Emma Stone ‘had to have no shame’ about nudity and sex in new film says director Yorgos Lanthimos

Cinema has a long history of full frontal nudity and explicit sex scenes, whether it's Eyes Wide Shut, Basic Instinct or The Wicker Man.

Now, director Yorgos Lanthimos has lamented the supposed 'death' of the sex scene, amid the domination of superhero movies at the box office.

There's also been a huge shift in the way that studios approach raunchier scenes.

Intimacy co-ordinators now becoming far more widely used in the industry to make sure everyone involved is comfortable and respected in a scene. It's long overdue, with many actors having spoken about bad experiences doing nude and sex scenes.

However, Lanthimos' upcoming movie Poor Things certainly seems to be going against the trend, including scenes involving masturbation, sex, and full frontal nudity.

Speaking as the movie premieres at the Venice Film Festival, the director has opened up about how star Emma Stone had to have 'no shame about her body' during some of the scenes in the movie, saying that she 'understood that right away'.

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He said: "The great thing about myself and Emma is that now we’ve completed like four films together. There’s a shorthand. As soon as I started saying something like I just said, she said, ‘Yes, of course, I understand, it’s [her character] Bella. We’ll do what we need to do.’”

He added: “It’s a shame that Emma cannot be here with us to speak more about it because it’s weird that it will be coming all from me.”

Stone was unable to attend the film festival due to the SAG-AFTRA strike.

The film will be an adaptation of the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray. It is a Frankenstein-style story featuring a scientist creating a creature.

Although mentally a child, the creature is adult-bodied, and sets about discovering herself in the wider world, including her sexuality.

The trailer reveals a world with weirdly spliced together animals, but with a more upbeat feel, including the extremely stylised visuals familiar to Lanthimos' fans.

The whole effect from the trailer looks gothic and whimsical, as Stone's character explores the world around her.

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Lanthimos explained the sex scenes: “First of all, it was a very intrinsic part of the novel itself, her freedom about everything, including sexuality. And secondly, it was very important for me to not make a film which was gonna be prude because that would be completely betraying the main character."

He continued: “We sat down with Emma at some point, especially for the sex scenes, we just sat down and decided, ‘What kind of position would they be in here? What kind of thing would they do there?’ What’s missing from the experience of sex and the different desires that people have that we need to portray to make enough of a representation of human desire and its idiosyncracies?”

Poor Things is set for a US release date of December 8, 2023.