To put it another way, we also don’t keep a hurricane watch here, just because the Gulf of Mexico has that problem. I also don’t think that not using condoms is a single reason for the AIDS epidemic, otherwise everybody in Slovakia would be dead already. I know very few people in this country who use condoms, and all the rest are perfectly healthy. I suspect that it has something to do also with alcohol, drug abuse, promiscuity and the whole gay party/club culture—that’s what creates a really deadly mix. I’d also like to say that I carefully followed the situation for twenty years before coming to this conclusion. It doesn’t mean, of course, that something can’t happen tomorrow on my set. But the chance a model would die in a car accident is about a thousand times higher. As for encouraging the viewer: I don’t encourage and I don’t promote. If I did, I’d be much richer now. I promoted condoms and healthy sex for seventeen years in my films. In exchange for my goodwill, I lost about thirty percent of my customers at one point. I am unaware of a single case of somebody paying for my films simply because I was promoting safe sex. But I got a lot of hate mail for being “vanilla” and “boring”. “
There is nothing wrong with bareback / condom free movies. I wish certain studios would get off their high horse already. Do you watch a slasher movie and go out and kill someone? Condom free movies and what someone chooses to do – or not do – in the privacy of their bedroom, are 2 different things.
Bel Ami is the only company in this business which (in seventeen years) hasn’t had a single case of ANY STD on the set.
George Duroy says, “I have the good luck to work in a country where, in the first twenty-five years of the AIDS epidemic, only eight people died of HIV infection as compared to 400,000 in the U.S. If I lived in California, I certainly wouldn’t shoot without condoms, but I see no special reason to stick to the same rules here.
Eight deaths in twenty-five years doesn’t constitute an epidemic—many more people die of ordinary flu here. Therefore, I think that while in the U.S. bareback equals Russian roulette, it is here merely condom-free.