The “creepy” director Demi Moore eventually grew to love: “Oh god, got a boner on that!”
Under normal circumstances, Demi Moore labelling one of the directors she worked with in the 1990s as a creep would be a cause for concern, but she eventually changed her mind.
For one thing, another actor who’d worked with them before had pre-warned her that the filmmaker had an unusual approach to shooting intimate scenes, so she had a slight idea of what would unfold when she was required to get hot and heavy in front of the cameras.
On the other side of the coin, it’s still weird, whichever way you try to cut it. No stranger to the erotic thriller, success was almost guaranteed when Moore teamed up with Adrian Lyne for 1993’s Indecent Proposal, with the director having cornered the market in salacious box office hits.
Having already steamed up the screen in 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and, to a lesser extent, Flashdance, Lyne knew how to bring audiences into the cinema to watch a high-concept story that involved no shortage of titillating moments. Despite that, Moore was trepidatious when it happened to her on set.
Handily, though, Fatal Attraction‘s Glenn Close had a word. “She’d warned me that Adrian was an odd guy to work with on love scenes: she told me he was yelling out obscenities the whole time she was humping away with Michael Douglas,” Moore recalled. And yet, it still took her by surprise when it was her turn.
“He literally didn’t stop talking, practically hollering, the whole time we were shooting the sex scenes,” she revealed. “‘Fucking raunchy!’ ‘Oh god, got a boner on that!’ he’d yell. ‘Come on, grab his dick!'” Unsurprisingly, Moore admitted that “at first, it was creepy,” as you’d expect when she was working with someone who was “getting all sweaty and worked up, yelling about boners.”
Remarkably, there was a silver lining. Regardless of how often Lyne was screaming about boners, which seemed to be a regular thing, “Having Adrian carry on that way took the focus off my own awkwardness because he was so over the top,” and once she learned “not to take his outbursts at face value, it was actually pretty hilarious” to have him encouraging her to go at it with Woody Harrelson.
Beyond that, at no point did Moore feel that he’d made her feel uncomfortable, or convinced her to do anything “that seemed prurient or excessive,” which is something you couldn’t say too often in a place like Hollywood, where the negative connotations of a director screaming about erections and dick-grabbing usually have the most negative inferences imaginable.
It sounds like an unusual experience to say the least, and thanks to Close’s words of warning before she’d stepped foot on the set, she knew not to take Lyne’s exuberance at face value.
