If you believe that sex addiction is a ‘guy thing’ or that it’s a fun-filled, nonstop orgy of pleasure and fun, all you need to do is watch the opening scene of Thirstygirl. This is where we first meet Charlie – inside a filthy public toilet. She is breathlessly zooming into a photo of a naked man, sending suggestive selfies and frantically Googling gangbang porn before she starts masturbating. There is nothing glamorous or alluring about the way first-time director Alexandra Qin portrays sex addiction. It’s a cold and sobering depiction of a compulsive and uncontrollable behaviour which, instead of satisfaction, brings shame to her lead character, straining her already fragile relationship with her sister as the two drive to a rehabilitation centre. Loosely based on her own experiences with sex and love, drug and alcohol addiction, Qin’s ten-minute proof of concept short dances between comedy and drama but it never loses depth or authenticity for even a split second. It’s a film that’s at once revealing and concealing and one that cements the director as one to admire and keep a close eye on. We are thrilled to premiere Qin’s film on DN today, along with an interview where we talk about her inspirations, learning the craft of filmmaking as she went along and what to expect from the feature.
With a background in software engineering and prison reform activism, I’m curious about what led you to write Thirstygirl.
I have always been in love with movies. Ever since I was a kid, movies were my escape, my church, my joy but I never imagined that I could be the one to make them. I didn’t grow up knowing anyone who made films or anyone who was a professional artist. Even though I loved art, I considered myself to be very artistically untalented, and I was always very good at the sciences so it made sense for me to pursue that in college. After a decade-long career as a software engineer and then as the founder and CEO of a nonprofit, I got sober from drugs and alcohol, which led me to start making a lot of art in my free time to cope with all my emotions, and my latent childhood dream resurfaced. After spending a year saying out loud almost every day, “I want to make a movie,” I finally got the courage to start writing my first screenplay, the feature version of Thirstygirl.
When I sat down to start writing, I knew that my first film had to be about sex addiction, because that’s the addiction that had brought the most pain to my life, as well as the one that I felt was the least understood in society. I wrote the film I wish I had seen when I was hitting bottom. The film that could have said to me: “You’re not a bad person. And there is hope.”
You have openly talked about your drug, alcohol and sex addiction. How did your personal experience inform the film’s narrative and was it always helpful or did it make some scenes harder to write/shoot?
Thirstygirl is very much inspired by my personal experience. While the plot is completely fabricated, the characters and family relationships are 100% taken from my life, which feels like a great rule of thumb for writing semi-autobiographical stories. I think I started writing the film at the perfect time in terms of having enough distance from the most painful events of my addiction ‘bottom’, but being close enough that they still felt very vivid and real when I needed to draw from them for scenes. By the time I got on set, the story was its own thing and it didn’t feel like I needed to be truthful to ‘what really happened’ at all. I was free to be truthful to Charlie’s story.
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Thirstygirl depicts sex addiction in a more nuanced and compassionate way to how we usually see it portrayed on film. Why was this important to you?
There are a number of films and shows about sex addiction that I love, like Shame, Nymphomaniac, and Fleabag, to name a few. But when I reflected on my own experience with sex addiction and what these films did in their portrayal of it, I felt that something was missing. I felt like we were always held at arm’s length from the protagonist. Not fully let into their inner world. Or not invited to understand why they were this way. And rarely (if ever) given a glimpse into what healing would look like for them. I wanted to make a film that shared the biggest truth I learned in my recovery journey: that addiction is the opposite of connection. The first goal of this film has always been to help people who are struggling with sex/porn addiction, or any addiction. And it was also very important to me to make a sex addiction film where the protagonist is an Asian woman, which is something I had never seen.
I wanted to make a film that shared the biggest truth I learned in my recovery journey: that addiction is the opposite of connection
Tell me about the casting process. What were you looking for in your lead and co-lead actors?
