Filmmaker Sook-Yin Lee adapted her ex-boyfriend’s sex-work memoir Paying for It

In 2011, Chester Brown released Paying for It, a memoir-manifesto about sex work. Told from his perspective, the film follows his non-traditional relationship with sex and relationships following a breakup with his long-term girlfriend Sook-Yin Lee. After two years of celibacy, he turned to sex workers and found both intimacy and solace. More than just a personal examination, though, the book finishes with a handwritten manifesto — an attempt by Brown to argue for the decriminalization of consensual sex work.

A minor character in the graphic novel, Sook-Yin Lee — the former Much Music VJ, radical film actor and artists in her own right — was moved immediately to want to adapt the film. Speaking over Zoom, Lee describes reading the novel for the first time. “The events had already happened quite a bit in advance of that when he finally put the book out. We had been through all this stuff portrayed in the graphic novel and film. The book really spoke to me. I thought it was very brave,” she says. 

“It had everything to do with labour rights and human rights and women’s rights. And so it really attracted me to want to tell that story. I asked him right away, and I had to stand in line. There were a number of other people, great filmmakers, who also asked him to make that movie. He granted me the rights to make the movie because he trusted me. He liked my films, and he was nearby, and he could trust that I wasn’t going to turn it into like a kind of funny frat boy film, which could have easily happened in the wrong hands.”

Over 10 years in the making, the film went through many rewrites. The first draft was the graphic novel almost verbatim. “I thought, ‘Hey this is a great storyboard, here we go,’” says Lee. “Chester and I took a look at that script and we were like, ‘This is not working at all. It’s terrible.’ Chester was like, ‘Just forget it. It’s not going to work as a movie’.” But for Lee, filmmaking is a lot like making music — it’s about problem-solving. 

The graphic novel is very episodic, depicting Brown’s encounters with 23 sex workers, and then his appendix-manifesto. Lee explains going through many interactions, including a version where the final act would feature Brown delivering the final section on a kind of pulpit. “It didn’t work, and that would have been impossible to fund. It might have worked for Jean-Luc Godard in the 1970s or ’80s, but not now,” she says.

The problem with the adaptation began to unlock for Lee, as she looked back into the text. She realized that much of the novel takes place during a period where Lee and Brown were not officially broken up, and still living in the same house. 

“We lived in this tiny row house in Toronto together, navigating our relationship while pursuing love, sex, connection in very different ways. And yet somehow we stayed together. And that was a space that was a perspective that I knew, and that was my story as well. So I expanded the canvas of his narrative and included a bunch of stuff that was happening in our lives at that time, and that’s when it sort of congealed together.”

Though Chester Brown remains Chester Brown in the film, Sook-Yin transforms herself into the character Sonny Lee, played by Emily Lê. More autofiction than autobiographical, the character’s inclusion nonetheless opens up the more limited perspective of the graphic novel to explore the pitfalls and challenges of more traditional relationships. “He really illuminated a different side to reconsider,” says Lee. “Just because you’re in a monogamous romantic relationship, does it mean you love somebody more than if you were to pay somebody?”

“The analogy of queer liberation and rights of consensual sex workers really resonated for me. In my life and in my work, the queer community has always lifted me. And that struggle for rights has been so key. So has the notion of questioning, of possessive, romantic monogamy,” she says.

Lee’s approach to filmmaking mixes the personal with the political. It remains Brown’s personal story with sex work, but also becomes expansive and political. Sook-Yin Lee cast non-actors in the roles of sex workers in the film, lending them an authenticity. She worked with sex workers behind and in front of the camera, including legendary sex work activist Valerie Scott, to create something not just real, but respectful and true to the experience. She had to negotiate with ACTRA, Canada’s performance union, to be able to make these casting choices. Her argument was that “in this day and age, we must consider who gets to tell the story.” 

More than just a desire to tell a compelling story, Lee takes the opportunity to discuss the challenges faced by sex workers in Canada today. Many sex workers can’t have a VISA card without the risk of having it shut down. She discusses Valerie Scott’s activism to shut down anti-prostitution laws in Canada in 2013, only for the government to turn around and criminalize the Johns. “It didn’t change,” she explains. “It’s like having a bookstore full of great books, but you can’t sell a book or read a book. And it really does not afford consensual sex workers any kind of safety.”

While other countries like Belgium expand the rights of sex workers, not only recognizing their labour, but affording them the same rights as any worker in the country, Canada remains behind. While things have changed since Brown’s book came out in 2011, the battle is still being fought. The uncritical equation of consensual sex work with human trafficking has been used as a battle axe from conservative lobbies and governments to further drive sex workers into the shadows. In the United States, the roll-back of reproductive rights and the right to protest offer a dark look into the slippery slope of slowly scaling back protections on some of the most vulnerable groups, reflecting the dangers of the unchecked removal of basic human rights. 

Drawing on her close relationship with the music world, Lee fills the film with iconic music and videos from that era, including the work of Pointed Sticks, Gob, Thrush Hermit and Ghetto Concept. Shot in her own home, the same one where she and Chester lived, Lee creates a film that not only functions as a political work but as a portrait of a bygone era in Toronto and Canada. 

Her other inspirations include the Taiwanese New Wave, and Edward Yang in particular. “Chester’s stuff is very tableau, he’s never in the sheets with people. The camera is often far away, looking down. I really loved the Taiwanese New Wave from the ’80s. People like Edward Yang, who allows a single shot to occur and people to move in around the shot. There are so many shots in this movie that were very difficult acting feats, because people have to stay within the shot, hit all their beats and have all of the emotional resonances.”

The film has had a lot of success so far. Lee, often accompanied by Brown, have been travelling across Canada in a kind of roadshow performance structure presenting the film. “I feel that this movie is very important to come out at this time,” says Lee. “It’s sort of helping to create a lot of conversations, and what I wanted to do was to humanize everybody so that we’re all on the same playing field.” ■

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Paying for It is now playing in Montreal theatres. Watch the trailer here.

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