If seeing actors like Stellan Skarsgard, Shia LaBeouf, Willem Dafoe, Christian Slater, Jamie Bell, Uma Thurman, and Charlotte Gainsbourg have actual, real-life hardcore sex* was the main appeal for you to see Lars Von Trier’s two-film porn epic Nymphomaniac, I’ve got some bad news….
For the truly hard-core elements of the film, von Trier used body doubles for the stars. But, Vesth revealed, the Danish director will use digital technology to combine the actors’ non-explicit displays with the pornographic performance of the doubles.
“We shot the actors pretending to have sex and then had the body doubles, who really did have sex, and in post we will digital-impose the two,” Vesth explained. “So above the waist it will be the star and the below the waist it will be the doubles.”
I hope someone had a camera on Shia Labeouf when he arrived on set and heard of this development.
This isn’t all that surprising. Though a few outlier actors would certainly be down, even the great Lars Von Trier isn’t going to manage to get all of these older, well known, largely married actors to go balls deep for his art film.
There are two sides to this- I like the idea that tech has allowed Von Trier to shoot this film however he wants, with no reliance on cut-aways or obvious editing around body doubles. I’m also concerned the proverbial seams will show and be a distracting part of a film surely full of distractions already. At the end of the day Von Trier could curate YouPorn for a week if I really needed to see his sexual fantasies- I’m much more interested in how he can tell a great story in an arena few have touched.
On that note, there are hints that Lars has gone all in on this one and that sex won’t be the only ostentatious storytelling mechanisms.
Vesth was a bit more forthcoming, confirming that von Trier will use experimental graphical elements in the two Nymphomaniac films, using double exposures and imposing words and symbols over the action as part of his storytelling. One buyer who screened early footage of the first film called the technique “groundbreaking…like nothing I’ve ever seen… Lars has thrown everything in this one. It’s about religion, about God, about philosophy…”
The film will not be showing at Cannes, Toronto, or Venice, so first word on the film will come from its Danish premiere.
Source | THR (via FilmDrunk)
*I tried to make that sentence more appealing as it went along.