Filmmaker Clement Virgo expects that his new feature, Lie with Me, will stir up at least one debate.

‘Is it porn – is it not porn?’ he says, and then offers his own view. ‘To me, porn doesn’t have a Hitchcockian element in it, which is suspense.’

Certainly there’s suspense over the rating that Canadian officials will assign to Virgo’s sexually explicit drama, which will have its world premiere Sept. 10 at TIFF. Distributor ThinkFilm hasn’t yet pinned down a release date, and the film hasn’t been submitted to any review boards. Virgo says an NC-17 rating (no one 17 and under admitted) is all but certain in the U.S. Lie with Me has already sold in a dozen territories, including Korea, Japan, Germany and Mexico, based solely on a provocative trailer screened at Cannes.

Lie with Me is based on the novel of the same name, in which an unnamed central female character moves with sexual abandon from partner to anonymous partner, cataloguing it all in a brutally straightforward stream of consciousness. It’s by Toronto novelist Tamara Faith Berger, a former penny-a-word author of porn stories for U.S. men’s magazines who married Virgo last year. Virgo says that he and Berger were acquainted at the time of the novel’s publication in 2001. ‘We lived across from each other on Cameron Street, and I used to see her all the time.’

Berger is credited with the screenplay, but Virgo says her role on the film eclipsed that of writer and was closer to all-round collaborator. ‘I really took my lead from the book,’ says Virgo, who avoided imposing a male perspective. ‘I think some men are shocked that women want and like sex just as much as they do, and it’s a little bit scary,’ he says.

He took particular care around the ending. ‘I did not want to punish this character for her desires,’ he explains.

However, she does get a back story and a name – Leila. The role went to 25-year-old Lauren Lee Smith (The L Word), a 2005 Playback 10 to Watch finalist. ‘I choose my roles based on whether the script terrifies me,’ she told Playback in an earlier interview.

This is the third feature by the Jamaican-born Virgo, not counting two MOWs he did for CBC. Rude, his 1995 feature debut about gritty urban life, was financed by the Canadian Film Centre and made a big splash, winning a special jury prize at TIFF. His follow-up feature, the family drama Love Come Down, was five years in coming and is widely perceived as anticlimactic, though it actually outperformed Rude on the awards circuit, collecting three Genies as well as prizes at the Acapulco Black Film Festival and the Urbanworld Film Festival.

Virgo fills in the time between features with television directing, most recently on the Showtime series The L Word, HBO’s The Wire and Paramount’s Soul Food, and he’s all too aware that it took another five years to get to another opening night. ‘I have financing for my next film already and we’re shooting next spring [in Nova Scotia],’ he notes. ‘I’m trying to make the intervals a little bit smaller.’

Lie with Me cost $2.3 million to produce, compared to $3.2 million for Love Come Down. ‘It’s a smaller film in terms of budget, but I think that it doesn’t feel smaller in terms of scope,’ he says. In fact, Lie with Me is Virgo’s first feature that doesn’t have a predominant racial theme, while its sexual content could make it more broadly marketable. But Virgo says potential commercial appeal wasn’t a consideration in any of his choices.

‘I didn’t want to shoehorn race into this story,’ he says. ‘The book has nothing to do with race. Frankly, the book scared me.’ Virgo wondered how he could ‘shoot a great love scene or sex scene, when we’ve all seen millions of sex scenes on film. How to not be coy about it, have the audience feel they’re watching something bold and honest. In terms of being more commercial, we’ll find out.’

Asked if Lie with Me might be the perfect adult date movie, delivering empowerment to women and visual stimulation for men, Virgo replies, ‘I want this to be a horny film for both men and women.’