“Are there any queers in the house tonight?!?!?!”
That was the opening line from Lilly Wachowski, leading to rapturous applause from five hundred people in attendance. That line alone set the tone for the queer crime filled screenings we were in for. The short film Wild Ones from debut director Leo DiSantis, preceded the Bound screening, and it was the perfect opener. The lesbian crime caper’s infectious energy, strong performances, and well staged action made it an excellent appetizer for the Bound main course. As Bound played on, still holding up infectiously after 30 years, the audience cheered, jeered, laughed, hollered, through every sultry line, seductive tête-a-tête, and over the top moment to come out of Joe Pantoliano. By the end of the film, Pantoliano described the audience as, “the second best audience I’ve seen the movie with”.
During the Q&A, made up of Lilly Wachowski, Jennifer Tilly, Gena Gershon, Joe Pantoliano, and Christopher Meloni, Wachowski described not just her enthusiasm for making the film, but the importance of making the film in a way that reflected her and what she and her sister were feeling when they were younger. She said, “We wrote Bound because we were going through some things and had a lot to figure out…We wanted to make a film with two strong women characters, and the fact that they were queer was foreshadowing [for The Matrix].” The film being about two women was a priority, as she described turning down $12 million if she made Corky (Gena Gershon’s character) a man, “People were interested in changing Corky to a man, and we said ‘No way.’”
Gena Gershon described further how she was putting her career in jeopardy by acting in Bound. She explained how coming off of her performance in Showgirls, her agent was weary of her playing another lesbian character so soon. But upon reading the script, Gershon knew she had to meet the Wachowskis, and when her agents tried to stop her, she noted, “They said, ‘We can’t represent you,’. So I said, ‘OK, bye.’ And I left!”. When she joined the film, Gershon started taking boxing lessons to bulk up, trying out tattoos and a shorter haircut, and worked with Susie Bright to go to different lesbian bars and “research” to try out her new look. Jennifer Tilly interjected saying, “When we were filming, Gina would come in and say to the Wachowskis: ‘You have to change this pickup line because I tried it last night and it didn’t work.’”
Joe Pantoliano and Christopher Meloni talked a lot about the difficulty cutting scenes from the film, as Bound initially received an NC-17. Meloni noted an ad lib that was cut during a torture scene, “I would start cutting his toes and said ‘wanna play 20 questions?’” However, the MPAA’s biggest issue with Bound was its one-take sex scene. The sex scene was shot in one take to communicate the intimacy between Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly.
Tilly explained, “You saw my hand on Gina’s very lovely crotch, and my fingers were sort of, you know, doing the finger thing…and the board academy said, ‘It looks like they are really doing it!’ So let me get this straight: If us girls were not such good actresses, you would let it pass? And they said, ‘Yeah, kind of.’”
Gershon disagreed with Tilly theorizing that the MPAA’s issue wasn’t that the scene was too erotic, but that it was too intimate, that the MPAA couldn’t handle two women genuinely intimately in love on screen. She said “… and there was one take that unanimously we were all like, ‘Oh wow, that’s the take.’ And what I recall about it is that you don’t see boobs, you didn’t see any party parts, but we were so connected. It was much more of a love scene…It was a very beautiful, intense scene where you see two women really connect and were making love. And they were like, ‘No, no, we can’t show that.’”
This disagreement led to an argument between Gershon and Tilly:
Tilly: “It was erotic!”
Gershon: “It wasn’t erotic!”
Tilly: “It was erotic! There’s nothing more erotic than women in love!”
Gershon: “You told your story, Jen, let me tell mine!”
Wachowski stepped in to basically explain that both Tilly and Gershon were basically accurate in their own way with the struggle for the MPAA to leave them alone. She described how they shot two sex scenes, one more intimate and one more traditional, and despite the fights with the MPAA they did have to trim the sex scene a bit. Pantoliano described how their producer, Dino De Laurentiis, fought the MPAA aggressively to keep the sex scene untouched, as it was shot in one take to communicate the intimacy. He noted, “Dino said, ‘I don’t understand; it’s okay to cut off the finger, but not okay to fuck with the finger”. Wachowski noted that there is an international cut of Bound that contains the original, more intimate, sex scene that she wanted to convey, to which Gershon replied, “I wanna see that version”.
Overall, the Q&A matched the energy of Bound, and I’m keeping an eye out for that foreign cut.
