British Film Industry Told to Cancel Sex Scenes Due to Pandemic

LOS ANGELES—The British trade association for film directors, Directors UK, has issued new guidelines for filming sex scenes during the COVID-19 pandemic. In short, the guidelines amount to, “don’t.” According to a report by The Guardian newspaper, the association this week issued an update to its “Directing Nudity and Simulated Sex” guidelines, to include measures designed to prevent spread of the coronavirus. Under the new guidelines, directors are encouraged to avoid shooting sex scenes at all, and instead to use techniques popular during the era of the “Hays Code,” when Hollywood censorship prohibited even suggestions of sexual activity between onscreen characters. Citing such Hollywood classics as Casablanca, and It Happened One Night in which leading men and women were able to depict sexual chemistry without showing any form of physical intimacy beyond a close-mouthed kiss or chaste hug, the guidelines suggest that characters “could be shown fixing their own clothes/re-dressing after the event.” It would also be possible to suggest the bodies of characters “moving under bedclothes.” Director Bill Anderson, who took part in creating the pandemic sex scene guidelines, told The Guardian that depicting “intimacy” between characters should be more important than depictions of physical sex acts. “Intimacy is not biology, it’s about mutual vulnerability, an openness and sharing of trust between human beings. If you shoot a sex scene that doesn’t have intimacy in it you’ve totally failed,” he told the paper. But he acknowledged that popular British-made TV shows such as I May Destroy You — now airing in the United States on HBO — and Normal People, which streams on the Hulu service, would likely avoid abiding by the new guidelines. Both shows rely heavily on frank depictions of sexuality and sex acts among characters. How to film sex scenes without risking transmission of the coronavirus has also been a problem for the American film industry. While Hollywood has yet to resume full-scale production, the films and television programs that have been filmed are forced to limit any form of on-screen contract between characters portrayed by actors.  But according to a report published in June by a motion picture industry task force, as production schedules ramp up, filmmakers may need to film sex scenes without actors at all, instead using computer-generated images (CGI) to perform onscreen sex.  The CBS-TV daily soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful has resumed filming physically intimate scenes — buy using life-size mannequins to stand in for actors, according to a New York Times report.  “It’s working quite well,” producer Bradley Bell told The Times. “We’re shooting it from a great distance or in a way you can’t see the form is inanimate.” Photo By W R / Pexels