Directors on Sex

Director Wong Kar-Wai takes a more laissez-faire approach to dealing with actors. His film Happy Together includes an explicit gay love scene between the two main characters, and he chose to shoot that on the very first day. "I think it was the first time that a famous Hong Kong star, Tony Leung, played a graphic gay scene," he recalls. "We set up the camera, and I said to the actors, 'Go to bed and do it.' They worked it out themselves." His new movie,_ In the Mood for Love_, focuses on unrequited love between a man and a woman (Tony Leung again and Maggie Cheung) who are married to other people. Originally there was a sex scene between the two, but the director cut it out. "We did that scene at the very beginning of the shooting," he says, "so in some respects, the way the actors walk and talk in every other scene is colored by that love scene. Even though there is no sex on-screen, a friend said to me, 'The film made me so horny.""

Miguel Arteta, director of last year's critically acclaimed Chuck & Buck, brings more of his personal experience into the sex scenes in his films. His first film, Star Maps, focused on a boy forced into prostitution by his own father. "There's a scene in that movie where he has to have sex with his father's girlfriend in front of a Beverly Hills couple," Arteta recalls. "At first he can't perform because he remembers his father's abuse. But then she says she wants to touch him, and she waits a very long time before she actually does it. Having been in abusive relationships, my fantasy is to have someone ask you at every turn for your permission. So I incorporated that into the movie, and then I tried it in real life. It helped me in my own sex life." Arteta's most recent film, Chuck & Buck, includes a sex scene in which the character played by Mike White and the character he's been stalking for the entire film (Chris Weitz) have an unexpected sexual encounter. "Right before we shot the scene," Arteta recalls, "Chris Weitz said, 'I'm not going to French kiss him.' I'm a foreigner and I didn't know the expression 'French kiss' so I thought he was backing down from the whole scene, and I got angry. So finally he said, 'OK, I'll do it,' and he really went all the way with it."

In her career as an actress, Joan Chen participated in one of the most memorably erotic scenes in recent films--a three-way sex scene under the silk sheets in The Last Emperor. "[Bernardo] Bertolucci often had a temper with the crew," Chen says, "but he was extremely gentle with the actors. He's in love with actors, and that makes you want to be beautiful for him." Chen's directorial debut, the impressive Chinese-language film Xiu Xiu: the Sent-down Girl, involved scenes of the protagonist being forced into prostitution. The girl used a body double for the more graphic moments, but even so, Chen says, "The crew didn't want to go through with those scenes because they were so protective of the actress. But they were necessary for the film. I actually felt there should have been more sex. Even though it was extremely cruel, she was transformed by the experience, and so it should have been almost a transcendent moment. Instead it was done in a matter-of-fact way because we were so anxious to get it over with." For her first Hollywood movie, Autumn in New York, Chen (pictured below) filmed Winona Ryder's first nude scene, a sexual encounter with Richard Gere, but the scene never made it into the finished film. "It was a story about a young girl who is dying," Chen says, "and I felt if you show more beauty and life in her body, her death would be more poignant. But when we tested the movie, the audience was predominantly female, and because of the age difference between Winona and Richard, they did not want to see her nude."

Among the new breed of indie-trained directors, Kevin Smith (Chasing Amy, Dogma) has been more outrageous in his verbal assaults on the audience's squeamishness than in his visual forays. Clerks was originally rated NC-17 for raunchy language and the rating was only changed to R after an appeal. "It would have been easier to show Dante gutting a woman or a 12-year-old boy than lamenting about his girlfriend sucking 37 dicks," Smith says. "I find that a sad comment on our society." Smith personally shies away from showing sexual acts. "Visually I'm not talented enough to bring it off," he says. "Maybe when I'm 40, I'll be more of a dirty old man, and I'll want to show sex. That's probably why you see nudity in Robert Altman films--not that I knock the man. But he probably has the desire to see young and vital actors in the buff. Maybe I'm too much of a Catholic ever to have those scenes. I don't know if I could have that conversation with an actor." Smith's ultimate dismay, though, came about through circumstances that speak volumes about the problems he and every other director face in an industry that is, as always, hopelessly schizoid on the subject of sex. "In Mallrats, the studio said we needed a pair of tits, and so there's a scene where Joey Lauren Adams opens her shirt. To me, that's a career low. Talk about unsexy! Remembering that scene will probably chase me away from doing sex and nudity for a long time."

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Stephen Farber writes the "Premieres" column for Movieline.

THEY LIKE TO WATCH, TOO

Here are some of the sequences that directors who've filmed sex scenes themselves appreciate in the work of their peers.

"I Loved what Gus Van Sant did in My Own Private Idaho in one sex scene with Keanu Reeves. It looked like a series of still photographs but wasn't. I also liked a scene with Jason Patric and Rachel Ward in After Dark, My Sweet because it wasn't gussied up, as my parents used to say. You saw two people really lying on top of each other."--Neil LaBute

"At the beginning of The Double Life of Veronique, there is a scene of Irène Jacob making love that is incredibly intense and deeply felt. The French film Betty Blue is very sexy. There's a sequence in that movie where the man is naked and the woman is covered. Usually in movies, the director goes to great lengths to hide the genitals when a man is getting out of bed, but that scene was the opposite of the norm." --Anthony Minghella

"I found Hitchcock's Vertigo extremely erotic. Just Kim Novak's face in close-up is very exciting. You know something sexual is going to happen, even though you don't see it. Similarly, the scene in Psycho of Anthony Perkins watching Janet Leigh through the peephole is erotic, because we're put in his position."--Wong Kar-Wai

"Most sex scenes in movies seem funny to me, like the scene with the clay in Ghost. Or there are scenes where glasses and lamps go flying and curtains come off the rod. I have never knocked anything over during sex. To me, a good sex scene is Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett up a staircase [laughs]. I did like the scene in The Way We Were with a drunken Robert Redford and an all-too-willing Barbra Streisand. He was the sex object, so maybe that's why I remember it. As a gay man, you always imagine yourself as Barbra Streisand."--Don Roos

"About half of Last Tango in Paris is actually quite bad. It nonetheless has one of the most memorable and effective sex scenes, the famous scene with the butter. I always say be specific about the actors and the characters in any sex scene you attempt. Both Brando and Maria Schneider were believable in that scene."--James Toback

"The Lover was pretty sexy. In the Realm of the Senses was even more outrageous, but I found it haunting. Of course it was more about lust than about Love."--Ang Lee

"I like the scene in Jerry Maguire with Tom Cruise and Kelly Preston when they're eating food out of the fridge after sex, and they're both buck naked. That was very sexy because you feel sex is continu¬ing outside the bedroom. I have to admit hardcore sex is interesting to me because you're seeing angles that you would never be able to see when you're doing it."--Kevin Smith

"In Blue there's a sex scene near the end of the film when Juliette Binoche is recovering from her bereavement. Her head is thrusting up. There's a feeling that she is being born again. I also thought the sexual scenes in Neil Jordan's The End of the Affair were very well done."--Joan Chen

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