Directors on Sex

LaBute has established himself as one of the most daring provocateurs on the contemporary scene. Referring to his second feature, Your Friends & Neighbors, he says, "I tried to do a whole film saturated in sexuality, even though I knew that the American audience is wary of discussing it or seeing it. Actually, you only see one sexual act, in the first scene. Ben Stiller and Catherine Keener had qualms about it, as they should have. I told them I wanted them to remain covered at every moment, and that gave them a technical challenge and helped to relieve the pressure. It also helped a great deal that we had a female cinematographer. It made the actors feel safer to have a woman's voice included."

"I hope to return to the sexual arena in other films," LaBute continues. "In my view, sex should be considered like a controlled substance. The less you control it, the less dangerous and less mysterious it becomes, and the less people are obsessing it into something darker than it needs to be."

Like LaBute, director Michael Cristofer has shown an unfashionable willingness to push the limits of sex on screen. His first feature, Body Shots, was originally rated NC-17 and was resubmitted to the rating board numerous times before earning an R. His new movie, Original Sin, which stars Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie, was also slapped with an initial NC-17. "I'm stupid," Cristofer says, "because I think people should have movies about things important to them, and sex and death would be high on that list. It is a battle to get that on-screen. You can put your dick in an apple pie--which I enjoyed, by the way--but audiences have become protected from realistic depictions of sexuality."

In filming the steamy scenes between Jolie and Banderas in Original Sin, Cristofer had the advantage of willing actors. He had worked with Jolie in the daring award-winning cable movie Gia, which was hugely important to her career. "There was a level of trust between us," he says. Banderas is a veteran of Pedro Almodovar's films. "Antonio is a consummate professional," says Cristofer. "He's done every kind of sex, from bondage to gay sex to heterosexual. And he's not protective of his image."

"I always tell actors that a sex scene has a purpose like any other scene," Cristofer notes. "It brings the characters closer together or drives them apart or has them thinking of someone else. That gives the actors something to play besides the sex act. If they have nothing else to play, then you just have two people fucking and it's pornography."

"What's interesting in a film is sexual expectation or sexual tension," says director Sydney Pollack. "If you actually show graphic sex, something is diminished--unless you're a great artist. Nic Roeg did it in Don't Look Now, and that scene has been copied and copied. Even there, what you see is stylized, so you don't feel you're watching a stag movie." Pollack is not known as a trail-blazer in the field of cinematic sex, but The Way We Were _included a memorable encounter between Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, and there are startling sexual moments in _They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and in Absence of Malice, when Paul Newman 'practically rapes Sally Field to show her how a woman felt having her privacy violated in a newspaper article. "I like to use sex scenes to convey other ideas," Pollack says. "After that metaphorical rape in Absence of Malice, there's a romantic scene between Sally and Paul, but I didn't show much of it."

While the sexuality in Pollack's movies is usually implicit rather than explicit, Adrian Lyne has a reputation for brazenness. "I'm much more interested in movies about sex than I am in The Matrix," he says. Years before he scrutinized nymphet-mania in his remake of Lolita, Lyne encouraged Michael Douglas and Glenn Close to overturn a few items while coupling in a kitchen in Fatal Attraction. "If you don't get some element of humor into a sex scene, there's a big chance that the audience will laugh anyway," says Lyne. "In this country especially, people feel uncomfortable watching sex in public, so I try to incorporate humor, like the scene of Michael Douglas trying to get his pants off in Fatal Attraction." Lyne is most famous for Nine 1/2 Weeks. "Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger never spoke to each other except when they were working, and that added to the sense of unease I wanted," he says of the rental classic. "That movie interested me because all of us are attracted to the idea of being uncivilized for nine or 10 weeks. I know that Kim saw the movie as a way of legitimizing her fantasy of doing something like that."

Lyne has some general advice that might be useful to young directors looking for pointers on sex scenes: "Actors are always nervous about how they look, so my job is to make them feel they look great," he says. "It doesn't hurt to give them a couple of drinks beforehand."

James Toback, another director with a reputation for brazenness in doing sex scenes, tries to make sure that the actors express something of their own personalities. "The writer-director's conception meshes with the actors' predilections," he says. "In the long scene between Robert Downey Jr. and Heather Graham in Two Girls and a Guy, you don't believe for a moment that either of them was pushed into anything that didn't come naturally. He satisfies her orally in that scene, and it works because Downey is a fundamentally oral personality." Toback has frequently clashed with the MPAA rating board, notably over Two Girls and a Guy. "In the scene where Downey is licking her, I had to reduce the number of head bobs from 15 to 3," he notes. "I said to Joan Graves, the representative from the rating board, 'When is the last time anyone made you come with three head bobs? I want to meet him.' She was totally stone-faced, as if I had asked her, 'Do you use FedEx or UPS?'"

Mary Harron also had a traumatic run-in with the rating board over American Psycho. She ended up having to cut 20 or 30 seconds from a three-way sex scene with Christian Bale and two hookers he hires for the evening. "I was surprised the NC-17 was for that scene," Harron says. "I thought it might be for the chainsaw scenes, but the board had no objection to those. The three-way scene was meant to show what sex as a transaction is really like. At first I wasn't sure how I was going to shoot it, but then I told Christian to play it looking in the mirror, and I told the two girls to look bored, and that made it work. Everyone laughed a lot while we were shooting it."

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