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Two days in, and the 2015 Sundance Film Festival is already gaining a reputation as the home of the off-the-wall sex scene.
Three of the early U.S. Dramatic competition screenings — "The Bronze" on Thursday night, and "The Overnight" and "The D Train" on Friday — brought the house down with unusual copulating between the main characters.
Much has already been written about the acrobatic hookup in "The Bronze," so we'll concern ourselves with Friday's entries in the "Most Surprising Sex Scene" competition.
In "The Overnight," about two couples spending a revealing evening together, much is made of the comparison of penis sizes between the under-endowed Alex (Adam Scott) and over-endowed Kurt (Jason Schwartzman). One scene has the characters naked, side by side.
"Let's make it clear right now: Those were BOTH prosthetics, OK?" Scott said at Friday's Q&A, to much laughter.
Director/writer Patrick Brice said going to the special-effects house to pick the right prosthetic penises was "the best day of my life" — though executive producer Mark Duplass also noted that the day he and Brice went on Google to find the right penis images for reference, and then sending those photos to producer Naomi Davis, was also pretty awkward.
With "The D Train," a meeting between two former high-school classmates, played by Jack Black and James Marsden, concludes with a night at least one of them would like to forget.
The scene was the last one director/writers Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel shot, and in retrospect it may have been a mistake to build it up in the actors' minds that way. The first kiss took eight or 10 takes and, Marsden said, "eight shots of tequila."
- Sean P. Means