The Accidental Porn Tycoon: An Interview With Bree Mills
Bree Mills wasn't always destined for porn. With a background in marketing and communication, her early professional career came at the dawn of e-commerce. Among other places, she worked at Tower Records, running marketing for their website until the 2008 global financial crisis. After being head-hunted for the Marketing Manager position at Gamma Entertainment, a Montreal-based company that operates and manages porn sites.
At the time, she wasn’t an avid consumer, nor did she know much about the landscape of online pornography, but the porn industry felt like a recession-proof move.
Fast forward 16 years. Bree has 3 AVN (Adult Video News) Awards and 7 XBIZ Awards under her belt. She’s married to former performer Sara Luvv. She’s the Head of Gamma Films Group (one of the largest adult production companies) and the Chief Creative Officer at Adult Time (known as “the Netflix of Porn”). And she doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon.
I got a chance to chat with Bree after this year’s AVN Awards to discuss her career, the craft of adult filmmaking, how a gold-star lesbian got into making straight and bi porn, and more.
Lily Lady: How did you transition from the world of marketing to directing porn?
Bree Mills: Well, one-click purchasing on Amazon and many blog sites use affiliate links. All that originates from adult marketing practices. People wanting to find porn was one of the first uses of the Internet. So a lot of practices that are now common across the Internet originate in porn.
At first, I worked at a porn company that ran other people’s pay sites. Then we thought, “What if we tried to shoot our own content and build our own brands?” Our company’s president didn’t want to do it himself, so I naïvely raised my hand and said, “I can write, I'm creative, I'll do it!”
LL: How’d it go?
BM: I don't think I’d ever seen a man's penis outside of, like, maybe a couple of immediate family members. [...] You know, a lot of people in our industry started as PAs and worked their way up to directors. There's an old-school mentality — or at least there was at the time. People who had been around were fairly jaded. I came in and applied a kind of Marketing 101, talking to customers and trying to understand what they wanted to see in their scenes.
I co-directed one project that I’d written and fell in love with the process. I moved [to LA] within a year, and met my wife who was a performer. Soon I became completely part of the scene.
LL: I like how your work can encompass different genres. I’m thinking about Teenage Lesbian (2019), for example, which is available on Mubi.
BM: I’m in this because I like to tell stories. Sex and sexuality are really interesting subject matters. You can never run out of ways to explore them. My motivation going into a project is always the story. Sometimes that is moving and thought-provoking, but it can be a complete boner killer. So I’ve learned to balance my instincts because I can sometimes swing too far in one direction.
LL: What’s the key to a great scene?
BM: A lot of great pornographers make their content because they have a kink and they're using the medium to explore it. Mike Adriano is a perfect example. Nobody shoots anal content like him, because he’s clearly such a fan. If I tried to shoot anal content, it's just not gonna play that way. But I could wrap a really interesting story around it that might appeal to people. So I've always leaned toward [storytelling], and when it hits it's because I'm able to achieve both.
With Teenage Lesbian, it was a true coming-of-age story rooted in my own experience coming out. Some of its sexuality has the tropes people look for in lesbian films: first-time situations, straight girl seduction dynamics — these things were all part of that, but in a way that served a good story. Success comes from being able to marry the two ingredients.
LL: I imagine that’s a hard balance to strike.
BM: [When filming], I know all the cuts for the R-rated version and I’ll also film the X-rated portions so that I can release an R-rated cut that’s not just a hacked-up edit. And the X-rated version allows me to show the explicit content behind our paywall for an adult audience. I don't really know anybody else who does that.
LL: Would you ever shoot a feature with mainstream actors?
BM: There's a generalization that performers in the adult industry are somehow less skilled than mainstream actors. Part of what I try to do is eradicate that generalization through the examples of the work we create.
Most of the stuff I do is actually improvised. I typically don't write dialogue scripts, so I'll work with the actors to come up with their characters. When you watch their work with that context, it's quite remarkable what they're able to do. And there are plenty of people within the porn industry who came to LA to work in the mainstream and found their way here.
There's a lot of incredibly talented people within our industry, and by treating the acting seriously, it's not too hard to showcase that talent.
I often get asked, “Why don't you produce an indie picture? ”But we can never advance our projects for distribution or even for serious festival consideration because as soon as they see the phrase “porn actor” it gets immediately shut down.
LL: I'm thinking about some people who have filtered through, such as Chloe Cherry and even godforsaken James Deen in The Canyons (2013). I wonder, then, if it’d be more interesting if a bunch of mainstream actors made a porn film. Since most of these distinctions are blurry, and there’s a ton of sex in most films nowadays.
BM: It comes down to this stigma associated with the other side of LA. Even with crews, I work with crews who also work for mainstream productions and they keep their porn gig a secret because if it gets out and they work in porn, it's like a scarlet letter. God forbid the guy working on the Disney shows is also working on my side. But it happens.
LL: I hear you. Making porn always seems inherently political. But with Project 2025’s stated goal to ban it altogether, how does making porn — and especially queer-focused content — feel right now?
BM: There’s a lot of fear-mongering out there. The industry has always been under threat of some kind. Age verification has been a big issue over the last few years. While we’ve been very committed to following each state’s guidelines and agree on the general principle of wanting to make sure that those accessing our content are of legal age, it’s a real challenge in practice because each state has its nuances. There's definitely speculation that there’s a larger intent.
LL: Yeah, age verification as an anti-porn Trojan horse of some kind. Can you tell me one thing that’s super important to you while shooting a scene?
BM: If somebody is halfway through a scene and they don’t feel comfortable, or if they have finished the scene and they don’t feel comfortable, we do not put that scene out. It's our responsibility to have respect for the vulnerability of the work that performers are doing. It’s a job, sure, but it’s a job that has heavy physical, emotional, and societal impacts. So it's something that should always be treated with empathy and care.
LL: You produce bi porn as well?
BM: The majority of our customers are hetero-identifying men. That being said, those guys are quite curious. Bi content is a subset of our catalog, but we do find that it’s most attractive to the “straight” bi-curious majority population than, say, more polarizing male-on-male gay content. We haven't necessarily seen enough interest to warrant a dedicated original series featuring exclusively bi-sex situations, but we see it enough to include it within other series that we have.
LL: I love that you fell in love and married a performer. Will we see that love story onscreen one day?
BM: Oh gosh. I suppose you can see it on my social media. My wife was a performer for maybe four or five years but has been retired for almost a decade. She's a pretty private person. I tend to draw a lot from real life in my films, though.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Published Mar 28, 2025
