Working Girls depicts a day in the life of several prostitutes working in an Upper East Side condo apartment. It's told largely through the eyes of Molly Louise Smith , a lesbian woman with an Ivy League education. In preparation for the film, director Lizzie Borden spent six months interviewing sex workers in various economic situations about their working conditions and how they felt about their occupation. Several women who I knew during the course of making Born in Flames were sex workers.
I was in an environment where sex work was intriguing to me and the idea of demystifying sex work became Working Girls. I thought, nobody really knows what middle class sex work is, and they have preconceptions about it. Both were romanticized in movies or reality. Working Girls was more a film about work than it was about sex. Some people went into this movie thinking it was about sex.
That actually derailed me as a filmmaker because a lot of people thought I was an erotic filmmaker, and those were the scripts I was offered. But this was meant to be the least erotic film you could ever see. You were meant to be a fly on the wall to see what women experienced about the men coming in.
And none of the women have perfect bodies and you see that too. Lizzie Borden 1. Lizzie Borden : One of the reasons I felt it was really important to go into the bedroom in Working Girls was to demystify what happens. So often, movies about prostitution stop before you get to see what actually goes on. In the bedroom I wanted to focus on the economics of prostitution, as the economics work out visually in this ritualistic exchange of goods: the condom, the exchange of money, putting the sheets on the bed.
There are some things I doubt men ever see: a woman lying on the floor putting in the diaphragm or washing blood out of it. And the issue of hygiene was interesting. A prostitute is constantly washing all these men off, gargling with Listerine and brushing her teeth. Those were the things that fascinated me. I totally designed the bedroom shots. We [Borden and Director of Photography Judy Irola] collaborated a lot on the downstairs shooting, where there were a lot of dollies.
