After being selected for last year's ultimately cancelled Cannes Film Festival, the provocative drama Pleasure finally made its world premiere at Sundance this past week, and Collider was lucky enough to speak with the film's writer-director Ninja Thyberg, as well as its courageous star Sofia Kappel.

Kappel plays a 19 year-old Swedish girl named Bella Cherry who moves to LA with the goal of becoming the next big porn star. The sexually explicit film doesn't shy away from the difficult realities of the porn industry, which has embraced aggressive and degrading videos featuring rough sex that involves spitting, choking, slapping and hair-pulling. For Thyberg, the film was the culmination of a long journey, and as any great director should, she speaks like an expert on the subject.

"I've been interested in porn as a subject for 20 years now, and for many different reasons," said Thyberg. "I started out as an anti-porn activist, so that's how the journey began. There are so many different reasons why this subject fascinates me, and one of the reasons is that it's taboo and no one wants to talk about it. And also I am very interested in gender roles and media images and how those affect our identities, so when it comes to porn, it's really very traditional gender roles taken to their most extreme form."

People don't make a habit of openly discussing their porn preferences because it's considered tacky or inappropriate, but believe me, almost everyone you know is consuming pornography on the internet, and there really is no shame in that.

"They say that 80 percent of all the traffic on the internet is porn. People consume this insane amount of porn, so of course it's something that really affects us and is a huge part of our culture, but it exists in a world of shadows. No one wants to talk about it and we don't really acknowledge it publicly. That's why I feel like this film really needs to exist, because this is something that exists," said Thyberg, who explained that she wanted to reverse the male gaze that dominates heterosexual porn because she's interested in exploring power from different angles.

Kappel said she was super nervous and "shaking" at her first audition, but once Thyberg put her at ease and made her feel safe, the young actress eventually empowered by the physically demanding role.

"I wouldn't say there's anything about the movie that 'scared' me, but there were things that were very challenging... but I think that there's a huge difference," said Kappel. "Of course, I needed to have a lot of courage to do this movie, because I'm giving a lot of myself, but I think the hardest part was [knowing] that I'm so much like Bella, so sometimes I had trouble keeping them separate and knowing who is Sofia and who is Bella. It was hard sometimes, but Bella is a great girl, so I don't mind.

Though Thyberg didn't initially intend to do so, she wound up surrounding Kappel with an ensemble of performers who had actual experience in the world of porn.

"That wasn't my ambition. I knew I wanted some people, because that's how I'd worked before," Thyberg said of combining professional actors with non-professionals. The director was aiming for something specific and wanted to cast people who had lived that porn experience in order to do it justice. She still auditioned actors, they just didn't get the part because the non-pros "just did it better, and it was much more believable. There was such a difference auditioning them. I do a lot of improv [on set] and people in the porn world were able to improvise," said Thyberg. And when the director didn't know about certain technical details, she knew she could fall back on the expertise of her cast. "That was a relief for me," she said.

Thyberg began doing research for Pleasure back in 2014, and it took a long time to earn the trust of porn professionals, though she kept an open mind and was honest about her own preconceptions of the industry. "I think they felt that I was honest in my ambition of really getting to know them. One person would introduce me to the next one, and it didn't take me that long to get access to shoots and visit porn sets," said Thyberg. "I didn't go to the famous porn stars at the beginning. It was the crew members, who aren't used to people chasing them or wanting to interview them. The crew weren't used to someone paying them that much interest, so that was a good way to start, and then after spending so much time there, after a while, everybody just got used to me and just saw me as a part of their community, I think."

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