A film director who has sparked mixed responses with his decision to include real sex in movies has explained why it's different to porn.
Most of the time, sex scenes in films and TV shows are completely fictional, featuring actors who are merely simulating whatever hot-and-heavy activities their characters are supposed to be getting up to between the sheets.
But every now and again, some filmmakers and actors decide to offer up the real deal by actually performing sexual acts on camera.
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It might sound like the kind of content that would usually end up on Pornhub, but director Gaspar Noé has insisted they're not the same thing.
Noé spoke about real sex in films following the release of his 2015 film Love, which not only featured unsimulated sex, but featured it in 3D.
The film tells the story of an American man named Murphy, who enters into a highly sexual and emotionally-charged relationship while living in Paris.
The couple go on to invite their neighbor to join them in the bedroom, but a broken condom ends up leading to a pregnancy, having big impacts on the couple's relationship.
It took a while for Noé to get Love off the ground, but eventually he found a cast made up of US actor Karl Glusman, and French actors Aomi Muyock and Klara Kristin.
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Having already made a name for himself as a director who features real sexual acts in films, as he did in his 2002 film Irreversible, Noé explained that the characters had an idea of the kind of film they would be entering into.
He told the Irish Examiner: “The good thing about this movie is all the people I proposed to be on-screen knew my previous movies and knew we were doing something valuable, a real movie about a real subject — love — and not something dirty."
In making his film, Noé wanted to 'have fun' with the audience rather than create a scandal, which is why he featured one ejaculation scene with a 3D spray aimed directly at the audience.
It's certainly explicit, but the director has insisted that his film is not porn.
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Explaining the difference between films featuring sex and porn, Noé said: “In what you call ‘adult movies’ there are no feelings at all. You never see people kissing or talking about pregnancy. You never see any girl having her periods and you never see a girl with regular pubic hair. It’s like a separate world that has nothing to do with normal life.
"What I wanted to do is represent in cinema something that’s important for me that for commercial reasons isn’t represented properly. The system of cinema rating is totally old- fashioned.”
Following its release, Love has received a middling rating of 42 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
Topics: Film and TV, Sex and Relationships