Adult Time Delivers ‘Birth’ With Star-Studded Hollywood Premiere

LOS ANGELES — Adult Time debuted its award-season feature “Birth” — directed by Bree Mills and co-starring Casey Calvert, Seth Gamble, and Leana Lovings — with a red-carpet premiere on Saturday night at the Bourbon Room in the heart of Hollywood.

The event featured the first public unveiling of a specially edited SFW version of the horror thriller, now a tradition for Mills after giving her previous, pre-pandemic features “Teenage Lesbian” and “Perspective” the same treatment.

The premiere started with a star-studded red carpet inside the Bourbon Room, which features a bar and a large night-club space with table service, a full stage and film-screening capabilities. The trendy Hollywood venue is decorated with classic film and music memorabilia, which provided a suitable backdrop to a catered buffet and cocktails, enjoyed in a relaxed atmosphere by cast, crew and the invitation-only industry crowd.

The screening of “Birth” itself was the first time that the stars, the production crew — including Pig Machine’s Siouxsie Q and Michael Vegas, which co-produced the title with Mills — and all the guests were able to watch the award-winning director’s realized vision.

It would give too much away to spell out if “Birth” is a horror movie or a suspense thriller. The story is told from the point of view of Calvert’s character, putting it in the psychological tradition of Hitchcock’s “woman in peril” stories and also Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” the subgenre those films spawned, carefully chronicled by Kier-La Janisse in her book “House of Psychotic Women.” Mills has also mentioned as an influence the tone of more recent fare, like the psychological horror made popular by the A24 studio with modern cult classics like Ari Aster’s “Midsommar.”

Calvert gives a career-best performance as a woman first trying to get pregnant and then going through her whole pregnancy while harboring increasing suspicions about her distant, manipulative husband, played by the always pitch-perfect Gamble. Lovings enters the story halfway through the feature as a religiously devout doula, providing a heightened dose of eeriness around Calvert’s character and her reproductive ordeals. Although a relative newcomer compared to her co-stars, Lovings surprises holding her own opposite two of the industry’s mos reliable acting talents.

But ultimately it’s Calvert’s show, as she physically and psychologically transforms, helped by a Hollywood-quality prosthetic belly that keeps growing parallel to her suspicions and mental deterioration. Calvert gives a nuanced, empathetic performance that avoids clichés and also bears witness to the careful work between Mills and her actors, all of whom improvised their dialogue based on the director’s scene prompts.

Mills told XBIZ that it was a real thrill to show “Birth” in a theater setting to all her collaborators and industry friends.

“I love to be transgressive,” she explained. “I like to evoke emotion, so it was really fun to watch the movie open with sex moments, which always instigate a kind of nervous laughter, and having it go from laughter to awkward laughter, to groans, to silence, to people going, ‘Oh God no.’ So I felt like I took people on a rollercoaster where they thought they were gonna get something, and then it started to get increasingly weirder and darker and more fucked up. And that was a joy to watch!”

Mills added that the natural effectiveness of the improvised nature of the dialogue was possible because she sees her job as helping the actors get into the mindset of their character.

“We all worked a lot together in pre-production, so I met with all of them, and I intentionally met with Casey separately, Seth separately, Casey and Seth together, Seth and Leanna together, but never Casey and Leanna together,” she elaborated. “We just spent a lot of time talking about the truth behind the story, and we talked a lot about who these people were. I also had them do all the styling themselves as part of their character prep. By the time we started filming, they knew who they were for the next two weeks. And the proof is in the performances.”

Mills said that her goal was to give Calvert a role that went beyond what everybody in the industry already knows about her.

“Sure, she’s an amazing performer, and has an incredible talent — but I wanted to give her something that was just gonna blow everybody’s minds,” she concluded.

Calvert confirmed to XBIZ that this was the first time she had seen the final result of their hard work.

“Bree offered to show it to me, but I decided not to watch it before the screening. But it didn’t feel totally surprising, because I lived the story while we were shooting it. Watching it with a group of my friends and see what people reacted to was very fun. And people overreacting to the enormous jar of Vaseline was amazing! I did actually put so much Vaseline inside of me, it was awful,” she laughed.

“Seth is amazing and so incredibly talented, and it was wonderful working with Leanna. She’s absolutely perfect for this role. She did so much research into the things that she needed to say to be in character. It was incredibly impressive and I think it shows in the film. There was a lot of stuff that her and I did, little subtle things, to try to be opposites from each other. A lot of work went into that.”

For Calvert the two scenes where she confronts Gamble’s character and their emotions are allowed to flare up were special both on set and on the screen.

“Seth and I really get into it,” she said about her long-time colleague and friend. “We did a lot of workshopping. We spent a lot of time working on the dialog for those things and dialing it. That was that was an incredibly enjoyable process.”

Gamble told XBIZ that he was proud of how he “got the point across of how big of a piece of shit my character was in this movie. It was a very difficult experience to go through, and I had to do a lot of self care afterwards. I’m really proud of what we did. Bree pulled off a great movie and Casey was absolutely incredible. I do believe it’s the performance of her career.”

The veteran performer and actor added that he has been working for Mills since she started directing, and has seen a clear evolution leading to “Birth.”

“By now she knows exactly what she wants,” Gamble offered. “She gave the exact story she wanted to tell, and she helped all of us bring out very challenging roles in each other throughout. Me, her and Casey getting to do this together, because of the road that we all traveled together is really amazing.”

Lovings told XBIZ that she jumped into the role of someone who was at once as despicable as possible, but who at the same time did not see herself as the villain.

“She saw everything that she was doing as justified,” Lovings reflected. “She thought everything was destined to be, because she kind of fell into the desires of one man. It’s woman being pitted against woman for their own self-interest. It was very sad, but I really took the time to develop the character, and I wasn’t allowed to meet with Casey until after they had filmed specific scenes so that we would have as much tension as possible when we were finally behind the camera.”

Sharing the screen with Calvert and Gamble, Lovings noted, was “so incredibly humbling. I feel very honored to have had the opportunity to act alongside them, to learn alongside them. I’m very proud to have been able to be here to share this experience with them.”

For Lovings, “Birth” is further proof that Mills is a one-of-a-kind creative talent.

“She is such a fantastic representation of what porn can be,” Lovings concluded. “Her ideas are so wild and fantastic, and it’s so wonderful to be a part of her creation.”

To watch the explicit version of “Birth,” visit AdultTime.com.