It was hard to cast the lead role of Charlie. Thankfully, I had an amazing casting director and producer, Brooke Goldman. We initially had an open casting call for New York, where I live and where we shot the film, but we weren’t finding her there, so we opened it up to the entirety of the U.S. Charlie had to have this very specific quality that I’ve rarely seen in an Asian actress – I think because of the scarcity of complex roles that are available for actresses of Asian descent. The best way to describe it is: Charlie is a slut, but you can’t tell. And she’s got something very dark behind her eyes.
After a couple months, we finally found our lead, Samantha Ahn. As soon as I saw her face, I knew it was her. She’s an incredibly talented and intuitive actor. Folks who meet her always say she’s nothing like Charlie in real life. That’s how good she is. Once we found our Charlie, we found our Nic soon after. Nic had to be vulnerable and have that ‘little sister’ quality of being funny, annoying, and chaotic. We did a chemistry read with Samantha Ahn and Claire Makenzie (who is also a fantastic actor) where we had them sit next to each other and hold hands, and they just started crying. It was magical. And it just so happened that Sam and Claire look 100% like sisters too. I got so lucky with the two of them and they were absolute dreams to work with. And they’re still close like sisters to this day!
There seems to be a correlation between the lead character’s mental state and the aesthetic, more pointedly the colour grade and lighting of the film. Is that real or am I imagining it?
It is real! That was a big part of our incredible DP Fletcher Wolfe’s vision for the cinematography. We assigned colors to Charlie’s mental state. Red was the color of her addiction. Cyan was the color of her shame. The soft orange in the last couple scenes was the color of the connection between the sisters. I love this aspect of the film and am very proud of how the cinematography turned out. Huge props to Fletcher, who really guided me, a first-time director, through the process of designing it.
Red was the color of her addiction. Cyan was the color of her shame. The soft orange in the last couple scenes was the color of the connection between the sisters.
This being your film debut, what were the big lessons that you learnt from the experience? Were there any unexpected challenges on set or in post?
Literally everything was a lesson! The biggest lesson I learned was how to weather the emotional ups and downs of making a film. It is such a scary journey. There are moments where it feels like the film will never be good. I spent a whole month depressed during the edit, convinced that everything was lost. But you just have to keep going and not give up until the film is as good as it can be. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel if you can persevere and be open to what the film wants to be.
One fun (and terrifying) challenge we encountered on set was losing the sound for the last scene of the film. It was too late in the day to reshoot and it was our last day. Thankfully, our editor and creative producer (and my wonderful husband) Esteban Pedraza came up with a great solution. He and the sound mixer took the two leads into a car and recorded them running through the scene 20 times while we were setting up the next shot. And he was able to match up one of the takes to the scene we shot earlier that day. It worked out perfectly and you’d never be able to tell!
There’s a light at the end of the tunnel if you can persevere and be open to what the film wants to be.
What do you hope the audience will take away from the film?
I hope that folks who are struggling with addiction can feel seen, and maybe a little less alone. And I hope that folks who have no experience with addiction can have some more understanding and compassion for those of us who struggle with it. All I really want is for the film to make people feel something.
Can you give us a hint about what happens to Charlie and Nic next?
Charlie and Nic get into way worse and way funnier situations. They get stranded in a small coal town in West Virginia on their way to Kentucky. Little by little, we learn about their past, their parents, and why they both became addicts. Charlie’s sex addiction boils up to the surface to a point where she can no longer contain it and it leads to a huge reckoning for the both of them. And we meet an amazing and unique cast of characters along the way. But don’t worry, it all ends well for the two of them. Well, mostly 🙂
What advice would you give other first-time film directors who are thinking of pursuing their passion for filmmaking?
Just start ASAP. Write your first film now. Direct your first film now. You don’t have to go to film school. I sure didn’t. I spent at least twenty years of my life dreaming of making movies and doing absolutely nothing about it. I would be such a better filmmaker by now if I had started even a couple years sooner! But I don’t regret starting when I did. I think part of the reason I have so many stories to tell is that I have lived enough life to do so.
