Nudity Required

Call me crazy… I don’t like shooting nude scenes. It’s a lot of work. The lighting has to be absolutely perfect, since everything’s all right out in the open. If you show too much, it could actually prevent sales to some countries since all their rules are different on what’s acceptable to be seen or not. You have to show just enough to make the viewer want to see more. A love scene is usually shot in such short clips from many different angles and dissolved together to make it more fluid and romantic. On top of worrying about all that, you have to be constantly aware that the actors are not uncomfortable or starting to feel awkward along the way.

Why have nudity? Well, for certain genres, like B-Movie horrors… that is one of their “main ingredients.” “No nudity” in a B-Movie horror would be like an action movie without the chase, or a romantic comedy with no love interest... a martini without the olive! The bottom line is, for most movies, “who is in it,” is the main selling point. Horror is one genre where that isn’t as important, and nudity kind of takes the place of the requirement of using known actors. As our friends at Maxim Media International say, “Blood, Babes and Boobs!”

I remember the moment that I took nudity very seriously. I’d shot a suspense thriller years ago – “Secret Sins” – that had some nudity in it, but not a lot. There were several reasons there wasn’t much nudity – Starting the love scene at 3am after a 17 hour day kept us from making the main love scene very long… Another nude scene came out a little too dark, plus a few other logistical reasons (this was shot on 35mm film, before there was even digital). Well, “Secret Sins” was represented at AFM, so we went up to visit our distributor at that time, in their suite at the Lowe’s. He said the Japanese buyers had just been in and wanted to buy rights to that territory for over 20K, and that they came back several times, really wanting it… but they passed because there wasn’t enough nudity. That is the numbing moment that I realized that if your genre calls for nudity, it should be taken very seriously. We made other sales, which was nice, but also lost a few big ones because of this.

Now, it’s true… Sometimes the sexiest scenes are where an actress is in lingerie… or fully clothed even… Just as long as the magnetism is there… and that’s what makes it work. There’s no actual nudity in my comedy “Curse of the Pink Panties,” for instance, and it opens itself up to a wider audience being more of a sexy PG-13 movie without the actual nudity. Some of the scenes are more provocative than if they had included nudity. This won’t work in a genre where nudity is totally expected, but in a sexy comedy like this, it works even better without it.

Our horror movie “Blood Sucking Babes from Burbank” – a campy low budget horror - was a movie where nudity was a necessity. I was very lucky in “Babes,” that the love scene was done by people that got along really well. Mira Rayson, who plays Felicity, is a dynamic, very pretty 18 year old actress. She had met Zack, played by Danilo Mancinelli, just 2 days before the love scene… but they were totally comfortable with it, and it really had that spark. Danilo is very professional on the set, and even within the first few hours they met, they were talking through the scene and how their ideas of how it might play. A big part of the movie is that magical love scene… and after all, the magic is what it’s all about.