Jean Guilloré, known professionally as John B. Root, is a French director and producer of pornographic films.
Jean Guilloré was born in Chambéry. Both his parents were teachers. He spent part of his childhood and teenage years in Cairo, Egypt, where his family had relocated after 1968. He returned to France in 1976, graduated in film studies and started working as a cameraman for the French national public television. On the side, he wrote children's literature. Several of his novels were successful in their own right during the 1980s and 1990s.
During his youth, he had developed a taste for pornography and considered himself a "voyeur". At 35, after several years of marriage, he had a "mid-life crisis". In 1994, as an experiment, he created an interactive pornographic CD-ROM, the first of its kind in France, which was bought and distributed by the French version of Penthouse and met an unexpected success.
He subsequently created his own production company with the aim of developing children's television programs. However, he was unable to find buyers for his projects and, to make ends meet, started creating new porn CD-ROMS. Since he had become relatively well known as a children's writer, he started using the alias "John B. Root". "B. Root" is a play on the French slang word biroute, meaning penis, while "John Root" is a literal translation in English of Jean Racine's name.
For several years, he created a series of pornographic CD-ROMs, two of which won the award for best European CD-ROM at the Brussels International Festival of Eroticism. In 1996, he directed for Canal+ his first feature film.
He quickly developed in France a reputation as an "intellectual" porn director, and his work was followed positively over the years by cultural magazines such as Les Inrockuptibles and Cahiers du cinéma. He also attracted media attention by speaking out in favor of "quality porn" and insisting that adult films could be a legitimate art form.
