“This film definitely saved me,” he continues. I overdosed so many times in my life, I cannot believe that I’m still alive. But the truth is, I mostly looked like I did when I was collapsing. I’m very high but I still look hot and I have my hard-on and I’m looking great. We have lots of scenes where I’m so sexy on drugs. It wasn’t until Agassi watched footage in the editing suite that the impact of his habits – including collapsing most days – started to sink in. “But life came along, and things happened. “I wanted a very happy film about a man who left Israel and became a huge porn star all over the world,” says Agassi. I have no complaints.” He met Heymann soon after he’d made it big the director was bowled over by Agassi’s charisma and proposed a documentary. “I work in a 24/7 kind of shop,” he says down the line from Tel Aviv. Sex and drugs abound, with unnervingly intimate footage, but it is sensitive and compassionate.Īgassi, now 35, doesn’t work in porn any more. Playing out like a bleak Boogie Nights, the film, shot by Israel’s Tomer Heymann over eight years, catches Agassi’s swift climb to the top then sticks with him through a slow, ugly decline. T he documentary Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life begins with the fresh-faced gay Israeli porn star winning a top industry award in Berlin, and ends with him high on drugs, writhing around on the floor, his life in tatters.
