Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s first feature film, the noir thriller Bound, created a minor sensation when it was released in 1996, garnering press for its ornate visual style—and for the lesbian love affair at its center. The movie’s twisty plot follows just-out-of-prison Corky (Gina Gershon) and gangster’s moll Violet (Jennifer Tilly) as they enter into a whirlwind romance and hatch a scheme to rip off the Mob. Sex columnist Susie Bright talked her way onto the set to serve as an expert consultant on Bound, helping the siblings create believable heat between the characters—and a realistic, explicit sex scene, which caused the MPAA to threaten the movie with an NC-17 rating.
Though the movie was overshadowed a few years later by the Wachowskis’ follow-up, The Matrix, it’s remained a cult classic, especially for lesbian audiences. (Lilly Wachowski recently met a young woman with a Corky-and-Violet tattoo.) As Bound arrives on the Criterion Collection, Lilly Wachowski and Susie Bright reunited for a no-holds-barred Zoom about working for Dino De Laurentiis, about shooting a queer sex scene while living in the closet, and about butches, pillow queens, and “lesbian cock.” Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dan Kois: Lilly, when you were in pre-production on Bound, you and Lana sent a letter to Susie saying you were fans and offering her a cameo. How did you know her work?
Lilly Wachowski: Our research was in this queer lesbian bookstore here in my neighborhood in Chicago, Women and Children First. We spent a lot of time browsing in the lesbian theory section and were reading her Susie Sexpert books, and it was really influential in terms of how we wanted to portray the women. And it was hugely influential in our own business as well, the business of our closeted queerness and closeted transness. We were researching for the larger project, but we were also researching for this smaller thing.
The larger project of your lives, and the smaller project of this movie.
Wachowski: Yeah. And each sort of compartmentalized. We’re each in our own closet at this point. There’s not a lot of talking about—maybe a little bit of talking through the vent, closet to closet.
What was it about the version of lesbian sexuality or lesbian culture that Susie’s work showed you that seemed right for this movie?
Wachowski: There was a quote that we carried with us. I’m not going to get it exactly right, but Susie was talking about the idea of penises, and that lesbians do have stiff, probing, insistent organs—we just call them hands. And we were like, yes, that this is what it means to be queer and have different equipment and work with what you have. And when you think about the sex scene in Bound, the sex scene is nothing without all of the foreplay that happens before, in the living room and in the kitchen, where she’s working those pipes and getting her hands all wet.
Susie Bright: We talked about that so much. I was like, “Lesbian hands are lesbian cock.”
Bound
Written and directed by the Wachowskis. The Criterion Collection Blu-Ray.
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Susie, when you got the script in the mail, what was interesting about it to you, and what worried you about the project?
Bright: I got this letter on brown sepia paper from Dino De Laurentiis, and I was like, is this for real? There was this very courteous note about how they had discovered my book, Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World, and were offering me a cameo in their movie. I read the script and I was screaming—not about the lesbian part, obviously, but about the way that they had written the suspense of the heist movie and how—I mean, I’m a squeamish, sensitive little girl.
I could see how the protagonists are a butch-femme couple, like me and my lover at the time, Honey Lee Cottrell, but there’s hardly anything about what they actually do in bed. So I wrote this really audacious letter. I said, “Could I help you write the relationship parts in terms of how they bond and get tight and then the sex that they have?”
I thought: If I associate with this, if I’m even a cameo, if dykes think I’m a sellout and a bullshit artist, I will be thrown into oblivion. My life will be over. It has to be so good. And I didn’t know them. I didn’t know them from a hole in the ground.
But you decided to go for it. What advice did you give them?
Bright: Because they had a visual vocabulary, I could send them little snippets of lesbian-made porn of dykes getting it on. I could send them a picture and I’d say, “This is my image of who Corky is.” There was this moment where Corky would take off her shirt, and I was like, “For a butch woman, taking off your shirt is the last thing you’re going to do.” Displaying your breasts? There’s going to be other moments where she’s really vulnerable—like letting Violet, who appears so femme on the outside, fuck her.
I love that, because I am a femme, and so often when you’re a femme, people think you’re a pillow queen, and you just lie there and go, “Oh, do me”—I do nothing; I file my nails. So the idea that a femme is a capable, competent lover—do you know how many dyke femmes came up to me after this and said, “You have given me strength”? We could show butch vulnerability that is still butch, and femme power that is still unequivocally femme.
Lilly, when you were on set to film that sex scene, what was that day like?
Wachowski: Well, it was a funny day. It was a closed set because it was so intimate, but the entire crew was there anyway, because of the way that we designed the shot [as a long take]. We had this crane that was coming up from the ground, and then there were all these cues.
