Writing a great love scene

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  • #16
    Re: Writing a great love scene

    Originally posted by nic.h View Post
    Any other suggestions though? They seem a bit light on, considering how common love scenes are.
    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.
    "Friends make the worst enemies." Frank Underwood

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    • #17
      Re: Writing a great love scene

      Derek:

      Anita: "I guess that's because two people who love each other actually exchange love in the sex act?"

      I get that, but we don't always see it. (I don't think we often need to see it.) It's often implied or suggested, the lead-up to when they have intercourse, though sometimes they don't have sex at all. Still intimate and sexy if done well. Perhaps "love scene" isn't the right term, though I can't think of another. But what I'm after is some examples of the culmination of two lovers coming together. I want it to be sexy, but not gratuitous. I want it to be subtle and restrained because the characters are terrified of taking this step - it's not the third act, mind - and, for these same reasons, they won't end up together. This is it - the one time they make it together even though they don't know that.

      "How could there be more love in soft kisses and candles, compared to having sex? This can not be measured like that."

      I have already stated my feelings about soft kisses and candles, but having said that, some of the most sensual filmic moments I can think of didn't involve actual, consumated sex. (Brokeback Mountain when Jake leans on the sleeping Heath; Lost in Translation when Bob whispers into Charlotte's ear, the ending of Casablanca... I don't think any of those moments wre boring to watch on screen.)

      My characters will have sex - we see them the next morning post-coital - but I want a romantic set up (without candles, thanks) but with emotional punch. I think I'm getting there anyway, but was hoping to be inspired in the actual writing of the script, not just how I visualise it as a film.

      Popcorntreect - I agree. I don't want to watch anyone get it off on screen. (Or not in a cinema full of strange people anyway. Time and place, and all that. )

      Lincoln - thanks. I think you're onto something re your theory. Hoping to redress that... My protag is the woman. The love interest is the guy. (That's not the answer, but it's a start.)

      DavidK - I meant "light on" in that there was only one suggestion. I meant that I was hoping to be able to read several examples to compare/contrast, and see what made them work. I'll check out Out of Sight again - I skimmed the script but will watch the film first. Any opportunity to see George Clooney in love works for me.

      I won't be showing them having sex, just the lead up. There has been tension all the way through (I hope) but what I want now is to write a scene where we know it culminates in sex, even if it's not there on the page. And I was hoping to find some good examples of when this moment (which happens a lot, when you think about it) reads well on the page as well as plays out well on the screen.

      Thanks for your help.

      Nic
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      • #18
        Re: Writing a great love scene

        Originally posted by nic.h View Post
        I'm struggling with a series of love scenes as part of my rewrite.
        The best love scene I've ever known was a scene in a restaurant.


        Setup for the scene: We know the guy's married, and it's his tenth wedding anniversary.
        For their anniversary, he's taking his wife to the restaurant where he proposed.
        It's a tradition for them .. they've done it every year. (Well, except for the first anniversary - she had a car accident on the way there, and he's done the driving ever since)

        That's the setup.

        So the scene is at the restaurant. And we see his wife for the first time. He's spoon feeding her.

        She's basically vegative - in a wheelchair and hasn't really moved or done anything more than roll her eyes and grunt in the nine years since the car accident.

        And we realise that he's looked after her every day since then. For NINE years.

        THAT is a love scene.

        Sex might be fun. It might even be between two people who love each other.

        But it isn't a love scene.

        Mac
        (PS: Translating this to your scene, I personally would want a scene where we realise that he has gone out of his way to do something for her ... not for himself. That would then be the trigger for the 'scene where we know it culminates in sex'. )
        Last edited by Mac H.; 09-23-2008, 07:48 PM.
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        • #19
          Re: Writing a great love scene

          Okay, I've been wracking my brains and come up with a few more.

