All four candidates in last fall's presidential election probably agreed on one thing--that there is too much sex in movies," says James Toback, director of films like Two Girls and a Guy and Black and White, both of which contain controversial sex scenes. "My question is, what movies are politicians talking about? They are outraged by something that doesn't exist." Toback is right.
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Almost 10 years ago, I surveyed the films of a number of directors who had been uncharacteristically bold in their treatment of sex, and since that time, horizons have narrowed. As budgets balloon and teenage boys call the shots, studios increasingly shun anything as outré as adult sexuality. But sexuality is fundamental and far too dramatic a part of life to be chased from the big screen entirely. So once again, I asked a group of directors to talk about sex in the movies, particularly in their own work. Their responses prove that celluloid sex is a dependably fascinating topic, however under siege it is at the moment.
A number of directors are far more squeamish about shooting sex scenes than moralizing politicians might guess. "I was raised in the '50s, and I'm still such a prude," says Don Roos, who directed the wry 1998 comedy The Opposite of Sex. In preparing to film a sex scene between Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow in Bounce, Roos reports, "I just said. Action!' and left it to them. I was a wreck during the scene, but they were fine about it. Gwyneth was like, 'Who is this nervous queen behind the camera?' Of course there was the added element that they had been a couple in real life, which made it even weirder for me. I thought I was where I shouldn't be, next to their bed whispering words of encouragement."
Ang Lee, the director of The Wedding Banquet, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm _and the new _Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, shares some of Roos's trepidation. "I'm a shy person," he says, "so it's never easy for me to direct sex scenes. I try to block my mind, just give directions, and pretend that I feel no embarrassment. In The Ice Storm, there was a scene between Joan Allen and Jamey Sheridan in the front of a car. It was supposed to be freezing, but it was actually 80 degrees and they were in this tiny space. There were so many other things for them to focus on that it took their minds off the sex."
In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lee wanted to set aside his own discomfort and have some truly steamy sexuality in the scenes between the young lovers played by Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen. "I wanted a passionate explosion," Lee says. "But she was only 19 and he was 21, so I had to be very explicit and tell them how to move their hands and exactly what to do. My approach is to encourage the actors to go as far as they're comfortable and then push them one stage further. A kiss is one of the hardest things to film because it is so difficult to photograph. The trick is finding where to place the camera. A real fight would look like a phony fight on-screen, and the same is true of a kiss."
Anthony Minghella, the director of The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, has reasons other than personal unease for being less than eager to do sex scenes. "I'd love to avoid shooting sex scenes because they can become very stock," he says. "The English Patient was a story that investigated different kinds of love--platonic love, love of country, love of exploration--so of course I had to include physical love. I made a few personal rules. If a scene was about intimacy, the actors would be naked. But if it was a sexual scene, they would be clothed. So when Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas repair to a back room during the Christmas party, they kept their clothes on. I still think it's a pretty steamy scene." For the film's sexual scenes, Minghella instructed his actors in minute detail on exactly what he wanted them to do. "Usually I create the space for the actors to be free," he says. "But in the sex scenes I dictated every move. And I did that because I never forgot an interview I read with a stage actress talking about her first film. She said she had had all this classical training, and on her first day on a movie set, she found herself in bed with a total stranger, left to her own devices, and she felt totally abandoned. I didn't want that to happen to my actors, so I would say, 'Put your hand here, move your head there.' That removed responsibility from the actors, and the actors must feel protected from their own sexuality."
The question all directors face in doing a sex scene is whether audiences will go along with them. "We all go through life in a modified state of high school," says Neil LaBute, director of In the Company of Men and Nurse Betty. "No one wants to be an outsider. So when people see a film, they think, 'What's the norm?' If it seems outside the norm, they feel uncomfortable watching it. We're all too desperate for normality."
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."
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