Brandon Cronenberg‘s “Infinity Pool” shocked Sundance audiences with its neon-tinged story of psychological torture at a hedonistic resort. But even with all of the murdered clones and dog collars, the version that audiences saw was considerably tamer than what Cronenberg originally shot.
When his NC-17 director’s cut was released in March, fans were shocked to see a much more explicit version of a sex scene between Gabi (Mia Love) and James (Alexander Skarsgård) that featured full frontal nudity from Skarsgård. At a Q&A moderated by IndieWire’s Eric Kohn following a screening of the directors cut, Cronenberg opened up about the provocative new scene and why it had to be cut.
“The MPAA has only one objective rule, and that’s no hard cocks,” Cronenberg said. “Everything else is a mind-fuckingly weird, infuriating, subjective quagmire that you have to navigate with them, no offense to the MPAA. But no hard cocks, we knew was the thing, so that had to to come out.”
Cronenberg said that his special effects artist Dan Martin is a skilled prosthetic constructor and worked well with Skarsgard to design his fake genitalia.
“He makes a lot of penises. The kind of movies that he does, he ends up making penises very, very, very frequently,” he said. “There’s a very interesting process where you introduce Dan to your actor and say ‘Dan is sculpting your penis. So he can send you shots of this penis and you can approve it. Alex Skarsgard had already done that on something else, so he’s like ‘oh yeah, we’ve done this a million times, send me the dick picks.”
Despite the easy sculpting process, the prosthetic had some functionality problems when they shot the sex scene in Croatia. Cronenberg said that technical difficulties involving the ejaculation process forced him to get creative and reshoot the scene.
“We shot it the first time in Croatia and the semen jammed. It really just sort of dribbled out and was too consistently white,” he said. “So the shot that’s in the film was shot in a studio after the main shoot.”
Additional reporting by Eric Kohn.
