HOT & HEAVY
Hollywood’s steamy sex scenes are all in a day’s work for plenty of actors — and terrifying for many others
She was in the midst of filming an explosive sex scene in a seedy fantasy motel in Pennsylvania and the stress was taking its toll. So at the end of every work day, Michelle Williams would discharge her demons.
Heading away from the shooting location, she would turn up her car radio to full blast — and scream.
“Oh yes,” she told Postmedia in 2011. “Making that part of the movie was pretty much like that. I would roll down the window, stick my head out and scream. It was about making me feel better.”
Williams and co-star Ryan Gosling were filming 2010’s Blue Valentine, an uncompromising study of a dying marriage. And it included erotic moments so controversial that the Motion Picture Corporation of America at one point threatened it with a rating that would have kept it out of most theatres.
But Williams was firm about the importance of the scenes in question. They were essential, she felt, to the movie’s integrity.
But did a similar artistic imperative apply to Game of Thrones? Emilia Clarke, who portrayed Daenerys Targaryen in the award-winning HBO series, recently confessed that some of her early sex scenes terrified her so much that she would cry in the bathroom before they were shot.
Clarke later toughened her resolve to resist nudity she considered gratuitous — she felt she was being “used.”
The issue was simmering long before the #MeToo movement erupted, but Harvey Weinstein’s shadow hovers over what’s now happening. Growing demands by performers that their unused nude footage be destroyed stem from rumours that the disgraced Miramax tycoon grabbed away discarded scenes featuring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in the lesbian love drama Carol because he wanted them for his own “personal” collection.
The Screen Actors Guild’s recently issued new guidelines for the filming of scenes involving sex and nudity. And something comparatively new is entering the equation — the presence of “intimacy co-ordinators” to choreograph such scenes before they are shot.
Such safeguards didn’t really exist in the past. Maria Schneider would have appreciated them back in 1972 when she and Marlon Brando were filming Last Tango in Paris. She later charged that Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci made her feel abused and humiliated.
But not all stars consider such scenes a harrowing ordeal.
Michael Douglas is one of Hollywood’s sexual veterans, having survived steamy encounters with Glenn Close (Fatal Attraction), Sharon Stone (Basic Instinct) and Demi Moore (Disclosure), but he has always been laid back about the whole business. For him it was all in a day’s work.
“I’ve had these love scenes over the years,” he said at the time. “There’s always a moment when you’re going through the script and you say — OK, yeah, it has to be done. Then the day comes when you’re going to do the scene and you pray to God you’re still on good terms with your leading lady.”
For many critics, the gold star for onscreen eroticism goes to director Nicolas Roeg, whose 1973 shocker, Don’t Look Now, features a sequence of scorching sexuality from stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.
A BBC commentator recently called it the first explicit sex scene in a mainstream release, while film historian David Thomson suggests it may well be “the best married sex scene in the history of the movies.”
So what about the recurring rumours that the sex in that film was real?
“Oh God — no way it was like that,” Sutherland told BBC Radio a few years ago. “You had two Aeroflex cameras, which were making a dreadful noise. You’ve got everybody outside with earphones on. Nic and Tony (the cameraman) were there with cameras, and Julie and I were there naked. I had it in the contract that there would be no sexual nudity. You couldn’t see my sexual organ — because it was mine. It wasn’t the character’s and I didn’t want people saying — oh look, there’s Donald’s!
“So we followed Nic’s directions. He would say — Donald, kiss Julie’s shoulder, move your head slowly down to her elbow — Julie, arch your back. And all the time there was this grinding noise from the cameras.”
Sutherland remains as proud of this scene as anything he has ever done. “It was memorable because it reminded you of making love yourself. You were not voyeuristic — it was just beautifully, beautifully done.”
By contrast, there’s Madonna, who called sex scenes “very difficult” because “it’s hard to pretend to make love to someone you don’t know that well” — but she liked doing them. She was sounding off in defence of a critically slammed erotic thriller, Body of Evidence, which Hollywood’s rating system forced to cut some scenes.
“I think it’s sort of silly that children are allowed to watch people being killed and blown up into little bits,” she told reporters, “but watching someone make love is considered an evil terrible thing.”