"They say 'closed set' but, truthfully, there are people at the monitors, too," warns actor Hal Sparks, who has performed in numerous love scenes on Showtime's Queer as Folk, on which he plays Michael Novotny-Bruckner. Before being cast on the series, he was best known for hosting E!'s Talk Soup, as well as for his comedic commentary on VH1's I Love the '70s, '80s, and '90s series. "They'll peel it down to 'central crew only,' which means between eight and 12 people, depending on the complications of shooting it. If it's a real intimate scene, it can be you, a camera operator, a boom operator, and then the director and [his or her] crew are off near the monitors. Then, ultimately, as far as who sees raw footage, you've got the editors.... So, boiling it down, between 15 and 20 people are going to see you at your most vulnerable."
大致的翻译为
'他们说是说清场,但是真实的情况是,总是有人在监视器边上的.'演员 HAL SPARKS 警告到, 他在SHOWTIME 的电视剧集QUEER AS FOLK中出演Michael Novotny-Bruckner,曾演出过多次性爱场面. 在这个剧集之前, 他是著名的脱口秀主持人(E!'s Talk Soup),同样也是VH1的幽默剧(I Love the '70s, '80s, and '90s )评论员. '在现场会只留下主要成员,人数会在8到12人,取决于拍摄的困难程度. 如果是一场非常亲密的戏, 场上会有你, 拍摄员, 挡光处理员, 当然还有导演和他/她的助手们在近处的监视屏幕边. 之后, 还有会看到最原始的片段的编辑们~~~~所以,到最后,大概15到20个人将会看到你最无防备的样子.'HAL SPARKS说.作者: 翊文 时间: 2005-6-27 10:32
Fakin' It
Actors share their tips on simulating sex: the sizzle, the sounds, and the "sock."
By Cassie Carpenter
To the audience, a steamy love scene can be titillating and intimate; it can intensify and move a story along. To the actor, the reality of performing in love scenes can range from slightly embarrassing to just plain uncomfortable--with spray-on sweat, a co-star you may have just met five minutes before, or a crowd of crew members yawning through each precisely choreographed take. Many factors determine if a love scene is successful: chemistry, trust, a lack of self-consciousness, a great sense of humor, and the occasional fabulous body double...or not. Back Stage West peeks into the closed set and asks four fearless actors--none of whom has felt the need for a body double--how they tackle love scenes.
According to the Screen Actors Guild's official nudity clause, actors should always know about the nudity involved in a union film or TV project prior to the first audition. Total nudity should never be required at union auditions, although the performer can wear pasties and a G-string. Still photography, sex acts, and the use of body doubles are not allowed without the performer's consent. The set must always be closed to all persons having no business purpose in connection with the SAG production.
"They say 'closed set' but, truthfully, there are people at the monitors, too," warns actor Hal Sparks, who has performed in numerous love scenes on Showtime's Queer as Folk, on which he plays Michael Novotny-Bruckner. Before being cast on the series, he was best known for hosting E!'s Talk Soup, as well as for his comedic commentary on VH1's I Love the '70s, '80s, and '90s series. "They'll peel it down to 'central crew only,' which means between eight and 12 people, depending on the complications of shooting it. If it's a real intimate scene, it can be you, a camera operator, a boom operator, and then the director and [his or her] crew are off near the monitors. Then, ultimately, as far as who sees raw footage, you've got the editors.... So, boiling it down, between 15 and 20 people are going to see you at your most vulnerable."
The basic rule is: The bigger the budget, the more people will remain on-set for love scenes. "They never bothered closing a set for me," actor Selma Blair says, with a laugh. "I'm not the most guarded person, so it doesn't bother me. If anyone wants to see it, go ahead. Usually I don't think they care. The crew is too busy eating a sandwich or something." Blair's love scenes in The Sweetest Thing involved a banana and a man in a purple elephant costume; scenes in Storytelling were so graphic that writer-director Todd Solondz had trouble watching them on-set. In the 1999 film Cruel Intentions, a girl-on-girl kiss won her an MTV Best Kiss Award. "It's so funny, because any love scene that I've done in a film is certainly an odd, intimate experience," she adds. "Of course, with Cruel Intentions and The Sweetest Thing, my love scenes always involved me falling out of frame or something that always ended with a hard laugh. I view them as kind of an acrobatic lesson."
Actor John Enos, who plays nightclub owner Bobby Marsino on The Young and the Restless, knows his way around love scenes. He's also performed intimate scenes with the likes of Heather Locklear on Melrose Place and Kim Cattrall on Sex and the City (as Mr. Too Big). "You know, every time I've done a movie or something where there's this big love scene, it ends up being the first week," notes Enos. "Bang, get right into it, and the next thing you know, you're naked with someone you don't know. It might be because a lot of people work out before the movie starts, so they're in shape for the love scenes, and that way they can eat craft services for the next five weeks. That's just an idea."
