cuba travel: 'Breaking Dawn' Director Talks Sex Scene 'Adjustment'

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

'Breaking Dawn' Director Talks Sex Scene 'Adjustment'

'It was more about romance than hot-and-heavy action,' Bill Condon tells MTV News about shooting sex scene for PG-13 rating.
By Amy Wilkinson

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1"
Photo: Summit Entertainment

Was the first cut of "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1" racy enough to be slapped with an R rating?

In the December issue of Glamour UK, star Kristen Stewart revealed that Bella and Edward's feather-strewn sex scene was so saucy that it had to be recut.

"It was so weird, it didn't even feel like we were doing a 'Twilight' film," she recalled to the British mag. "I was like, 'Bella! What are you doing? Wow! What is happening here?!' It was very surreal. We [originally] got rated R. They recut it."

Though director Bill Condon couldn't confirm the R rating when MTV News recently spoke with him on the phone, he did reveal the approach necessary to earn a more teen-friendly PG-13 for the November 18 release.

"It's almost clinical the kind of strict guidelines [the MPAA] have about anything that appears to be — how do I put it delicately?

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That appears to be, let's call it thrusting. In fact, you know, it was so much more about romance than it was about hot-and-heavy action, so it was a very kind of simple adjustment to make."

If filming the infamous sex scene was one of the simplest items on Condon's honeymoon to-do list, one of the most difficult was scouting the location: the secluded Isle Esme owned by Carlisle Cullen.

"We went to Brazil where it was at, that felt important to us," he said. "There are very few houses built on the water because it's against the law. So they're mostly built up, so it was hard to find a house that was like that. It took us — wow — we were five hours outside of Rio and then a boat trip of 40 minutes to get to this one island that had the house that we wanted."

It was a good thing Condon was satisfied with the locale seeing as he and the crew spent several unexpected extra hours there.

"We spent four days there and one night, when we had this incredible hurricane and couldn't get off the island," he said. "Eighty of us slept in the house on the floor and in bathtubs. It was incredible."

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