Clark Gregg on the set of Choke Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

Q&A: Choke Star Sam Rockwell
Q&A: Choke Author Chuck Palahniuk
Choke Review

Somewhere along the line, Clark Gregg got a hold of the novel Choke by Chuck Palahniuk, and after reading the titillating tome about a sex addict slash grifter slash possible messiah, he decided it would make a great romantic comedy. Fast forward five years later, and Gregg is now the proud author and director of Choke, which opens September 26th. Gregg, who wrote the screenplay for 2000's What Lies Beneath and currently stars in The New Adventures of Old Christine, also has a small role in the movie as the bewigged Lord High Charlie, one of the employees at the colonial village that Choke's protagonist, Victor Mancini, works at (when Victor's not boffing teachers on school trips or trying to seduce the milkmaid).

When Gregg, as Lord High Charlie, wasn't sputtering "thy's" and "thou's" at his stoned and horny stable of fake villagers, he was behind the camera, directing one of the stranger entries (heh) into current cinema — a date movie for perverts.

What was the whole Sundance experience like for you — bringing your baby to Sundance and having it get picked up there?
Well... it was six and a half years, I think, from the time I read the book to when we started shooting in New Jersey last summer. It went from being this tremendously slow painstaking [process] — rewrite, look around for money, try to get the thing put together — to light speed... We finished it three days before it screened. [We] arrived in Park City, showed it to 850 people who laughed much more than I thought they were going to, and even though I'd been sat down by all the lawyers and agents involved with the movie that day that said this is a disastrous Sundance where 32 movies have shown and zero have been bought, an hour and half later at a nightclub Fox Searchlight shows up en masse and says they want to buy the movie, so it was very, very pumpkinish, and suddenly it was very Cinderella.

Can you talk about handling the sex in the movie? Because obviously, you really are out there, the movie is so out there, and I just wonder about how you approached that quality of the content, and how aware you were of keeping it with an R-rating?
I knew I wanted it to be an R-rating, not necessarily because of the difficulty of getting it seen by people, you know. I had no interest of doing it in a vacuum. I wanted this material to connect to people. I thought the sexuality was a very, very important part of it and needed to be as unflinchingly put up there as Chuck Palahniuk had put it in the book. But at the same time, I never had any interest in being shocking for shocking's sake... I think the most shocking stuff happens in your mind, so that the aesthetic I was going for was to kind of find that line where everything that needed to be there to have it feel like a truthful representation of a sexual compulsive's life needed to be there, but at the same time, my personal taste is such that I always find those things most powerful and affecting where the thing that would push it over the edge is kept just off screen, and that's really how I try to do it. I wanted people to walk out feeling that they had just watched something a little bit shocking, but then when they went back through it trying to remember what they had actually seen, they'd have to realize that their genital count was extremely low.

Are there any scenes left on the cutting room floor for censorship issues or continuity issues?
No, nothing. You know, because I had approached it from that point of view, there wasn't... We were looking to keep everything in there that kind of pushed the envelope in terms of... I think it's important in telling the story to have it really reflect how much human connection is turned into just a bunch of body parts for a person who's this intimacy challenged and this sexually dysfunctional. And yet when it came time to kind of submit it for an R-rating, we got it the first time. We had to cut nothing, in terms of content. There was stuff that I shot that we had to cut because it didn't work story-wise, but nothing because, you know, otherwise we'd be in trouble.