Sock Treatment
On most television productions, love scenes take between three and five hours to shoot. A love scene on a feature film can require a day or more of shooting, and it's not out of the question for people to be making coffee and serving food right next to your set. After each take, the makeup department not only does the usual touchups but it also typically sprays the actors down with a rosewater and glycerin concoction to make them appear sweaty. While women wear body stockings, G-strings, and pasties on-set, men get what is known as a "sock."
"It's a flesh-colored pouch that wraps your genitals up like a bag of leprechaun's gold," describes Sparks. "It's got a drawstring--so, even sexier--you're doing this whole thing with a tourniquet on your penis." When it comes to appearing naked, many actors--particularly those with clout--will insist on what is called a "nudity rider," an airtight contract that expands on the SAG clause and essentially gives the artists final cut of their love scenes. To read an example, visit the website SmokingGun.com, which has posted Linda Fiorentino's three-page nudity rider in its archives.
Actors who have been vocal about having nudity riders include Charlize Theron, Neve Campbell, Shannon Elizabeth, Sharon Stone, and Alyssa Milano. Many actors refuse to do any nudity: Catherine Deneuve, Andy Garcia, Julia Roberts, Scarlett Johansson, Kirsten Dunst, and Sarah Jessica Parker, to name a few. "Some of my favorite actresses working today feel comfortable doing it, and I don't think it diminishes them," Parker has said (as quoted in The New York Daily News), "but I've never felt comfortable doing it." In an interview with Maxim magazine, Kevin Bacon noted that he has a no-nudity clause in his contract, and as producer of Wild Things, he technically could have sued himself. Other well-known actors are more open to nudity. Holly Hunter told Premiere, "I've never signed a nudity clause in my life. And whenever I've done nudity, I felt it was right--I mean, we've got five senses, and sex employs all of them, so if you're expressing something about what it means to be alive in the world, how can you subtract sex from that?"
On a racy series such as Queer as Folk, actors are required to sign off on nudity waivers for every sex scene. "I got into the habit of signing them after the fact," says Sparks, who just wrapped shooting the fifth and final season, which recently premiered. "It was a different director every week, and if you're working with somebody who isn't as sensitive to the issues, then you can kind of stop it. You say, 'I'll sign this when we do what we said.' So they can't use the footage until it is signed. But you've got to look at the material and ask, 'How does this serve the story? How does this serve me as an actor portraying my character?' In the case that it does, you can pretty much go all out. If it doesn't, then you've got to start limiting your activity."
When Sparks, who is straight, first started playing a gay character on the show, he didn't realize that gay men have sex facing each other. "I can't see how that wouldn't be painful.... They're like magicians," he says. "It was my first sort of gay [role], so it's a different animal. It's the same thing I guess a lot of gay actors will experience the first time they have to do a straight sex scene. It's just kind of this, 'Uh...how does this work?'"
The Choreography of a Kiss
"I didn't know how you kissed onscreen," Blair admits. "You know, what is rude? I was very nervous about the tongue factor, and my policy is: If your character would do it, then you do it. But then I find out later that a lot of the best actresses would never dare use the tongue. So I'm shamed." Many actors use the "just go for it" attitude when it comes to kissing onstage or onscreen, but tongue is considered inappropriate unless you've either talked it over with your co-star or the director specifically calls for it in the scene.
Directors are known for being precise about what they want onscreen, so it's not surprising to hear specific blocking instructions such as, "Put your left leg over her right thigh, then roll her over facing you onto her left hip." Sharon Stone has referred to herself and Michael Douglas as "the horizontal Fred and Ginger of the '90s," because of how choreographed their blocking was during the three days it took to shoot the main love scene in Basic Instinct. Sparks says he, his fellow actors, and the directors had "sex meetings" on Queer as Folk at which they went over the content and blocking of each love scene.Sometimes the blocking of a love scene can throw an actor off-focus. "The scenes get very technical, and that can be frustrating, because you're trying to stay in the moment," explains Enos. "A lot of times the sound is off, and the director will just kind of shout out directions on where to move, to move what, and where the camera's coming. So, it's pretty much hands-on, and it gets very hot under those lights."
If you think doing love scenes on-set is scary, imagine what it's like to do them live in front of an audience. Michael Cassady was named L.A.'s Best Stage Actor of 2004 by Entertainment Today magazine for his performance in the wild comedy Shyness Is Nice for Alliance Repertory Company. The edgy play involved partial or full nudity for all of the actors, as well as several sex scenes, for its 10-week run in a cozy 50-seat theatre. Cassady and his co-stars had the advantage of a rehearsal period, which allowed them to get comfortable with the scenes, as well as with one another before opening night.