Walls were flying out, and we moved three walls and put a wall back in—
In the middle of the shot, you’re moving walls around?
Wachowski: Yeah, while we’re circling, there are walls being hinged out. And so the camera would come up and we would call out, “Wall,” and then this wall would go. And then the camera would move around and we’d go “Foot,” and then they were doing their action. It was complete chaos happening behind the camera, but in front of the camera the two actors were just in this beautiful dance together. I think we shot it like 13 times, and there were two that we thought were fantastic. Sometimes there were a lot of technical issues because the camera would hit a wall or not be able to come around the side correctly. There were two takes, an American take and a European take. The European take is the preferable one, but we got an NC-17 with that take.
So you didn’t cut anything out to get the R, you used the alternate take which revealed a little bit less.
Wachowski: Yeah.
Bright: I remember getting the phone call when we were in the middle of that ratings fight, and I was ready to go down there and cut their heads off with a machete. It was so ugly, because this is how sexist the ratings board was. They would say, “Well, you know that scene where Jennifer has her fingers on Gina’s thigh, it insinuates that something more is going to happen.” Now, if you had a man’s hand on a woman’s thigh, no one would give a crap about it, right? But the fact that a woman’s hand was on her thigh and it insinuated that her hand was going to go further, it sent them into a complete meltdown, and they said, “You can’t have this shot, it’s X-rated.”
I mean, I hate them just for that, but then the way they gilded the lily was they said, “Hey, you can substitute a shot of Jennifer’s tits and wouldn’t that be just as nice?” You fucking assholes. It’s not about Jennifer’s tits.
Wachowski: It was just preposterous at the time, and imagining having that fight nowadays—it’s just stupid. They were just stupid bigots.
Lilly, you mentioned before about the way that what you were learning and what you were experiencing dovetailed with the larger personal journey that you were on. Shooting that scene, did you feel like, “How the fuck did I get in this situation? How am I going to make it through this thing?” Or was it liberating or joyful or fun?
Wachowski: There was a secret thrill for me to be in a queer space, and there was an absolute thrill to be making something that I knew hadn’t been seen before, and to be doing it with a particular style that hadn’t been seen before. And so that part was cool. But nothing prepares you for shooting a sex scene when you’re a young filmmaker and you’ve never worked with actors that way.
Bright: Well, I think you’re being too humble. It was a fulfillment of something that had been very carefully planned, and when people ask me, “How come there’s no good sex scenes anymore?” It’s like, well, because you need to spend the time to make it really beautiful and to make it meaningful.
But for you, Lilly, there were things that were difficult about it, nonetheless.
Wachowski: It was difficult. We were with a producer, this Italian patriarch, who saw the lesbian bar scene, and he was like, “This is not a lesbian bar.” Because the lesbian bar that exists in his head is from, like, Penthouse Forum letters. So he didn’t start getting interested in the dailies until we got to the third or fourth day, when we started shooting more intense thriller-y stuff. That was when he started going, “Oh, OK. They know what they’re doing.” And then, when he saw the sex scene, he said, “The price of this film just went up.”
Bright: His Roger Corman attitude kicked in.
Now it’s almost 30 years later, and queer representation in movies feels like it’s in a totally different place. What’s Bound’s legacy?
Bright: I still find most mainstream depictions of lesbian relationships to be pathetically bourgeois. It’s just upstanding citizens, lesbians, who are middle class and have sex. Oh, how exciting! Fuck that. You know what I love about Bound? It’s about working-class characters who are divorced from bourgeois aspiration and from the platitudes of capitalist American Dream happiness.
Wachowski: I love all that. I love the idea of queerness that fights hierarchies, and I certainly feel like that was something that we set out to do. That premiere at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco!
Bright: I don’t know how Lilly and Lana pulled that off. It was just so amazing to be with that audience, because for them, yeah, sure, it was erotic, but what everybody in the crowd knew was: This is the lesbian movie to end all lesbian movies. And I was of course on tenterhooks because everyone knew that I had a part in it. What if they did something that embarrasses me and I was crucified after that showing? They did not, to say the least. It was like the fruition of everything we felt so passionately about.
And the ins and outs of the heist are as tricky and attention-grabbing as any noir film should be. I remember seeing a couple of people walk out of the Castro as soon as the finger-cutting scene came. And of course I was like, “Ahhh!” because I’m squeamish. And meanwhile, Lana and Lilly were just like, “Ha ha ha ha ha.”
Wachowski: That was the greatest screening of any of our films that I have ever seen.
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