As much as I love the film, and this particular scene, I think Nicolas Roeg is director who exploits his actresses, and there was definitely some exploitation here.
Apparently the sex scene was 'unplanned', which is basically Hollywood code for getting the actress to sign the contract first. On the day of the sex scene, a top Paramount executive just happens to pay a set visit i.e. should Christie refuse to do the scene they had a Hollywood heavyweight on stand-by to make it clear her career would be over if she backed out. So basically they have Donald and Julie naked on the bed, and four other guys standing around: the director, the exec, the photographer and the lighting guy. That must have been pretty intimidating for an actress that had never been nude on film before, let alone done sex scenes. From Christie's account on Wikipedia, she sounded petrified as the director shouted instructions to Sutherland: "pull her gown open", "suck her nipple"—and as Bart seems to recall penetration—probably "put your dick into her" at some point. Sutherland had form for banging his co-stars so presumably didn't have a problem with any of this. Warren Beatty famously went absolutely mental over it, and I think I would have too if my girlfriend had been semi-raped and filmed for a movie.
It wasn't the first time Roeg had put real sex into a movie, he got Mick Jagger to do something similar in Performance. Also, Jenny Agutter was very upset at how explicit the footage was when she saw Walkabout for the first time, and she was only 16 when she made that. This is a director who clearly took advantage of his actresses (it is notable that none of these women ever made another film with him, apart from Theresa Russell who he was married too), but that said he backed it up with real talent. Jenny's nudity certainly adds a certain je nais se quoi to Walkabout, and the sex scene in Don't Look Now creates a genuine air of intimacy that has never really been recaptured by any film since. I suppose it raises that old dilemma of whether the ends justify the means. If it counts for anything both Christie and Agutter speakly highly of these films today.
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LilPlumley
13 years ago
Where did you get that information?
All I can say is that it really didn't seem to me like Julie Christie wasn't on board. She didn't look terrified or even remotely scared.
Also, if she was semi-raped, as you've called it, I don't think anything would stop her from admitting today what had happened when they made this movie. She wouldn't speak highly of it if it had been so horrible, would she?
And I think Warren Beatty had a reputation for being a womanizer and I can very well imagine him being the jealous kind of guy.
Hey Andy, did you hear about this one? Tell me, are you locked in the punch?
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franzkabuki
13 years ago
Did Roeg really have so much weight to throw around that he could get Paramount executives to back him up on this? One would think the studio would value big stars like Christie and Sutherland more highly than a relative nobody Roeg and just tell him to axe the scene - and replace him in case of some further whining.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
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L0GAN5
13 years ago
I doubt Roeg would have had any power at the time. If a Paramount exec was on hand on the day they filmed the scene then I think you can safely assume that Paramount—or most likely Robert Evans—wanted the scene in and sent their man over to make sure it was filmed. Christie was a huge star at the time, so it was quite a coup to get her naked in a film; Paramount would know that the film would practically market itself, and maybe Evans had it in for Beatty and knew it would needle him.
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