"The whole joke of the play was that these two 30-year-old virgins were thrown into this world of sex and drugs. So it was kind of inherent in the premise that there was going to be a lot of slap and tickle in it," he says. "In our case, it was a comedy, so the sex was like a punch line. When I go to a play, I don't want to see crotches up in my face, because that's not a sexy stage image at all. To do it so that it's tastefully staged and comfortably executable by the actors, it takes some precision work so that the sightlines are in the right place and you can mask body parts so it's realistic and not totally graphic. Everybody knows it's just a play."
Chemistry Assignment
Creating chemistry is the actor's biggest task while performing love scenes. Even real-life couples can fail to generate heat onscreen. On the other hand, sometimes the actors can't stand each other, yet it turns into fireworks onscreen; Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing and Debra Winger and Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman are just two reported examples. The good news is that actors can usually spend at least an hour discussing comfort levels with each other before the lighting has been set up and hair and makeup happens.
"Sometimes if you really do have chemistry, or wish you had chemistry, it can really muck everything up," explains Blair. "Right now I'm shooting The Fog with Tom Welling, and we have a scene where my character brushes him off in a friendly way, but I couldn't play it with confidence because I was so enamored with his beautiful face. My husband had a bit of a laugh about that because he never sees me really flustered. [Before this] I've just been kind of neutral with all my co-stars, and it allows us the freedom to just get to act--that's the safest approach. I don't understand the thing when people want to meet and say, 'We have to see if we have chemistry.' It's called acting."
Says Sparks, "That is one of the weirder things about sex scenes: You might actually find them attractive, and they may be married offscreen--they may have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, there may be something else going on--and you have this really difficult moment of, 'Oh, that's not real.' You feel a little denied and pulled away from."
"The challenging love scenes are the ones where you can't stand the girl that you've got to do it with, but sometimes [those scenes] come out the best," shares Enos. "It's that love-hate thing. If [the actors] have, like, a carnal dislike for each other, I think that [the scenes] tend to come out better. If you can act, that's where you're really called upon, even if you dislike the person. You've just got to get beyond it. If you can't, then it's just going to fall flat and be lousy."
注这段也挺好玩的：Chemistry is one thing, but what happens when male actors get a little too, um, excited? Michael Pitt has said he would dip himself in a glass of ice water before his graphic love scenes with Eva Green in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers. Ewan McGregor admitted to asking the director for "10 seconds" to collect himself before doing another take while simulating sex in films that have included Velvet Goldmine, Trainspotting, and Young Adam. Cassady worried that it was only a matter of time before he "popped one" onstage for Shyness Is Nice, but the sacredness of being in a play stopped him from revealing an uninvited guest star.
"The worst thing you want to do is get too excited in the scene, but it never happened, and I was shocked," Cassady adds. "I mean, these girls were really attractive. I think, to a certain extent, there's an understanding that you're onstage, and it feels good still, but you kind of talk yourself into the fact that you're doing a play; it's not real."
Audio Dialogue Replacement (ADR) can be another layer of embarrassment for actors who thought they had finished their love scenes on-set. It's difficult to mike actors while they're making out, so the exaggerated "oohs and ahs" are left for postproduction. "I think I blush a bit doing the ADR in a room with a bunch of technicians who don't know you," says Blair. "You have to do this moaning and screaming while watching your naked body on film. It's surreal. I don't view it as myself. It's just the character, but, yeah, there are a bit of uncomfortable moments, especially when Mom sees the film."
Make It Matter
The late filmmaker Francois Truffaut wrote about how, in Hitchcock's films, "the love scenes were filmed like murder scenes, and the murder scenes were filmed like love scenes." With that in mind, there can't just be two bodies slapping against each other. Actors must know that a good love scene should heighten emotion and propel the story forward with another layer, whether that is awkward vulnerability, comedy, fear, power, suspense, or passionate love. The important thing is to make your love scenes matter.
"Whatever you can think of that will further your character's growth in that scene, find a way to show it," Sparks advises. "If your character is having sex with their lover because they're afraid they're going to leave or they're angry with them, find a way to show that in your eye contact and your body movement and in your hands. You also have to understand that, afterwards, there's going to be a level of discomfort, unless you're just a sexually flippant person. That's one thing, but, after a sex scene, you're going to feel a little lonely or distanced or weird, and you can admit it to yourself or you cannot, but you will. You might think, 'Was that a good idea? I don't know.' So prepare for that, and make sure you have somebody to talk to about it if it does start to bother you."
All actors must possess a certain lack of self-consciousness to be able to get through these scenes. On a final note, Blair advises actors to try to feel comfortable in their own skins despite insecurities. "Don't be nervous about your body," she says. "If you're comfortable in it, then everyone around you will be comfortable. It's really just another costume you're putting on for the day." BSW
But i wonder it seems Gale rise up in the first season when he sex with justin for the first time? I do checked it carefully~~
——————————————————————这位简直说出了我的心声！作者: duzilvxing 时间: 2006-7-31 14:27
