Charlie Productions : How To Get Naked

At some point in the past we were at a party held to celebrate the successful closing of a film festival. It was very late and everyone was very drunk but one of the guests was clearly not having the best of it. He was a friend of a friend of a friend and he had clearly felt uncomfortable among strangers. This social anxiety translated into drinking and he was soon inebriated enough to be stripping off. To be fair, earlier there had been swimming so people had grown accustomed to a lack of clothing but he was very definitely going beyond the unspoken dress code of the party, which was nothing more honourous than to arrive and remain dressed.

This sounds fairly bacchanalian but it was really a very civilised event and something of this atmosphere clearly penetrated the alcoholic fug of his brain; whilst he was still merely a man in his pants one of the organisers of the party turned to Chris and said "He's asking if it'd be all right for him to get naked, what do you think?"

This remains one of the most elegant and civilised acts of drunken nudity I have ever witnessed and stands as a template for getting naked in public, a template with a simple golden rule - ask first.

This story is also instructive as to the general approach to public nudity in real life since once the man had his request granted and was duly swinging his nuts by the stereo, we all did our very best to ignore him. Clearly this is not what a man hopes for when he gets naked at a party and in the end he forced our attention by attempting to insert a rose into himself, at which stage it was clear he'd do himself a mischief and was forcibly deflowered in the most literal sense of the term.

A similar deliberate blindness to nudity can often be encountered in filmmaking. It manifests both as an effort to ignore the practicalities of working with naked people and as an effort to ignore the need for naked people in the first place. Though born of opposite impulses both versions are mistaken because in film you cannot shut your eyes to nudity.

I mean this metaphorically of course, however this aphorism holds true in a much more literal sense. Generally speaking we cannot shut our eyes to naked people on cinema screens. As result one of the surer ways of ensuring bums on seats is to put bums on screens. Nakedness can also be criticised because naked people in movies undercut the usual motivation behind watching a film. In most cases we go to the cinema to a story acted out by famous people. However, when those famous people get naked that appeals to a different interest that has little to do with narrative. For both these reasons nudity in film is often wrongly seen as purely cynical, as if it were always some sort of creative or artistic failure. Consequently there is often a sense it is best avoided, however, if you can divorce it from the voyeuristic twinge of seeing a particular performer naked, then nakedness can be an incredibly powerful narrative tool.

Think about Bob Dylan's line "...even the President of the United States must sometime stand naked". In that one image he tells an entire story about the nature of power that could not be more eloquently or more simply expressed. We all get naked, if only to wash and once you get past the binary dissimilarities of men and women we are all, within reason, basically the same when we do and yet the act of being undressed is full of meaning and significance. One of our founding cultural myths is built around Adam and Eve's sudden and shocking understanding of their own nakedness and being bare resonates as an expression of power or weakness, of intimacy and trust or the limits of the same. As it expresses so much about a character's power or vulnerability it sits at the very core of story telling and, best of all, it's visual.

Having slept with his landlady, Jack Carter could have given a long speech about how returning to his abandoned home he felt vulnerable and had nothing but an innate determined brutality to keep him moving - but how much more immediate and unforgettable was it to see him stood naked on her doorstep with nothing but a rifle. Gudrun Ensslin is given a great many speeches to convey her status as a self empowered social and political revolutionary in the film "The Baadermeinhof Complex", but none makes half the impact as the point where she interviews a new recruit for the Red Army Faction whilst in the bath. Her naked defencelessly simply underlining her natural authority.

A good example of this not working is from our own first short. "Good Morning, Who Are You?" was supposed to be a witty fantasy about the nature of love in which a couple woke each morning and pretended to be a pair of complete strangers who had met for the first time the night before. It fails because, due to our inexperience as directors, the cast are supremely uncomfortable with each other. Though no actual nudity is called for, the sight of a supposedly married couple get dressed beneath the sheets like strangers on a beach instantly reminds you that these are just actors in a room. What should have been a chance for us to visually express the true nature of their relationship turned into a way for us to undermine the entire story.

Equally I have never forgotten being invited to a performance of "Steaming" by an actress who couldn't make an audition. She was working with a summer theatre school and though most of the cast were around fourteen they had decided to put on a play about a group of middle-aged women talking in a sauna. This is clearly not a wise choice of play for the performers but at least on the stage they could have performed fully clothed and let us suspend our disbelief about the steam and the nakedness. Instead the cast all wore bathing costumes and towels which left them as wrong as if they were fully clothed and as uncomfortable as if they were naked.

The lesson here is two-fold. Partly it's the obvious thing of knowing your own limitations, but more importantly it's accepting that in order to tell a really compelling story you have to be prepared to go to a really compelling place. In the cases above it is the execution that lets down the idea. In both cases the ideas are compelling. Not compelling because they involve nudity but compelling because they involve characters in crisis. The problem was that this crisis was best expressed through a nudity neither the teenage girls nor the teenage Blaines could deal with.

