Pam and Tommy director Craig Gillespie on talking genitals and Lily James’ shock transformation

Australian director Craig Gillespie reveals why he wanted to tell the story of the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape and how he pulled off the miniseries’ most outrageous scene.

When the first three episodes of Pam and Tommy arrive on February 2, there’s a fair chance that viewers will be talking about one scene more than any other – Tommy Lee’s talking penis.

In one of the more surreal and startling pieces of TV in recent times, the second episode of the eight-part drama, features the naked, bad-boy, Motley Crue drummer (played by Sebastian Stan), engaged in an animated conversation with his own genitalia as he processes how smitten he is with the woman he has met just days earlier, Baywatch pin-up Pamela Anderson (Lily James).

Australian director Craig Gillespie, the man behind last year’s Disney hit Cruella, says he was so surprised by the bizarreness of the scene that his first reaction was to wonder how it could possibly be true. But once he learned that the incident came from Lee’s own no-holds-barred memoir, Tommyland, it became a case of how to actually film it and keep the audience onside. Gillespie says that the game, up-for-anything Stan, whom he had also directed in I, Tonya, was the key.

Lily James and Sebastian Stan as Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee in a scene from Pam and Tommy. Photo by: Erin Simkin/Hulu

“Having Sebastian gave me that confidence because he can deal with these tonal situations and demand your attention as a performer and I knew that he wouldn’t back down from the challenge,” Gillespie says.

“I knew that he would do it with all the sincerity of what the subtext of the scene is, which is he has genuinely fallen in love and is declaring it to himself and that he’s unabashedly going to commit. So, that’s the undercurrent of it and the challenge of the absurd nature of it is always fun.”

That said, it still made for one hell of an awkward day at the office. Long discussions were had between Stan, Gillespie and an intimacy coach to make sure everyone was comfortable with the animatronic appendage, but the director says that “when you get to it, it becomes very mechanical”.

“Literally we have these four puppeteers working the animatronic, hunched down below camera,” Gillespie explains. “Then it’s a range of performance – like how much is too much? And again, with his performance, the sincerity of it and the genuine conflicted nature of it, it’s all of that. So you get very much in the zone of how do we make this work as opposed to maybe stepping back going ‘what are we doing?’”

Australian director Craig Gillespie says he wanted to tell the real story of the infamous Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee sex tape. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

Pam and Tommy tells the true-life tale of one of the odder chapters in pop culture history when the newlywed rock star and actor – they married on a beach having known each other for four days – were unwittingly pushed into the public gaze when their private sex tape was stolen by a disgruntled contractor who was working their house.

Seeing a way to make back the money he thought he was owed, former porn star Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen), hit upon the idea of selling the tape, and when no company would touch the stolen goods, set about distributing it on the then-fledgling internet. Soon enough, the footage became widely available and the pair quickly became a punchline, rather than the victims of a serious crime. Gillespie saw parallels with the Tonya Harding story he’d dramatised for I, Tonya, in that the version that the public remembered was not necessarily the whole story.

“That’s the tragedy of it,” he agrees. “It did become a punch line instead of a crime and it’s amazing the willingness of our society to just roll with that. At the time I had the vague recollection of seeing it on late-night talk shows and SNL (Saturday Night Live) skits and things.

“I had some sense that they must have been complicit in some way. I mean, they must have profited somehow, like ‘why do it?’ and never really thought about it much. And then so when it came to actually reading this, it was just unbelievable like it was in their home safe, in their garage, personal property that was stolen and they had no recourse and then were just abused in the media.”

Lily James is playing agains type as Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson. Picture: Erica Parise/Hulu

English actor Lily James – best known for more wholesome fare such as Downton Abbey and the title role in Disney’s live action Cinderella – was already on board as Anderson when Gillespie got the directing gig, but the Aussie filmmaker says he’s always fascinated to help a well-known actor surprise by doing something unexpected.

“We haven’t seen her doing a role like this before, so that part was really exciting,” he says. “Having seen a lot of her work prior to this, I knew that she is a brilliant actor and incredibly accessible to the audience and we really needed that.”

The first picture of the heavily-inked, slightly unhinged looking Stan as Lee and a heavily inflated, bleached-blonde James as Anderson nearly blew up the internet when it was released last year. Gillespie says that physical transformation was important for both, but for James in particular he wanted to use facial prosthetics sparingly, not just due to time constraints, but also so that he could better see her performance beneath it. Even so, it took James six months of training, four-hours in the make-up chair every day and a specially tailored breast piece to achieve the famous Anderson physique.

Sebastian Stan is brave and mesmerising as rock bad boy Tommy Lee. Picture: Erin Simkin/Hulu

“It’s almost like putting on an outfit,” Gillespie says. “For Lily to be able to be able to do that transformation helps her get lost in the character in a good way.”

Pam and Tommy is based largely on a long Rolling Stone profile from 2014. There’s also input from other sources but both Lee and Anderson declined to be involved, and the latter rebuffed James’ attempts to contact her to talk about the project. Surely proceeding without their express permission runs the risk of invading their privacy all over again?

Gillespie says he respects Anderson’s decision but says his intention was to “change the narrative” and the preconceived notions of the whole episode.

“Understanding the outrageousness and how heinous it was, what happened to them, we get to look at them with a different perspective and in an unjudgmental way,” he says. “I felt like that opportunity was worth taking. And to see it through today’s lens and how we’ve changed as a culture in so many ways, and in some ways, how we haven’t. We tried to be as empathetic as possible and I wouldn’t have been interested in the story if it wasn’t about creating a new dialogue.”

Pam and Tommy is streaming on Disney+ from February 2.

Originally published as Pam and Tommy director Craig Gillespie on talking genitals and Lily James’ shock transformation