Oppenheimer is that rarest of movies: a modern movie that’s a) not part of a franchise, b) rated R, c) about adult (that is, serious) subject matter, and d) both critically acclaimed and a big-time money-gobbler. Oh and there’s this: it features a sex scene. No one does sex scenes in mainstream movies anymore. They’re so rare that there was the film’s few moments of horseplay inspired a smallish amount of controversy. Perhaps it even angered the gods.
“In the middle of our sex scene, the camera broke,” Florence Pugh told the crowd at a recent Universal panel, as per The Hollywood Reporter. “No one knows this, but it did. Our camera broke when we were both naked, and it was not ideal timing.”
Oppenheimer’s sex scenes involve Cillian Muprhy’s titular physicist and Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock, one of his former paramours with whom he has an assignation during his marriage to Emily Blunt’s Kitty. It sounds like the moment of coitus interruptus occurred during an earlier hook-up, before Oppenheimer gets hitched.
“Cillian and I are in this room together. It’s a closed set, so we’re both holding our bodies like this,” Pugh said, then wrapped her arms around herself.
But Pugh decided to make the most out of the situation. She decided “this is my moment to learn,” then turned to the camera surgeon and asked, “So tell me, what’s wrong with this camera?” She remembers asking things like “What’s going on with the shutter here, buddy?”
Pugh praised Christopher Nolan’s famously intense set, where chairs might not be discouraged but bathrooms breaks kind of are. She said that “every person on this set was so knowledgeable and was so ready to make this kind of movie that there was no dull moment. It was all amazing. It felt like we were lucky to be there every second of the day.”
Oppenheimer, recently nominated for a slew of Oscars, is back on some IMAX screens and is available for rental and to own.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)