Interview: Elliot Tuttle on ‘Blue Film’
It would be an understatement to say that there is truly nothing like Blue Film.
The debut feature from filmmaker Elliot Tuttle, which just had its world premiere in-competition at the 2025 Edinburgh International Film Festival, takes place in just one location (an Airbnb rental in LA) and chronicles an intense, shocking encounter between camboy Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore) and Hank, a mysterious stranger paying for his company (Reed Birney). What begins as a transactional meeting spirals into something far more unsettling, as the night exposes a buried connection between the two men and drags them back into the wreckage of a past they thought they’d left behind.
According to Tuttle, the choice to contain the story in one space was both a creative and practical one. “I wanted it to be very producible,” he says. “I liked this kind of idea of an echo chamber of perversion, like there being no escape, except for maybe the humor that these two characters might bring in. I liked the idea that there was not a lot of breathing room — that for 90 minutes, you couldn’t leave this Airbnb either. It kind of forces you to listen to the movie.”
It would be doing the film a disservice to spill all of its secrets, but the subject matter at the heart of Blue Film is genuinely shocking, one that is rarely explored through the medium of film nowadays. And for good reason. Not every filmmaker can be trusted to handle such a distressing topic with the care, nuance and sensitivity it requires. But throughout the course of the film’s lean 87-minute runtime, Tuttle proves he is more than up for the challenge, handling the story with a precision that never feels exploitative, instead building a slow, suffocating tension that will stay with audiences brave enough to go on this journey far after the credits roll.
That tension is carried by the two central performances. Reed Birney delivers a career-best turn as Hank, the quiet but unnerving presence at the center of the storm. “Reed was always my first choice,” Tuttle says. “I thought it was going to be much more difficult to cast that part. He liked it enough to at least take a meeting with me, and then he said yes. It was a little bit of a shock to me. I think Reed was robbed of an Oscar nomination for Mass. He’s an incredible actor, and he deserves to be a star.”
But the film is by far and large Moore’s. He is a revelation as Aaron, embodying both the surface bravado of a camboy persona and the raw vulnerability of a man stripped back to something he thought he’d long buried. And while Moore has previously been in many TV shows, most notably this year’s acclaimed Code of Silence, Blue Film marks his film debut, a fact that’s hard to believe considering the confidence with which he tackles the role. “Kieran blew us away in the room,” Tuttle recalls. “He brought this kind of hulking physicality that the movie really needed. It was brutish, but also fragile in moments. And he came in already deeply engaged with the material. He’d just read a book on pervert ideology before he even got the job, which stunned me. He really did bring something to the character that wasn’t there on the page.”
Blue Film will undoubtedly start many heated, crucial conversations, as it already did following its world premiere in Edinburgh. But it’s important to note that the film doesn’t merely rely on shock or provocation. Once the immediate jolt fades, what remains is something far more haunting: a chamber piece that dares to wrestle with sexuality, religion, and the question of whether our lives are shaped more by predisposition or by circumstance.
For Tuttle, making a film this uncompromising felt necessary, particularly in the current cultural climate. While the film is not at all an endorsement of the behavior it depicts (quite the contrary), it refuses to look away from it, presenting a stark, unflinching portrait without judgment. A blunt, clear-eyed portrayal that doesn’t excuse, doesn’t glorify, doesn’t look away, but instead asks audiences to listen and form their own judgement. “I just think the idea that every character needs to be a moral guiding light for the viewer is pretty disgusting,” he says. “And the whole sex scene discourse drives me insane — people asking, ‘Is it necessary to the plot?’ Sometimes it’s just more exciting to watch bodies on screen than to sit through another plot point. I think we’ve lost the way a little bit. America, specifically, because I think that there’s this unspoken pact amongst queer tastemakers in the US that we kind of have to be impenetrable right now. But that’s so boring. I understand that desire, I guess, but it’s a little dispiriting that we have to make ourselves palatable to others for acceptance.”
It’s worth noting that Blue Film‘s journey to the screen wasn’t particularly challenging. Tuttle managed to complete the script and assemble the film’s incredibly talented cast and crew in the span of a few months, while the actual shoot itself took about two weeks to complete. The film’s journey to the festival circuit, however, is a different story. Perhaps due to the current social and political climate, many festivals in the US have been apprehensive about screening the film – despite the amount of praise festival programmers have heaped on it. But the film feels right at home in Edinburgh, amongst an exciting, genuinely propulsive line-up that was designed to challenge audiences rather than appease them.
“I love it,” says Tuttle of Edinburgh. “I’ve been aware of Edinburgh’s legacy as a festival but I’ve never been to the UK before. This is amazing. I really love being here. The the history of this festival is incredible. And so many of my favorite films of the past 10 years have have screened here. So it is really an honor. You don’t really see this kind of risky programming a lot. I just saw Ondine Viñao‘s Two Neighbors last night. I really thought it was incredible. And I was so happy to see it at a festival. This is why people come to festivals, for discoveries like these. I feel like the festival landscape has gotten more risk averse and quite frankly, a little boring. And so it’s really wonderful to come here and have an experience like that, and to have my film so warmly embraced.”
BLUE FILM premiered in-competition at the 2025 Edinburgh International Film Festival.