America 1987

Chapter 42 Sex, Lies, and Videotapes

Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman, the meddlesome Hollywood newcomer director who interfered in casting, was making some minor adjustments to the script she was about to shoot based on her memory.

The movie he's going to copy this time is called "Sex, Lies and Videotape".

Just by hearing the movie title, you can tell that it's an art film. In fact, it's the art film that David watched the most before he traveled through time.

Simply put, it resonated with me so much.

What fascinated him most was that hazy feeling of understanding something yet not quite, so much so that he watched it many times.

The fact that this movie was created in the original timeline can be considered a miracle.

Director Steven Soderbergh incorporated many of his own personal experiences into the script.

For example, the male protagonist's impotence, fear of intimacy, and his strange habit of indirectly obtaining pleasure through videotapes are all true reflections of the director himself.

It is said that when Soderbergh was writing the screenplay in Los Angeles, he was going through an emotional low and had many unresolved anxieties about interpersonal relationships and sex.

He later admitted that writing this script was a form of self-therapy—externalizing his unspoken problems through the male protagonist.

However, he also emphasized that the scene in the movie where the protagonist uses videotapes to record women talking about their sexual experiences is not his own fetish. Whether the audience believes it or not is another matter. Anyway, I don't believe it. Even if he didn't actually do it, he must have done it countless times in his dreams, otherwise he couldn't have filmed such a bizarre and realistic scene.

However, this was not the main reason why David copied this movie; the main reason was that it was too easy to film.

A typical low-budget film—with a budget of just over $100 million;

The production scale is minimalist—the entire film has only four main characters and seven or eight scene changes. The scenes and actors are highly concentrated, and there is no need for complicated staging.

Moreover, it's set in an indoor drama style—the film relies heavily on dialogue, similar in style to Rohmer, and doesn't require complex outdoor scenes or action sequences.

In addition, the director had his own personal experience as a foundation, which made the scriptwriting process extremely smooth, and it was completed in 8 days.

So much so that from the moment the script was written to the completion of the film's post-production editing, the entire project took less than fifty days.

The filming period was very short, with two versions of the story: one says it only took 7 days, even faster than the filming of Fatty Wong in Hong Kong; the other says it took a month.

Regardless of the method, David is confident that he can get this done before the Oscars, showing Hollywood filmmakers, who are used to fixed industrial processes that take months or even a year and a half, what efficiency really is.

"David, is the oatmeal ready? You've been inside for almost half an hour."

Catherine's slightly teasing voice rang out from outside the kitchen, "If you really can't do it, let me do it. Don't you know how to cook?"

"How could this be!" David, startled awake, responded, poured the bowl of oatmeal into the pot, turned on medium-low heat to bring it to a boil, and then stirred it constantly with a spatula to prevent it from sticking to the bottom.

……

"How is it?"

Seeing Catherine knock on the door and come in, David, who was hunched over the table revising the script, turned his chair around to face her and asked.

"It's alright," Catherine replied, picking up the original script from the side and sitting down on the edge of the bed, flipping through it as she did so. "It's a little worse than what I made, but it's still passable."

David almost laughed. "You eat this every morning and have made it so many times. Your skills must be much better than mine, a complete novice."

Catherine is actually the kind of woman who never lifts a finger, and she usually chooses very simple foods for breakfast.

In the original timeline, she reportedly volunteered to try cooking, but accidentally set the pan on fire by adding too much oil.

Normally, a fire extinguisher is a must in the kitchen of a house of their caliber, but she was so panicked that she ran outside and called the fire department. If she hadn't been lucky, the multi-million dollar mansion would probably have been burned to the ground.

After this incident, Michael Douglas went so far as to forbid Catherine from ever stepping into the kitchen again.

David made this oatmeal for her today because he woke up early this morning to find her busy in the kitchen, which startled him so much that he quickly stopped her and took over making it himself.

Looking back, I realized that the other person probably just doesn't know complicated cooking and can make simple oatmeal porridge by themselves.

"Is this the script for the movie we're shooting next month?"

"Yes, that's the first draft. The general plot is there, and I'm still making some minor revisions."

Catherine looked at it for a while, then asked with some surprise, "Why did you write a script like this?"

"What's wrong?" David dragged his chair forward. "Is there a problem?"

"Of course," Catherine said, pulling her foot out of her slipper and kicking him. "Why would you write a character who is impotent and can only get pleasure from watching videotapes?"

"Oh?"

David chuckled, grabbed her ankle, pulled her into his arms, gently tickled the sole of her foot, and asked, "Then tell me why I can't write this character?"

Catherine didn't struggle. She moved her heel slightly and, sensing the change in the other person, she smiled and teased, "Look, even touching a foot can excite you like this. There's no way the word 'impotence' could be associated with you."

Hearing this, David, who was gradually leaning towards Quentin, did not refute it. He chuckled as he rubbed her, "Have you finished reading, Cathy? It's not something an actor should do to draw conclusions before finishing the script."

The story told in "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" is actually quite simple.

It was a man named Glenn. Well, the four characters "Graham" were too long, so David didn't like it and changed it to two characters.

After staying at his old classmate John's house, he had some contact with John's wife, Ann.

Ann discovers that her partner has a strange habit of recording women talking about their sexual experiences and desires on videotape. Through a series of coincidences, she also gets involved in this game and reveals her true desires in front of the camera, ultimately achieving redemption for her life and marriage.

That's pretty much the gist of it. However, Glenn's claim of impotence in the first half of the movie is actually a lie, which is twisted at the end.

Simply because of a failed relationship, one develops a resistance and rejection towards romantic relationships, which is a form of self-castration in spirit, and not true impotence.

Catherine hasn't seen the final plot yet, which is why she asked that question.