Interview with Wendy Slick, Director of Passion and Power

In Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm producers and directors Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori chronicle the fascinating story of a simple invention with big ramifications—the vibrator. I interviewed Wendy Slick, who’ll also be on hand for a Q&A after the film’s showing at the San Francisco Women’s Film Festival on Friday, April 11, 2008.

Q: How did you and Emiko Omori (co-producer and co-director) decide to work together?

A: Emiko and I have been friends and colleagues for over thirty-five years; this is not our first big project together. We worked together on Emiko’s drama, Hot Summer Winds, about the lives of Japanese Americans before World War II. Emiko directed and wrote it, and I produced it. We have similar aesthetics and get along really well; and thus, we work together well.

The idea for this particular film came when Emiko and I were at Sundance for another film. Rachel Maines’ book [on which the film is based] had just come out. One of our friends, a filmmaker named Pat Ferrero, had hired Maines for her film, Quilts in Women’s Lives. When Maines finished her book, she was inundated with film offers, so she called up Pat for advice. Pat suggested we do the film. Emiko and I were both kids of the 60s and when we read the book, it really resonated with us; it’s a very incredible topic. So we wrote a proposal and bid on it and got it. It wasn’t just a money issue; I think we approached the subject with humor and intelligence.

Making the film took about seven to eight years. It opened at the Lincoln Center.

Q: How did you find funding for this film?

A: We thought finding funding was going to be easy, because the movie deals with sex. However, this turned out not to be the case. We went to top funding levels of PBS, and were almost given funding from them three times, but at the last minute, some programmer would step in and say no. It seems our society is ready for a lurid discussion of sex or an intellectual one—we fall somewhere in between.