Whoever said research was boring should work with director Joel Schumacher. Schumacher's latest project, the Nicolas Cage vehicle "Eight Millimeter," follows a private investigator's search for the creators of an alleged snuff film, a journey which leads Cage into the underworld of illegal porn. While working on the film, the 59-year-old director got a quickie education on the so-called ins and outs of the sex trade.

"I'm not a prude, far from it. But if you go into an adult bookstore and you look at what mainstream pornography is, aside from the glossy boxes with the pretty blondes on it, you see the specialty sections and how vast some of the perversity is," Schumacher tells EW Online. "It's pretty stunning."

This isn't the director's only run-in with retail kink, however. Schumacher first got hip while working on "Batman Forever." "Because on 'Batman' we do so much work in rubber, I started noticing these stores that sell rubber fetish magazines," says Schumacher. "There's dozens of them, which means it's a huge market. It's not just one guy out there somewhere who's into this."

Though Schumacher hopes that the snuff films his movie portrays are simply the stuff of urban myth, he isn't as hopeful about the future of porn. "We know there's evil in the sex trade, and we know there's child pornography and lots of aberrant behavior in the world and that it's growing and getting closer to home," he says. 

Ironically, Schumacher himself may have to fend off critical charges of obscenity due to the graphic nature of "Eight Millimeter," which initially earned an NC-17 rating. But the director had no problems censoring himself to get that all-important R. "If you make a movie about illegal porn and snuff, and you get an NC-17 and bitch about it, grow up," he says. "Go make a Prozac movie."