What’s My Motivation?

Sex worker-turned-neophyte porn filmmaker Audacia Ray is learning that characters are, like, maybe a good thing to have in a movie.

So the movie I’m making has a plot. In theory, I dig porno with a
plot, but in practice I typically fast forward through that shit
because seriously, I’m here for the fucking. So I’m attempting this
delicate thing, where I want there to be just enough plot so that the
viewer knows why these people are fucking each other, but not so much
that it’s like, “dude, shut up and bone already.”

In one of my early casting sessions, I interviewed a dude who also
has an off-off Broadway acting career, and he asked me a question I
hadn’t thought about in any great detail: “What’s my character’s
motivation?” It was pretty obvious that this had never occurred to me
before, and I stammered, “Uhhh, he wants to do it?” in reply. I don’t
think he was impressed.

[…] I saw how more developed characters could be a good thing and could
give the movie an interesting texture. So as I’m sitting down to write
my script, it’s something I’ll be thinking about an awful lot. Who are
these people, and what drives them?

What a great idea: thinking about characters "an awful lot" as you write a script for a movie.  She may be on to something.