K. Fox's Beau Comments on Her On-film Shagging

The first draft of Intimacy that Kerry received contained directions in elaborate prose, rather than the normal concise idiom of a completed film script. Each episode of "Wednesday" sex was minutely described, skilfully developing atmosphere and meaning as the story progressed. But the sex scenes now spanned large swathes of text, and had little to do with Kureishi's original, taut narrative; they were innovations of the screenplay.

Kerry wanted to know what I thought. I didn't really know. It was elegantly written, which was a start. … Kerry has made a career out of tackling difficult material. There have been a scattering of sex scenes in the 15 or so films she has made since. On paper, this looked like another interesting challenge. Nevertheless, the sex in the script sounded significantly different from anything Kerry had come across before. One line in particular caught the attention of us both: "She sucks him off for a long time."

No doubt about it, that was a puzzler. It was just one line in a complex narrative, in which the sex was an integral but not dominant part. Still, it made us laugh. How would [the film] trick the audience into believing that one? Head bobbing on air in the male lead's lap? Nifty handling of a prosthetic organ?

The truth was glaring, but took some reckoning with all the same. It wasn't going to be a trick. In fact, this lonely line was a useful indicator that, if Kerry accepted the role, the sex in Intimacy would be far more demanding than the normal perfunctory erotic interlude of most mainstream movies. To some indefinable degree, this sex would be real.
…
Next came a private reflex. Forget Kerry - this wasn't going to be easy for me. She has since become the mother of my son, but at the time we'd known each other only for six months. I was in the flush of the most important relationship of my life and had no doubt that I was also, in the immortal words of John Lennon, a jealous guy.
…
If the film went ahead, I would have to wait while she left for rehearsals to practise sex with Mark, and came back home. Then, I would have to wait as she went on set, undressed with Mark, took him in her arms, helped him reach a state of arousal, and came back home again. And eventually, I would have to watch, along with a sizeable public, in the magnificent magnified detail of widescreen cinema, everything they'd done together. Or, after editing, not quite everything. Which is the worst? Seeing nothing, or something, or everything? I thought of Touchstone and Audrey, and the world seemed to flicker in negative.

I did have another response, however, which crept in gradually and stayed with me for the duration of filming, right up until the moment I first saw Intimacy. It wasn't the classic fantasy of being hidden while watching your partner have sex with someone else.

But it wasn't entirely unconnected to it, either. It was an impulse to know how far I could extend the boundaries of my possession of Kerry, and still feel the same about her. Or, rather, I knew I wouldn't feel the same about her. Ahead lay an obscure destination of the heart. Would it be better, or worse? If it didn't ruin us, would it make us stronger? Frankly, neither I nor (despite her experience) Kerry had any idea what it would be like, or what effect it would have on us.
…
As Kerry and I talked about it, a sense of adventure emerged. We developed a new solidarity. If jealousy is about watching - or imagining you are watching - an infidelity, then this would be an experiment in controlled jealousy. I met Rylance and felt not the slightest twitch of resentment. Mark has a calm, almost elfin presence. The sex scenes would be tougher and physiologically more complex for him than for Kerry.

The final question was, would they be having penetrative sex? Logical or not, that was the impassable barrier for me, and for Kerry also. If they did, it wouldn't be the first time it had happened in a mainstream movie.

There are stories about actors in a relationship having real sex for the standard type erotic interlude, without the crew even realising. Unknowingly, you may have seen a film where this happens. But that is decisively not what happens in Intimacy. There is oral sex, which you see, and there is the extremely effective illusion of two ordinary people making desperate love.
So why, if it's an illusion, the need to go as far as the film does? Why the need to show real oral sex, even if only briefly? And why the need to show, more often, Mark with an erection?

The answer is simple. It is to take the internal logic of a work of art to a conclusion; that is its integrity. In this case, it is to take a story that deals with sex as far as the actors can allow, without compromising their personal lives, and to elicit from them the most powerful performances of which they are capable….

We now live with a very confused entertainment culture, which wildly overstates the importance of movie stars, transforming every weekend supplement into a marketing arm for Hollywood. By the same token, though, the actual job which those actors do is downplayed to a negligible minimum. It sounds almost pretentious to talk about "serious" movie actors (as opposed to celebrities), but they do exist. And this is an example of what they do, when prepared to take a risk, with the material of life.

There's another, subtler reason for the oral sex in Intimacy. Although brief, it completes the illusion for the audience. Because we can see this thing happening, we are allowed to feel that everything is. References to it in the press have been amusing for the purse-lipped literalness it has produced.
"Fox takes Rylance's penis in her mouth," squeaked the Sydney Morning Herald after she won the Silver Bear for best actress at this year's Berlin Film Festival. "Blowjob" is the affectedly relaxed demotic deployed by columnists. To my mind, a blowjob represents the mechanical, bobbing up-and-down motion you get in porn films.

