Young People Fucking: Or, Ways Tease Your Audience

by Andrew Gnerre | Published September 4, 2008

If you’re in the process of making a movie right now, you might want to pause and learn a quick marketing lesson from Martin Gero, director and co-writer of the new comedy Young People Fucking. Yep, that’s the lesson right there: Grab people’s attention with your title.

The Canadian film, which hit select U.S. theaters Friday, August 29, 2008, is as honest and unflinching as the title, but the chances of many people seeing it, let alone $400,000 worth in Canada, would have been slim were it not for the intriguing title. Gero himself admits as much. “At the end of the day, we’re a Canadian film, we really have no bankable stars, so to speak, and certainly no one’s like, ‘Oh awesome! Another Martin Gero movie!’” Continues the first-time director, “We needed some sort of hook. A title’s job is to be provocative and interesting. I think we’ve done that very well.”

Shortly before the film’s U.S. release, Gero spoke with MM about whether or not sticking with the title was worth drawing the ire of the Canadian government (who tried to retroactively deny the film tax credits) and how to prep a set for non-stop sex scenes.

Andrew Gnerre (MM): Now that you’re a bit removed from Young People Fucking, what are your general feelings on the film’s title? It seems to have brought on both good and bad repercussions.

Martin Gero (MG): I think the good has far outweighed the bad.

The only problem is, I think, [with] a title like that the audience brings a certain amount of baggage of what they expect the movie to be if and when they come. I think people come in expecting Shortbus. And it’s not Shortbus.

MM: One interesting thing about the film is that the stories aren’t actually connected aside from the subject matter. How did that affect the writing process?

MG: [Co-writer]Aaron [Abrams] and I had never written anything together. This is kind of the perfect movie for two guys who weren’t used to writing together to write.

He would go off and write one in its entirety and I would go off and write one in its entirety, then swap and rewrite each other’s work. We’d write another one, swap. We wrote it in two different cities, mostly over the Internet.

MM: So that was the original idea you had? To have separate stories?

MG: Yeah. The idea for the movie was… We love romantic comedies but they’re pretty sexless. And sex comedies are very virginal. So we wanted to do something that was adult and had to do with us.

You can’t ever have those stories intersect because all the situations have to do with conflict, and the second you cut to a coffee shop where someone’s talking about what’s going on, you’ve diffused all of that conflict and have to ramp it back up again. Once we started those stories there was no reason to leave and force them to intersect.

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