On Sex on Screen

A panel discussion at Sundance London gets me reconsidering if, how and why I choose write sex scenes for screen.

I have to admit, I don’t like sex scenes on screen.

I don’t like watching them. I don’t like writing them.

As a viewer, they almost always take me out of the story.

I’m thinking about the actors who are doing the pretending. How much pretending are they having to do? If a woman is in a bra, or tits out, I’m thinking about how well or badly her agent negotiated her contract. When actors are grinding away, I’m wondering about the artful disguise of their on-set modesty patches.

The only time I’m not thinking about the actors during a sex scene is when I’m seeing actors for the first time - then, and only sometimes then, I can ‘get lost’ in the considerations of character. That happened to me with Normal People. Even then, the main thing that impressed me was how well they performed/presented the sex, versus everything else I’d ever seen.

As a writer, I feel icky writing kissing or sex scenes (I actually think My Eyes are Up Here contains my first scripted kiss! And that was a late…