What Kerry does in Intimacy is not as formal as that. Her movements are gentle and humane. We're not used to it. We don't see much sex in Britain. In fact, strangely enough, we see very little realistic sex at all. We see lots of sexually-charged advertising images, a huge amount of semi-pornographic magazine representations, some desultory stuff on television, but almost no truthful images of it at all. Intimacy is irrelevant to debates about pornography. It doesn't blur the line between art-house movie and top-shelf video. It makes it clearer.
…
Intimacy… [is] about what Norman Mailer called "the dark, gritty business of sex".

Should someone find themselves turned on by the film, that would be odd, though not aberrant. But if the emotional complexity of a real, or realistically conveyed, human relationship inspires equally indecent feelings as watching the bumpety-bump burlesque of hardcore pornography, then you have a problem which no degree of censorship will solve.
…
But, as a general principle, not showing something runs counter to the instinct of cinema. It should be no surprise that violence and sex are its continuing obsessions. These are events which, as they occur in life, are fast, fleeting and blurred. If we are involved with them, we have no visual distance; we see confused images. The whole purpose of a movie camera is to be our voyeuristic eye and - whatever its aspirations to high seriousness or low frivolity - to magnify and let us see in art what we can't in life.
When I asked Kerry why she wanted to take a chance on the kind of sex Patrice was portraying in Intimacy, she said, first, "because I've never seen it done before." For me, the reasoning was much the same. There would have been a point of no return if Patrice had asked Kerry and Mark to perform penetrative sex.
…
When shooting began, the strains on Kerry became apparent. The entire story of the film takes the characters on a descending emotional spiral, and the nadir for Claire, the Wednesday woman, occurs when she confesses to Betty, played by Marianne Faithfull, that her whole life has been nothing more than a talentless "dabbling".

But there is no question that the sex scenes, concentrated into a single week of filming, were the most demanding. She described it as exhaustively "grafting your way through scene work". The floor was hard, giving her carpet burns. She would come home exhausted and almost ill. Patrice had agreed to make it safer than just a "closed" set. When a scene ended, the crew were not allowed to rush in and rearrange things. Kerry and Mark needed time gradually to pull themselves out of a punishing experience.

Much of Intimacy is shot hand-held. But, during the sex, the camera was stationary. Both actors knew which parts of their bodies were being looked at. Nevertheless, Kerry realised that Mark had further to go to accept his nakedness. Actresses have been cultivated in the industry to undress, and are better used to it. Kerry said she felt "protective" of Mark because, between him and Patrice, there was the tension of males pushing each other to an extreme.

Then there was the matter of displaying physical arousal in front of a cameraman. For Mark, the most difficult scene was what Patrice called the "beautiful" Wednesday, in which Kerry takes him in her mouth. Kerry's toughest moment came on "black" Wednesday when Mark, albeit ambiguously, rapes her.

For me, by this stage, the dominant anxiety had become more simplistic. Would the film justify Kerry's work? Would Intimacy be any good? The first time I saw the film, it was with an audience that consisted only of Patrice, Kerry, Mark, Hanif Kureishi and Timothy Spall, who was playing Kerry's cuckolded husband in the film.

It was an overwhelming and inspiring relief. Although made for less than Patrice had hoped, it was stunningly shot. The film moved with gripping intensity. Dirty London had never, I felt, been portrayed as honestly and luminously as this. There was a sublime ugliness to the film.
That, however, was the "beautiful" screening. Later, at a press event, I would have to confront the "black" screening. In a small theatre in Soho I sat surrounded by critics, my own editor, PR reps, and an elderly New Zealander: Kerry's mother, Margaret.

Never let anyone persuade you that a film is the same film whoever the audience is. In this cramped, nervous atmosphere, I saw faults that hadn't been there before. I wasn't convinced by a subplot.
…
In fact, the one thing I am absolutely certain of is that the sex scenes are some of the most brilliantly executed aspects of Intimacy. If anything, it is a question not of whether the film is justified in including them, but whether the rest of the film lives up to the sex scenes.

Even during my "dark screening" I was moved. I knew the Kerry who was on screen, yet she was also someone else. To do it, she says, she had to tap random different memories to come by her performance. Watching her, I felt a rush of past confusions and abandonments. "Drama is there for you to feel sympathy with others," Kerry explains. "People can see they're not alone in the world. You don't have to be worried that you're the only one."
Once I had seen the film - both "beautiful" and "black" versions - the jealous urge to find out how far Kerry and I could trust each other disappeared. Everything did change. We now have a small son, and that speaks for itself. When I try to explain to myself what I like about Kerry, I think of an odd talent she has.

A New Zealander, she has lived in London for only six years. Yet she knows her way round the city better than most natives. I came back to London from Scotland. It is with a foreigner's awe that I sit in a car as she drives, in possession of a mysterious clarity of mind, through this loneliest and most labyrinthine of capitals. Drivers of black cabs don't get better than this. This woman has a kind of occult knowledge.

Fourteen years ago, driving that car with Touchstone in the back, Audrey taught me a tough lesson. I obviously learned it well. Now, even if I were fleeing the jaws of hell and it was Friday afternoon rush hour in London, I've got a driver I would trust to find the highway. The inferno receding, and special effects blazing, this is a movie in full Technicolor - all 24 frames per second flashing positive.



http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,511246,00.html