Getting your characters naked is both a powerful narrative tool and an eye catching special effect. However, unlike, for instance, having your character shot and unlike a massive CGI space fight, indeed unlike almost everything else that you will ask your cast to do, getting naked is, to some extent, real. When they fight it's a stunt, when they cry it's a performance but part of the intrinsic power of standing naked is that it is you.

So how do you convince people to get naked for your film and how do you enable them to keep acting whilst they at their most vulnerable? Obviously there are some basic things you can do that make someone feel supported. Don't pretend you don't know because you do, it's all the things that are first out of the window when you're stressed to the eyeballs because you're making a film in a hurry and for no money.

So stop. Slow down. Put your cast first. Listen to their concerns and, more importantly, be sensitive to the worries they may not wish to say out loud. Give them dressing gowns. If possible keep the location warm. Keep the crew to a minimum. Make sure you are working with a crew you can trust and who you know are professional. The list is endless and obvious and though all these things are important none are enough (which doesn't mean don't do them).

Many people will suggest that when shooting naked actors it is de riguer for the crew to strip down too. I have witnessed traumatic video evidence of both Lars Von Trier and Paul Verhoeven embracing this philosophy but I don't think it's only sexually obsessed crackpot Dutchmen who do. It's not something that we have ever done, ever seriously thought about doing or, most importantly, ever been asked to do by our cast. Not that we wouldn't if it felt like the right approach but it does smack of a somewhat pointless tit for tat playground logic. Though perhaps tit for tat is an inappropriate expression. Would it relax the cast to be surrounded by a naked sound recordist and camera team? I remain unconvinced and fully clothed.

However what makes sense about the idea of a fully naked crew is that it does at least prove that everyone is committed and is less likely to casually throw in scenes of nudity without good reason. This is the real nub of the matter. What matters most, what makes all the above really work, is that you know and respect why this is happening and that you mean it.

When we shot "Good Morning, Who Are You?" we didn't ask either actor to get naked. Wrongly we hid behind the idea that it wasn't necessary, that the dialogue would convey all we needed it to. Rightly we knew that we weren't able to ask our cast to strip off for this project (we knew it, we just didn't admit it, which we should have done and found a different script). In effect, we didn't mean it.

Similarly, another film of ours that you will not find on our reasonably priced DVD boxed set was the third that we shot. "Cold" dealt with gloomy teenage sex in a way that, in utterly different circumstances, could have been bruisingly honest (even if nothing could ever have saved it from being solipsistic and over earnest). For various reasons the film and the budget spiralled out of our control and what should have been a very small and personal film ended up with a full crew and a flat full of strangers all of whom were older and much much more professional than we were. This is not the audience you want when trying to make a film about a dismal sexual mistake.

It seemed like a good time to experiment with our cast and we tried an assortment of mind games and hack tricks that made us feel like we were in control, like we were guiding them towards some sort of creative place. We got two of the cast to improvise a row in the street which might have helped them hate each other, we got our lead actress to rehearse in her pants which helped no one. Whilst we were in some ways being braver than we had been on "Good Morning, Who Are You?" we were still not being honest. We were not in control and instead of being able to offer our cast honesty we gave them bullshit tricks. We didn't know why we were making that film or how it had become the huge film shoot it suddenly seemed. We didn't really know why we were asking the actors to simulate sex it was, rather appropriately, just something fumbled for in the dark.

The mistake was not the sex or nudity, the mistake was trying to make a film without properly understanding why each element mattered and what it meant. Sometimes, with some elements of a story, you can skate over this, you can get away with it as in many of our earlier films we did. When it comes to nakedness it has to be true - you have to mean it.

It was five years before we returned to openly sexual subject matter with "Free Speech" which is, in many ways, the film version of the radio play "Good Morning, Who Are You?" In this time there had been exponential development in our skills as visual story-tellers and our control of both our material and our team. Most of all we knew why we were making "Free Speech" and we knew the narrative importance of the character's nudity.

Never the less we still picked our best crew, evenly balanced it between men and women, made sure that everyone and everything was properly prepped the day before, turned the heating on, had dressing gowns standing by and generally did our level best to reassure both Danny and Jacquie that nothing else mattered except them, which wasn't hard because it was true. But all of that only really helped because it was clear from the outset that we knew what we wanted and we meant it.

It comes right back round the drunk man at the party. He knew what he wanted; he wanted to be naked. Because he was able to be honest about that need he didn't have to cause a panic by suddenly ripping his pants off, he was able to ask and as a result found that no one really minded at all. Just don't try stuffing a rose in your penis.

Charlie Productions believe passionately in doing things and always trying to stop in time for tea.

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