Patricia Rozema is one of the directors of the sexually graphic HBO television series Tell Me You Love Me. (Patricia Rozema)
Sunday night television has never been so steamy. In just its first few episodes, Tell Me You Love Me, HBO’s new 10-part dramatic series, has shown us heterosexual couples fellating, masturbating, ejaculating, engaging in phone sex and performing full-on coitus with a clumsy, naked abandon that leaves little to the viewer’s imagination.
Since its Sept. 9 debut, the much-hyped show from the habitually barrier-busting U.S. cable giant has more than delivered on its promise of erotic candour. But for those of us who’ve become hooked on it, the sex is only half the story. Tell Me You Love Me is as raw emotionally as it is sexually, exposing the way men and women interact with probing, often uncomfortable intimacy that, at its best, recalls such squirm-inducing European classics as Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris and Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage.
In fact, Canadian director Patricia Rozema says the 1973 Bergman film was an inspiration for her as she set out to bring series creator Cynthia Mort’s brutally frank scripts to the small screen. Rozema, a gutsy filmmaker whose features include the idiosyncratic comedy I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987) and a radical re-imagining of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1999), made a rare foray into television to shoot three episodes of the series, including its much-talked-about pilot. As she reveals in the following interview, she was attracted by Mort’s desire to dramatize the garden-variety sexual and emotional problems faced by ordinary people in long-term relationships.
The show tracks the progress of three average couples: Jamie (Michelle Borth) and Hugo (Luke Farrell Kirby), libido-driven 20-somethings whose plans for marriage have been derailed by questions of fidelity and honesty; Carolyn (Sonya Walger) and Palek (Adam Scott), a professional pair in their 30s who are trying desperately to become pregnant; and Katie (Ally Walker) and Dave (Tim DeKay), devoted suburban parents in their 40s whose sex life has dried up. Attempting to help them is a wise older therapist, Dr. May Foster (Jane Alexander), whose own loving marriage is not without its unresolved issues.
Although it has some of the slick trappings of prime-time soaps such as Grey’s Anatomy (including emotional montages scored to pop songs) and borrows the tidy therapy device from The Sopranos (its predecessor in HBO’s Sunday night time slot), Tell Me You Love Me is unusual in its willingness to leave viewers annoyed and frustrated with its difficult, inarticulate characters – perhaps one reason why its critical reception has been mixed. It’s a show you have to stick with, much like a relationship, to appreciate its full impact. Rozema herself only saw the completed series recently. “I just burst into tears a couple of times,” she says. “I felt like there was a Vise-Grip on my heart watching it.”
The Toronto-based director was speaking by cellphone from a plane en route to New York, where she is editing her latest feature, Kitt Kittredge: An American Girl Mystery, an HBO-produced family film starring Little Miss Sunshine’s Abigail Breslin, which sounds a world away from the adult situations of Tell Me You Love Me.
Dr. May Foster (Jane Alexander) helps couples with intimacy problems in Tell Me You Love Me. (TMN/Astral Media)
Q: Nancy Franklin wrote in The New Yorker that Tell Me You Love Me is “unlike anything that’s ever been on television.” Certainly, the show has generated a lot of buzz for pushing the boundaries of sexual explicitness on television. Were you aware while shooting it that you were doing something groundbreaking?
A: It felt very new to me when I read [the script]. It was very moving, very unlike other scripts I see. I generally find the depiction of people’s sexual natures very juvenile or prurient. Ever since the sexual revolution, there’s been this pressure for people to aspire to these gymnastic sex lives, and if they’re not, they’re somehow sad creatures. I think there are whole masses of people out there feeling like there’s something wrong with them, and this acknowledges that reality, that in our sex-saturated culture there’s very little place for any sense of the normal. Sex is usually cast in the context of infidelity or kinkiness of some sort. Monogamous, loving couples dealing with all the particularities of their sexual natures was something completely new, and I was excited by that.
Q: Who decided to make the sex scenes so graphic?
A: It was in the script. I got this script and there was a scene where [Carolyn] masturbates her husband and then examines the semen, kind of like a scientist. That was written and it was my decision to go along with that and shoot it in a matter-of-fact way. I can’t say there weren’t lots of giggles and laughter and nervousness on the set when we were shooting it; it was a very funny situation. At the end of it, I said, “I don’t know if we need to be applauded or spanked.” But the basic underlying assumption of this series is that there’s nothing shameful in loving sex, and there’s nothing shameful in the depiction of it.
