The key to a successful sex scene? Don’t let your partner think you’re taking advantage of the situation, says Michael Douglas, poking fun at the need for “intimacy coordinators.”
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During a meeting with the public at the Cannes Film Festival, the “Basic Instinct” star quipped that “nothing can be done today without resorting to intimacy coordinators,” who have popped up in recent years to ensure actors all intimate phases are preserved.
But the 78-year-old American actor, who joked he’s “an expert when it comes to sex scenes,” claimed that “the secret is in the rehearsals.”
“It’s like when you’re rehearsing a fight scene, you have to work out the choreography. You start very slowly and then you get up to a faster pace,” he said.
“When you’re shooting a love scene, it’s important that the actress doesn’t think you’re taking advantage of the situation. “You tell them up front, ‘I put my hand here, you put your hand there, and then we kiss,'” added the ‘Fatal Liaison’ star.
“If you succeed, it will seem spontaneous while everything is very well choreographed,” he said.
The actor, who received Tuesday’s Palm of Honor, recalled the 1992 release of Basic Instinct, one of his five films showing at Cannes, with humor.
The explicit sex scenes are “unique, even for France,” he laughed. “To see those sex scenes on the biggest screen I’ve ever seen… And after that we had a very quiet dinner. “Everyone digested the film,” he recalled, causing laughter in the room.
He explained that many actresses turned down the role after director Paul Verhoeven warned them there would be “a lot of nudity”.
Michael Douglas thought the sulphurous film’s other star, Sharon Stone, was “amazing.”
The actress had revealed in recent years that the director had not respected his approval of a scene in which his intimacy is revealed.
Michael Douglas also spoke fondly of his father, Kirk Douglas, recalling that the legendary actor met his wife Anne in Cannes.
“Before social media, we had more secrets, secret meetings that nobody knew about,” he said.
“I spoke to Leo DiCaprio about this: Today someone sees you and suddenly there are 1,000 people. “You don’t have the freedom that we had before,” he said.