Brandon Cronenberg on designing a prosthetic penis with Alexander Skarsgård: ‘We’ve done it a million times, send me fucking pics’
Brandon Cronenberg’s “Infinity Pool” shocked Sundance audiences with its colorful story of psychological torture at a hedonistic resort. But even with all the murdered clones and dog collars, the version audiences saw was considerably tamer than the one Cronenberg had originally shot.
When her director’s cut NC-17 was released in March, fans were shocked to see a much more explicit version of a sex scene between Gabi (Mia Love) and James (Alexander Skarsgård) that featured full frontal nudity by Skarsgard. In a Q&A moderated by IndieWire’s Eric Kohn following a screening of the director’s cut, Cronenberg talked about the provocative new scene and why it needed to be cut.
“The MPAA has one hard-and-fast rule, and it’s not hard dick,” Cronenberg said. “Everything else is a fucking weird, maddening, subjective quagmire that you have to navigate with them, no offense to the MPAA. But no hard cocks, we knew that was the thing, so it had to come out.
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Cronenberg said his special effects artist Dan Martin is a skilled builder of prosthetics and worked well with Skarsgard to design his fake genitalia.
“He does a lot of shit. The kind of movie he does, he ends up making penises very, very, very often,” he said. shots of this penis and you can approve it. Alex Skarsgard had done it before on something else, so he’s like, “oh yeah, we’ve done it a million times, send me the picks.”
Despite the easy sculpting process, the prosthetic had some functionality issues when they shot the sex scene in Croatia. Cronenberg said technical difficulties involving the ejaculation process forced him to get creative and reshoot the scene.
“We shot it the first time in Croatia and the sperm jammed. It’s actually just sort of dripping and it was too consistently white,” he said. “So the shot that’s in the movie was shot in a studio after principal photography.”
Additional reporting by Eric Kohn.