Q: That masturbation scene you mention is particularly startling – it’s not the kind of thing you normally see outside a triple-X video. You must have realized there was a possibility it would just look gross or funny, like something in a Farrelly brothers film.
A: That was a risk, but we’ve avoided it, don’t you think? It looks real, doesn’t it?
Q: It sure does. On the internet, people are discussing whether that and the other sex scenes in the show are real.
A: But it’s not real, it’s simulated. At one point, one of the producers was floating this idea in the [trade papers] that it would be real sex [in the series]. I immediately said, “Well, find another director, I don’t want to do that.” I wasn’t interested in that.
Q: Having to do so many intimate scenes must have been challenging for the actors. Adam Scott has said that he and Sonya Walger did tequila shots to loosen up before shooting their first sex scene together.
Jamie (Michelle Borth, left) and Hugo (Luke Farrell Kirby) confuse love and lust in Tell Me You Love Me. (TMN/Astral Media)
A: I think it’s the most demanding and rattling the first time you do it. And the second time, maybe. And then, as it is in relationships, it gets less stressful. [The actors] wanted to be respected, they needed to feel that there wasn’t something grubby in what they were doing. What I did was rehearse the couples alone well before the shooting, well before you’ve got lights in the room and people on the clock and the money trickling away. Just me and the actors in the room. Then any insecurities and awkwardness can be talked about, just me and them.
I also designed a shooting style that made it possible for me not to have to be re-creating scenes over and over. There were two cameras, and sometimes three, to capture different angles, so we’d choreograph it and then just let ’em go. We weren’t in the horrible position of saying, “OK, now, the sheet was here and your hand was there, and I think you were breathing harder at this point…”Q: I gather the scenes were shot with just a skeleton crew.
A: Oh, yeah. It was just the actors and me and a couple of others on set, and I’d be rushing in with the bathrobes to cover them quickly, so there’d be a real clear delineation between the fiction and the fact.
Q: Of course, the series’ realism extends well beyond the sex. The way the couples interact, the things they say – or often, don’t say – to one another, is so accurate it’s sometimes hard to watch.
A: It’s painful isn’t it? I had one person write me and say, “I felt busted.”
Q: It reminds me of Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage.
A: I watched that before I did [the series]. I hesitate to say it, just because I would never dare to put my name in the same sentence as his, but that was very much an influence – those tiny, telling gestures and little giveaway looks [in his film].
Q: This was your first time directing for HBO. How did you become involved in the project? Had you worked with Cynthia Mort before?
A: I’d never heard of her. She called me up directly and said [adopting a broad New York accent], “Patricia, you’ve got to shoot my pilot!” I said I hadn’t done much TV and I wasn’t sure. But she said, “No, no, no, you’ve got to read it, you’re going to love it! And you’re the only person to do it.” So I said, “OK, I’ll have a look.” And I read it and loved it. HBO has a list of pre-approved directors and I guess I was on it.
Q: I understand the series was shot in Canada as well as L.A.?
A: We did the pilot in Winnipeg. It’s cheaper there. Then, once HBO ordered the series, they had to try to make L.A. look like Winnipeg. It was fascinating, the difference in production styles and attitudes towards filmmaking, between Winnipeg and L.A. I had a rare opportunity to shoot roughly the same thing in two places. I came way more nationalistic than ever. There was just such a freedom to experiment and an open, artistic attitude in Winnipeg, this idea that we were all making something new together. And in L.A. there was a lot of clock-punching, and the attitude of the crew towards the sex was much more retro, kind of this “Isn’t this naughty” thing, rather than seeing what was beautiful and new about it. I felt much more supported as a filmmaker trying new stuff in Winnipeg. There are so many set ways of doing things in L.A.
Q: Has working on a TV series influenced your filmmaking style?
A: I’m trying to make things as authentic and as non-beautified as possible now. Unlike my early work. We have a higher standard for realistic depiction now and that’s my goal, to have it feel like it could only be real, like cameras have somehow entered somebody’s life. I want to keep that fluidity and authenticity – and then head back to the beauty. That’s a whole other level. I feel like this has been limbering me up for my next big film.
HBO’s Tell Me You Love Me airs on The Movie Network and Movie Central in Canada.
Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
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