“I’ll fight naked,” says Viggo

Posted by Paige MacGregor (paige@filmschoolrejects.com) on August 20, 2007

After a couple years out of the saddle, director David Cronenberg (A History of Violence) has teamed up with screenwriter Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) to produce Eastern Promises, set for release next month.

The buzz about Eastern Promises revolves around a “naked” fight scene that takes place in a London bathhouse between History of Violence star Viggo Mortensen and two other male actors.

In an interview last week with The Globe and Mail, Cronenberg discussed the evolution of the scene:

The stunt co-ordinator spent a couple of hours a week with the three actors involved, with Cronenberg dropping in to monitor the action. Then the actors performed it in slow motion while Cronenberg worked out his camera moves: “I didn’t want Bourne [Ultimatum]-style impressionism where you don’t actually see what’s going on. People go to the movies to transform, or live another life, and I wanted them to feel that they were there, that they were vulnerable.”

Somewhere in there, he says, there was the question of what to do with the towels.

“I’ll fight naked. That’s how it would happen,” Cronenberg says of Mortensen’s reaction. “There wasn’t even a discussion about what else we do because Viggo knows I’d be too restricted if I couldn’t shoot him from the waist down.”

Cronenberg says he’s already got feedback commenting on the bravery of the scene. “These days with DVDs and screen grabs and so on, we know there will be naked shots of him on the Internet, so the naturally vulnerability of the actor is increased, but we also know that’s how the scene must be played.”

With an R-rating for “strong brutal and bloody violence, some graphic sexuality, language and nudity,” it’s unclear why this particular scene is receiving so much attention. Audiences of late have become accustomed to seeing the bare male ass (Gerard Butler’s in Frank Miller’s 300 and Seth Rogen’s in the summer comedy Knocked Up), and without an X-rating (the closest you can get to male frontal nudity without one is Jason Statham’s raging epinephrine-induced boner in Crank) that’s all of the male nudity we’re going to get in Eastern Promises (since the male psyche can’t wrap itself around a 20-something foot image of a penis on the big screen—“Wait! It’s bigger than mine!”—and women’s delicate sensibilities would just be oh so offended). So really, what’s the big deal?

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