          Atonement
          Pride and Prejudice
          (odd that these recent ones are both period pieces, and adaptations)

          and some older ones:
          Witness
          Someone To Watch Over Me
          The Bodyguard (the film was a bit cheesy but the script read well I thought from a quick skim)
          Sleeping with the Enemy (the tentative romance brewing with the neighbour - although the copious direction pretty much lays out the subtext for you on the page)

          I guess it all comes down to the tone you want your script to have.

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          • #20
            Re: Writing a great love scene

            LAST TANGO IN PARIS - There's a sex scene for almost every emotion in this one.
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            • #21
              Re: Writing a great love scene

              Thanks for the suggestions! And thanks for your input Mac. I do think I'm getting closer here though it's hard to like anything you write when you've written it over and over.

              I'll go through these scripts and see if I can come up with any others.

              Cheers.
              Nic
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              • #22
                Re: Writing a great love scene

                I'm coming in late here and did not read all of the other comments.

                I would say just write it the way you would want it to play out if you were the person involved in the scene.

                What do you want to show?

                A man who really knows what women want?

                A man who just wants to do it?

                Conflict between the two?

                Just write it as you feel and see it.

                Quit worrying about the "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" crap.

                "The fact that you have seen professionals write poorly is no reason for you to imitate them." - ComicBent.

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                • #23
                  Re: Writing a great love scene

                  My favorite part is the reseach... and it's tax deductable!

                  Writing Sex Scenes:
                  http://www.scriptsecrets.net/tips/tip138.htm

                  BODY HEAT is probably online somewhere, and that script got attention because it was hot.

                  By the way, on film people never do it on a soft matress when there's a cold automobile hood or a rainy alleyway available.

                  - Bill
                  Free Script Tips:
                  http://www.scriptsecrets.net

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                  • #24
                    Re: Writing a great love scene

                    Thanks Roland and Bill. Sound advice from both of you.

                    I had no idea this would be so difficult given that this was the one part of the story I'd worked out so long ago! Amazing how twee every word looks on the page even when the image itself is not cliched at all.

                    Thanks again.
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                    • #25
                      Re: Writing a great love scene

                      For a less steamy but amusing example, check out the deflowering of Eugene (Matthew Broderick) in Beluxi Blues.

                      HIM
                      You sell perfume too?

                      HER
                      I sell hard-to-get items.... You better tell me if you're gonna do it from over there honey, cos I'll need to make some adjustments.
                      "Friends make the worst enemies." Frank Underwood

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                      • #26
                        Re: Writing a great love scene

                        Body Heat... the first love scene with the wind chimes and the chair tossed through the window. No cue sax music, no burning candles, no match cuts to rockets blasting off or a train entering a tunnel or waves crashing... just southern heat & humidity, some wind chimes, some shattered glass, then foreplay. Didn't even care if actual romp in a bed or the floor or nudity was shown because all the tension building up to that from the start of the two characters meeting was on point.

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                        • #27
                          Re: Writing a great love scene

                          Originally posted by Ire View Post
                          The best cinematic sex is mostly foreplay. I don't know how much your lover's fingers and lips have touched, grazed, slid around up and down without actually truly meeting, penetrating, but that said, I'd hope there has been heat between them i.e., anger, frustration, distance, emotional distance. If you have that prior to the banging, bedding all the better. Also, the where of the fornicating. The more risky, as long as it's organic to the story, don't think Victorian.

                          As far as us guys, I haven't watched a non-pornographic movie for sex since um, Mulholland Drive. Well, it was on cable.
                          This is how I write most of mine. I also watch movies with good love scenes and and free write what I'm watching to practice. In one of my scripts the first time I got a consultation the reader said the best part was the sex.

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                          • #28
                            Re: Writing a great love scene

                            Originally posted by Popcorntreect View Post
                            I'm a guy and I prefer "love" scenes over "sex" scenes. I just don't feel comfortable watching them in a feature length movie.
                            I guess that's why we really don't see alot of them in movies these days.

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                            • #29
                              Re: Writing a great love scene

                              I like boobies.
                              "Tone is now engaged in a furious Google search for Leighton Meester's keester." -- A friend of mine

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