude to the genre. Some films we made in two versions, one commercial, the other a “cult” version, as was the case with Morgana, in which I played the lead, and which was a hit in both versions. In sales, the commercial version exceeded all expectations, and the cult version, filmed in Épinay-sur-Seine, earned me a second nomination for the Golden Hot, which I didn’t win, obviously, as it’s not the done thing for somebody who isn’t already a legend to win it too often.

Morgana is the story of a young woman with mental powers that allow her to put ideas into the minds of men. She seduces them and does as she pleases with them, but although this seems just an enjoyable game at first, it gradually turns into something more dangerous. Morgana has a sister, Jessica, who has always been her rival and competed with her in everything. When they were younger, Jessica had better marks, men always fell in love with Jessica, treated her better, and although outwardly Morgana hadn’t minded it had made her suffer. There is nothing worse than competition between women, especially if they are sisters. So when Morgana becomes aware of her powers she’s happy, because it means she can stand out, but once she has gotten past that and starts to remember how bitter she felt as a teenager because of Jessica, she decides to plant in a particular man the desire to kill her. And that’s what she does. The strongest scenes are when we see Jessica being penetrated from behind by her murderer while her partner penetrates her from in front and two illegal immigrants from Liberia and Burkina Faso give the murderer a double anal fisting. I don’t know if any of you have seen Morgana, but I can assure you that the tension achieved in those scenes is incredible, when Jessica is penetrated by her murderer and on the other side of a two-way mirror Morgana watches everything with her lover. She is so excited at seeing her sister sodomized by a man obsessed with the idea of killing her, that she straddles her lover’s penis and they perform a truly amazing scene on the table.

This film made me feel that we ought to do more daring things, to innovate, and it was it this point that we met Kim Ji Lu, a screenwriter who had been fired by an American studio for writing things that were too complicated. For us, that was an excellent calling card, and we immediately started reading his screenplays. They were fantastic. There were sci-fi stories, westerns, comedies. We invited him to Paris and when he arrived we were amazed to see that he was really obese, at least 330 pounds, bald, with an ugly ponytail, and wearing a Hawaiian shirt that showed the sun rising over the Pacific. The type of person who doesn’t exist in Europe. Kim was an eloquent speaker. He told us about his origins in Asian cinema and his love of Wong Kar Wai and Kim Ki-Duk, Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou, and Takeshi Kitano. His literary influences included Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and the poetry of e. e. cummings and William Carlos Williams, and he also admired the techno-erotic paintings and images of H. R. Giger. Anyway, no sooner had he arrived than we spent a whole night listening to him, drinking martinis that he made himself, astonished by how highly cultured he was.

The first thing we did together was a really impressive piece called Vaginaland. It begins with a huge close-up of my cunt, filling the whole screen, which is then penetrated by a penis and as it does so turns into a curtain that opens and begins the story. The action takes place in a kingdom situated inside the vagina, where everyone worships the goddess V. and makes ritual sacrifices to her, which consist of outrageous orgies. Every inhabitant of Vaginaland has to offer at least one orgasm a day to the goddess V., and those who don’t are punished and sent to hell. And where is this hell? Again there is a full-screen shot of my vagina, but this time my body turns and what we see in close-up is my anus, which again is penetrated by a penis. This takes us into Anusland, the Country of the Damned.