In our new weekly series Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sexscenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy.
This week, we're going to take a look at how Halle Berryshot a gorgeous, beautiful, achingly honest and real nudescene in the film for which she'd eventually win an Oscar, Monster's Ball, and how that never would've happened without the almost entirely forgettable movie Swordfish. That's right, theJoel Silver-produced cyber-thriller with more frosted tips and technobabble than you can shake a stick at is directly responsible for Halle Berry's Oscar. Kind of.
After spending the 90s playing many a sexpot without actually taking her clothes off, it seemed like Halle Berry wouldforever be a member of Tobias Fünke's legendary club of never-nudes. Then after a brief nipslip and butt shot in her Emmy and Golden Globe winning role in HBO's Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, Halle entered the new millennium with a dogged determination to reinvent her image.
Very few actresses go from winning awards in serious dramatic fare to doffing their tops in a John Travolta action movie, but Halle felt compelled to do Swordfish thanks in no small part to producer Joel Silver's persuasiveness. From an article in Entertainment Weekly published at the time of the film's release in June, 2001...
According to Silver, it was Berry’s ”sophisticated” onscreen image that convinced him she ought to tackle a sensual role. ”I’ve known Halle for years, and I felt this was time for her to do this,” he says of the actress’ first topless scene. ”I think it’s cool for the character and good for the box office.”
And despite some initial trepidation, Berry eventually agreed with Silver’s point of view. ”So much of my life I was afraid to [do a nude scene],” she says. ”With the success of my Dorothy Dandridge project and the critical acclaim that brought me, I finally felt that I didn’t have to prove myself anymore.”
As to the nude scene itself, it's about as perfect a nude debut as one could hope for: well-lit, perfectly framed, almost like a Playboy pictorial, and gratuitous as hell. Guys that write scenes like this—cinematic criminal Skip Woods, in this case—love to tell you that these scenes are integral to the plot, but they're usually just character beats, not really plot beats. For example, in this scene, Halle's characteris topless sunbathing and reading Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" so that you know she's both sexy and smart...
Berry has maintained over the years that the rumors of her receiving an extra half million dollars to shoot the topless scene were greatly exaggerated...
''In my last movie, 'Swordfish,' I showed my breasts for the first time, and the producer told the press this lie that I got more money for the part -- $250,000 for each breast. Well, if I were charging for them, it would be a lot more than $500,000." via New York Times Magazine
In this same interview with The New York Times Magazine, she also admits to the truth of the matter, that this was a gratuitous nude scene, but without having done it, she never would have said yes toMonster's Ball...
"In 'Swordfish,' it was totally gratuitous nudity, and I knew it. But I probably wouldn't have been able to do the sex scene in 'Monster's Ball' if I hadn't shown my breasts in 'Swordfish.'''
In an interview with The New York Post from the same era, she adds the following...
“If I hadn’t done that and been over it, when I got to the love scene in the ‘Monster’s Ball’ script, I would have stopped reading and said, ‘Not for me.’ “
So how do we get from the hackers and hunks of Swordfish to the gothic Southern misery of Monster's Ball? For Halle, it took her months of convincing the film's director Marc Forster to cast her in the role. Also from the New York Times Magazine article...
Berry says she was ''like a fly that would not go away. Two weeks into the begging, Forster finally agreed to see me.'' Berry smiles. ''And I convinced him.''
Forster, who is Swiss, was particularly concerned that Berry would shy away from the unusually raw sex scene between her character and Billy Bob Thornton's. ''It's graphic,'' the director recalls. ''They are two characters in agony, and they go at it like animals. I was worried, again, that she couldn't do that.''
It's among the most well-known sex scenes in the history of cinema, currently ranking #2 on Mr. Skin's Top 150 Nude Scenes of All Time, but if it's been a while since you've watched it, check it out below...
It had been quite a while since I had seen the film or the scene, and I'm as blown away by both now as I was 17 years ago when I saw this in theaters. The sting of losing both Heath Ledger and Peter Boyle—who is as chilling here as he was in the 70s in flicks like Taxi Driver and The Friends of Eddie Coyle—adds a poignancy the film didn't have in early 2002.
My goodness that sex scene, though. It's every bit as feral as I remember, the collision of two people who have probably had a lot of sex in their lives, but never in a way that willingly allows both of them to be downright primal. Billy Bob's character Hank hasbeen a pretty big racist piece of shitfor most of the film up until this point. His son's suicide, however, has left him vulnerable and perhaps softened him enough to finally see that what's really wrong with the worldhas nothing to do with the color of people's skin.
Halle's Leticia is dealing with immense pent up sexual tension. She hasn't allowed herself to feel anything for another man in a long time because her husband was alive and on death row. Now that he's gone, she's allowing herself to feel something and she wants Hank to make her feel good. It's been riffed on and made fun of to death in the ensuing years since the scene debuted, but this is as honest and raw as we've ever seen Berry on screen and in the moment, it works so well.
Also hovering over the film is the issue of whether or not Berry and Thornton really, you know, "did it."Both stars deny it up and down,with Thornton saying on HuffPost Live that the overall tone of the film prevented him from viewing it as an erotic moment...
There’s obviously some excitement in filming an intimate moment with one of Hollywood’s sexiest women, but Thornton said because the film was so dark, he felt “pretty exposed” rather than titillated.
Berry, in the New York Post article mentioned previously, mentioned that she trusted Thornton implicitly to not take advantage of the situation...
“I didn’t feel like [Thornton] would use this scene as a way to exploit the situation and take advantage of me, and I don’t think he felt that, either,” she said.
Then there's stuff like this looped GIF from the VHS 1.33 aspect ration version of the film that shows something looking an awful lot like Billy Bob's nuts hanging down by Berry's butt...
