Viv Thomas is neither about the screaming and bellowing and swearing, nor the hairy bobbing man-arse

Viv Thomas, 60, is a globetrotting European pornographer whose models are sophisticated but eager, long-limbed but fleshy in the right places, polyamorous and polyglottal. He has created an adult niche safely between the utter degeneracy and the gauzy inaccessibility that bookends Europorn, providing that status-conscious continent with a thriving upper middle class. Of boobs.

Born in South Africa, Thomas now makes his headquarters in the Algarve, a coastal region in the south of Portugal, where he and his crew run VivThomas.com.

Thomas began shooting adult material in his 30’s following a car accident.

We talked about Thomas’ aesthetic and the changes he has seen in the adult world since he began working in this arena.

Gram: Here in the United States, people get in car accidents while looking at pornography, yet you had your car accident first. Do you think that had something to do with your success?

Thomas: I also have to give credit to my wife (Avril Mouton, a former Miss South Africa runner-up, was one of Thomas’ first models), who has stood by me through all the ups and downs. It was Avril who went out cold canvassing both in the UK and USA trying to convince magazines to buy our pictures.

Gram: Describe the origin of the brand VivThomas.com after you decided to work for yourself.

Thomas: We started the company in 1993, which was at the time solely a photographic company called VLT Promotions. Later on I incorporated Rolling Images (for movies) into the company, and ran a website for both under the URL VivThomas.com. Later on I saw the importance of movies, especially when we started working with Playboy TV in the UK, and felt we could have an influence, so I hired a small team of University students (including my now current Director Of Productions – Lewis Thomas (no relation)) to help me produce first-rate movies in a style which was reminiscent of what I’d been doing in the photographic field. This was when everything merged into one, and with some foresight into the future of the Internet, the company was renamed VivThomas.com Ltd, now Lda.

Viv Thomas’ crew has a great sense of humor. I started paying attention to the company’s boxcover copy when on one title the description of an anus was “a twitching rabbit nostril.”

Gram: When Americans think of Europe, they often think of the band that sang “The Final Countdown.” And for many that is enough. But for those more discerning types there is a kind of girl that you return to over and over. Describe her.

Thomas: Well typically she is all-natural, jaw-droppingly beautiful, genuine, and into what she is doing for reasons beyond just the money. Oh and she has an incredible body too.

Gram: My occasional complaint about European models, and the complaint I have heard from others [see Poppy Morgan’s comment here], is that, though exquisitely beautiful, they often appear robotic. If this is at least partly true, do you think there is something about the European consumer that makes this lack of affect necessary? And by all means provide examples to the contrary.

Thomas: There are European models like that, but there are also American models like that, it’s not specifically a nationality thing, I think its just models in general. Often they just go though the motions, it’s sex-by-numbers most days. We were in America and our team was having great difficulty toning down the ‘performances’ because we just found them hysterical. They’d switch it on in an instant, zero to 100mph, just screaming and bellowing and swearing. They couldn’t understand that this isn’t what we wanted.

When we work with a girl who just turns up, puts on an act which appears, as you say robotic, emotionless, whatever, grab the money and run, then they will rarely turn up again in one of our movies. We look for girls who are genuinely into what they are doing. Our whole thing is about genuine passion, romance, a connection between two people, real orgasms, we try and capture the beauty of that. I hate when a model has to use spit to lube her pussy, we try to set up and coax something real from the models, so they should be genuinely turned on, and we should see natural wetness from the girl. Some can do it, some can’t. That’s why many of the same girls show up on our site and in our films, because when we find someone like that who can really get into it, then we will tend to use her a lot.

Gram: Is there a discernible European aesthetic in porn? When European directors talk about American porn, is it easy to describe?

Thomas: I know this is a generalisation but I find that most Euro porn is typically the same as most American porn.

Gram: Wait. Did you just say “generalization” with an ‘s’? We don’t even spell things the same. How can you say our porn is the same?

Thomas: I think European directors are kind of influenced by the American industry in terms of content and what they think everyone wants to see – hard, strong and extreme sex acts, very little artistic merit, little romance, gaping assholes, spit flying everywhere, loud over-exaggerated moaning, three or four guys to a girl, hairy bobbing man-arse all over the place, gagging, make-up running off the girl’s face, ridiculously huge platform high-heels, dildos the size of a baseball bat.

Gram: I saw that today at the In-n-Out on Van Nuys. I guess that’s why it’s called In-n-Out.

Thomas: I’m not against it, and I know there is a market for that kind of stuff, but it’s not what we do. More and more we are steering away from that kind of thing. There seems to be a tendency these days to believe the way forward is to get more and more extreme.

Gram: Is European porn being influenced by American porn?

Thomas: I think the most disturbing thing is that a lot of naturally beautiful girls in Eastern Europe are getting unnecessary breast implants, giving them those bloated balloon tits which sit on the far sides of their small frames. I’m guessing that this is an American-porn influence. I’m coming across here as anti-American-porn I but that is far from the truth; there are a number of American producers I greatly admire. But on the whole I find most of the porn I see both American and European, for me personally, not very arousing.

Gram: What is it like to be a Portuguese Pornographer?

Thomas: Não faz mal – as they say in Portuguese – ‘it’s no problem.’ We keep a low profile, we still travel a lot and have a client base which is pretty international. I don’t think we’re really ‘Portuguese pornographers,’ and when we were based in London I wouldn’t have said we were ‘British pornographers’ either. We do what we do. We’re just based here for the good food, the weather, the good wine, the beaches, the golf, and the wonderfully relaxed way of life, not to mention the down to earth and warmly welcoming attitude of the Portuguese people.

Gram: Sometimes I think porn, which isn’t especially concerned with its own history and which has a high turnover rate, might be an easier job for people who have no conception of the so-called “Golden Age” of the 70’s and 80’s. It’s when people are around for a decade or more that they really notice change. How are things different from when you started?

Thomas: To be quite honest, I don’t think things are any easier. The attitudes of both the consumer and the models have changed quite dramatically over the last few years. Mostly because of the internet, some girls work so frequently they become quickly overexposed and we can not sell their pictures. They can loose sight of what’s good for their, sometimes very limited, careers.

The consumer has also changed, selling to magazines / publications was our main source of income, again the digital age quickly changed that.

Up until very recently, I knew all my clients extremely well and for the most part they are/were good friends, now we deal with strangers that we might never ever even speak to never mind even meet. We also have to compete with all this free porn that’s available on the web, even our own stolen content which we find scattered on free sites or illegal torrent sites, just days after we’ve released a title.

This may sound very old fashioned, but it was very special when we knew who our clients were and most of the models were our friends. The working environment was so much friendlier and relaxed. Everybody trusted each other and there was a tremendous amount of respect for one other. One thing is for sure, the days of shaking hands on a deal being binding are long gone, these days you have to have contracts as long as your arm and even then, you can be taken to the cleaners.

Another change is the product itself. When we first started it was much more about glamour and more tasteful erotica because hardcore was practically illegal in the UK until the year 2000, so we were making softer erotic videos. I suppose to a certain degree that’s kind of what we still do, but we were able to get much more explicit, and we now distribute (and sometimes produce) a few other different types of product, harder, more amateur, whatever.

So yes, if only we could bring back “The Good Old Days”… but I heard it from my father and I have no doubt that my kids will repeat it once again to their own children: Progress is inevitable, but we don’t have to like it.