from www.smh.com.au- What is a porn star like? Do they fulfil the cliche of ”women in micro-minis and four-inch stilettos and fishnet stockings, actresses … made up in Day-Glo mascara and cornea-damaging, super-reflective lip gloss, [resembling] garish orchids”? This is how Los Angeles Magazine writer Dave Gardetta described them after six months researching a story on porn star Sasha Grey in California’s infamous San Fernando Valley.

Sitting at the Hilton in Sydney with Sasha Grey is a surprise. First, she is very attractive in a very non-garish way. Second, if you saw her walking down the street in Sydney, with her knee-length boots and her demure face with its oh-so-subtle make-up, you’d think she was just another very successful, pretty, vibrant young executive.

There’s no hint that this 22-year-old, who was born Marina Ann Hantzis in Sacramento, California, has made, according to the Internet Movie Database, a staggering 176 movies since 2006 including such undoubted classics as My Evil Sluts 3.

That’s more than twice the movies Paul Newman made in a career lasting 54 years. Even the prolific Jack Nicholson has only made 46 movies in the past 40 years.

When asked about this extraordinary level of productivity, Grey smiles and, with a knowing look, observes: ”I think what the outside doesn’t understand is that you can shoot a scene in four hours. It might say on your resumé that you’ve made 160 films but it is actually 160 scenes. So you are not doing five scenes in the one film. It is a lot quicker to shoot, especially because of video.”

And now Grey, who can declare after only three years in the business that she is ”controlling my own product and I have my own company. I am able to create the kind of movies where I have the say from beginning to end as a producer and performer”, has expanded into mainstream movies with the lead role in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience.

For those unfamiliar with the sexual mores of New York, the ”girlfriend experience” is where a wealthy man hires a hooker on the condition that she behaves as though she is his girlfriend, which usually involves being interested in what he talks about, going out to dinner, being a companion and, almost incidentally, providing sex.

The Girlfriend Experience is another contribution to Soderbergh’s ”blockbuster-then-art film” cycle, which has seen his work on Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen balanced by low-budget art films such as Full Frontal (2002) and Bubble (2005).

As Grey explains, the film was made as a low-budget exercise. ”There was a lot of improvisation,” she says. ”We had an outline, so it was shot in chronological order, which is quite rare. It was really nice because it kept up the pace and the energy.

”We only did three to four takes per scene. Usually three and that was it. There are a few moments where it was very natural … It allows for the awkwardness that happens in real life. You don’t always come up with a perfect result.”

The end result is a film about sex that has no sex scenes. Grey plays high-class (and highly remunerated) New York escort, Chelsea.

This invites the cynical observation that, in choosing a porn star to play his main character, Soderbergh was playing an intellectual game: trying to see if he could make a film about sex, starring a porn star, that had no sex in it.

When asked about this strange contradiction, Grey explains: ”I think it is about the transaction. It is the one type of prostitute that offers more than just the sex. It is like what Steven said: ‘They all have common themes. Let’s take that common theme out and show you the relationships that are cultivated with Chelsea and her clients.”’

It also means, particularly because of the improvisation, that the film ends up being a savage attack on US capitalism.

Grey admits Soderbergh has said of the theme of the movie: ”Everything in life is a transaction, whether you are flipping burgers at McDonald’s or you’re an escort or you’re a girl on the street who has a pimp. Everything is a transaction. Whether you are selling sex or not, you are always selling something.”

When this theme is added to filming at a time when the world economy is in freefall, it ends up being about men with enough money to buy prostitutes for a ”girlfriend experience” all concerned about how the money markets are behaving.

”By happy accident – it is not happy in real life but for the sake of the film – the economy did crash when we started shooting,” Grey says. ”So the real-life situations fitted into the film because we were dealing with those kinds of people.”

Most importantly for Grey, it is, hopefully, the beginning of a new stage in her career, with other offers for mainstream films coming in.

Anyone who has seen Boogie Nights or Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends television documentary on the US porn industry will know it is a common dream of porn stars that they are biding their time to become mainstream movie stars.

Grey, who now would be very wealthy because of her business acumen and her status as one of the US’s leading porn stars, doesn’t see her career in that way.

”Right now I am really happy being able to challenge the status quo. It never has been done before that you have a woman who is performing in adult films but she is also doing non-adult films. Usually it is the redeemed sinner.”