Leslye Headland Says Wes Anderson 'Saved Sex' For Her Thanks To 'Rushmore'

Leslye Headland won't forget her first time, but not for the reasons you might think. In a guest blog she wrote for The Film Experience, the playwright and filmmaker, whose buzzed-about debut, Bachelorette, opens theatrically on Sept. 7 wrote that while losing her virginity was "sort of a let down," the experience was salvaged by a post-deflowering viewing of Wes Anderson's iconoclastic teen romance story Rushmore. 

"It was awkward, sort of empty and was done mostly to just get it over with," Headland wrote of the sexual experience in "Growing Up Cinephile," adding: "Afterwards, a thick disappointment hung in the room. My deflowerer half-heartedly offered up a solution" to watch Anderson's second feature, which he pronounced the "greatest thing you’ll ever see."

Turns out the guy had at least one redeeming quality: good taste in post-relations movies. "Watching Rushmore, naked, innocence freshly lost, was one of the most beautiful moments of my life," Headland wrote. "As the slow motion closing shot set to The Faces flashed before me, I was treated to the tears of real love and tenderness I’d hoped my first sexual experience would bring. "Thank you Wes Anderson," the filmmaker concluded: "You saved Latin. But, for this cinephile, you also saved sex."

Headland also chose Woody Allen's Love and Death and The Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski as landmark films in life.

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