Re: Writing a great love scene
A bit light on what?
Call me cynical but when a producer reads "love scene" they don't think 'foreplay' and there are still enough old-school players around who instinctively ask the question "So, do we see her t!ts?".
In all seriousness I seldom need to see people having sex in a movie - I'm almost never convinced it's "essential" to the story. I think the tension that surrounds passion and the small innocent ways it's revealed are much more interesting. What makes it work, IMO, is a slow build-up so the intensity of feeling becomes more apparent but there's no on-screen pay-off beyond delicate flirting, and the characters finding themselves in situations where the best they can do to vent their passion is a stolen moment where fingers or feet touch, or where they brush against each other 'accidentally' in a professional or social situation. If the scene is impromptu and there's no indication earlier in the story that they may have these feelings, then the secret is to identify a number of small behavioral moments which reveal their feelings and compress the interaction into a smaller time frame.
And then there's innuendo to reveal their inner feelings in dialog. Innuendo, by the way, is not an Italian suppository. Their conversation could play on something that's going on around them - whatever that is, you can almost certainly find a moment to steal a sexually ambiguous phrase to indicate that they are both aware of the feelings smoldering between them.
Originally posted by nic.h
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Call me cynical but when a producer reads "love scene" they don't think 'foreplay' and there are still enough old-school players around who instinctively ask the question "So, do we see her t!ts?".
In all seriousness I seldom need to see people having sex in a movie - I'm almost never convinced it's "essential" to the story. I think the tension that surrounds passion and the small innocent ways it's revealed are much more interesting. What makes it work, IMO, is a slow build-up so the intensity of feeling becomes more apparent but there's no on-screen pay-off beyond delicate flirting, and the characters finding themselves in situations where the best they can do to vent their passion is a stolen moment where fingers or feet touch, or where they brush against each other 'accidentally' in a professional or social situation. If the scene is impromptu and there's no indication earlier in the story that they may have these feelings, then the secret is to identify a number of small behavioral moments which reveal their feelings and compress the interaction into a smaller time frame.
And then there's innuendo to reveal their inner feelings in dialog. Innuendo, by the way, is not an Italian suppository. Their conversation could play on something that's going on around them - whatever that is, you can almost certainly find a moment to steal a sexually ambiguous phrase to indicate that they are both aware of the feelings smoldering between them.
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