Windy City Times
October 16, 2002
Like the 1987 Bret Easton Ellis novel on which it is based, Roger Avary's The Rules of Attraction (now in theaters) is a difficult hybrid. Scenes of incomparable hilarity alternate with scenes of almost unwatchable grotesquerie and violence. Although the most grisly scenes--a haunting suicide and a date rape sequence involving vomit--will test many viewer's patience and stomachs, their inclusion is integral to director Avary's goals for the film: to satirize and capture the sex-and-drugs waste that occurs in the lives of many privileged bored youth during their college years. The film's lighter scenes provide much-welcome candy-like relief.
For gay audiences, two lighter scenes offer particular enjoyment. In a brief fantasy sequence, James Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek and former Guess model Ian Somerhalder share a kiss. While in perhaps the most fun scene of the entire movie, Somerhalder and Russell Sams dance on a bed and strip to their underwear in a ritzy hotel room to George Michael's "Faith."
Director Avary recently recalled that the hotel dance scene was completely unplanned. "It was Russell Sams's first day on a movie, and we were in a hotel room at the Ritz Carlton, and we had finished early. I was like, 'I'm here with a crew. We've got a camera. Let's do something.' I had somebody run down and get a George Michael CD from my car because Russell was dressed like George Michael, and I told Russell, 'This is your first day, and on your first day, we always do an initiation, and your initiation is going to be to do a striptease on the bed for us."
"And he was like, 'Nahhh...!' (He's from Tennessee). And then he saw the camera, and we started doing playback, and he's like, 'Alright, Hoss!' He was up for anything, and so he just got up there, and we started rolling."
Ian Somerhalder was added at the last minute. "I
had been working 12 hours that day," Ian recalled. "I was tired. The photo in
the press materials of me laying on the bed with all of the beer around me--that
scene has been cut out, but I'd been in my underwear all day, in that room, so I
had my Ritz Carlton robe on and was going downstairs to go to my trailer to
leave and Roger said, 'No, no, no, stick around.'"
"Russell Sams had never been on a set before, and Roger said, 'I want you to strip on the bed.' And we were like, 'Huh? No, nah ...' And he said, 'No, really do it.'"
"I said, 'What am I going to strip to? I have nothing on!' So I said 'I'm not doing it.' But Roger said, 'Trust me, Ian, you have to.'"
"These huge speakers half the size of this table were rolled in. We're in the Ritz Carlton, and all of a sudden you hear at the most extraordinarily loud volume, the beginning beats of 'Faith.' Russell started dancing and Roger said, 'You've just got to jump in at some point.'"
As Avary recalls, "It was one take, no choreography or anything. The crew started gathering around the monitors and going, 'My God, what is going on? This is fabulous.' What I captured was so good that I had to include it in the movie, so I shot a little bit of additional footage with Faye Dunaway and Swoosie Kurtz (as the guys' mothers waiting downstairs in the hotel restaurant) to intercut with that."
"Then I thought, 'We're a low-budget film. How am I going to get the rights to George Michael's 'Faith?' Thank God George Michael has a sense of humor and is a cool guy because he essentially gave us the rights for a song.'"
Regarding the kiss scene with James Van Der Beek, Ian said, "It's just funny ... we laughed about it, and talked about it, and we knew we had an opportunity to do something that was kind of fun and, you know, quite simply, to fuck with a lot of people. You might as well capitalize on that. It was just fun, a lot of fun. The first thing we said was, 'No tongue.' And that's what we did-- yea, there's none. But again you know, you're pushing the envelope, and why not push the envelope?"
In the film, Somerhalder plays Paul Denton, a smart but romantically tortured gay college student deeply in unrequited love with Van Der Beek's character, Sean Bateman, the predatory straight bad boy younger brother of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. "Paul always, always goes for straight men. That's why he's so tortured in that way," Ian said.
The kiss sequence occurs on a split screen. On
the left side of the screen is Paul's fantasy, in which he kisses Sean, who
kisses him back, strips off his shirt and goes for it. On the right side of the
screen, Paul in reality masturbates into a pillow while Sean falls asleep stoned
at the foot of his bed.
Of reaction to the kiss scene, Van Der Beek said, "Everyone's been pretty cool about it. I actually had this fantasy that people would guard it, so that it actually would be a surprise. I really liked it in the script. I liked the fact that it was there. I loved how it was done--split screen."
"It's just so funny, because it's so peripheral in the script. When it's the first question out of people's mouths, you wonder what their priorities are, what their issues are. To focus on it would be silly, it would be like focusing on any two-second portion of the movie that happened in a fantasy sequence. There are so many other things to talk about. To focus on something that happens on one side of the screen, in one character's imagination, doesn't make any sense."
The MPAA initially asked Avary to cut the kiss sequence, as part of a series of cuts requested in order for the film to get an R rating. Avary held out, though, and the scene remained intact. "They said they wanted to cut it because of the masturbation--but we all know that it was what was going on on the other side of the screen that tweaked them. I believe they wanted to avoid the whole homophobic thing and ultimately let it slide."
Somerhalder's previous credits include Life As A House, in which he played Josh, the suburban straight high school pimp who tries to convince Hayden Christensen's character to get into hustling, and the WB summer series Young Americans, in which he played Hamilton, a straight kid who becomes confused when he falls in love with a girl he thinks is a boy. In MTV's Anatomy of A Hate Crime, Somerhalder played Russell Henderson, one of the two men who killed Matthew Shepard.
"It's really a shame that Anatomy of A Hate Crime
didn't do a lot better," Ian said. "After shooting that scene and recreating the
killing of Matthew Shepard ... when we were all done, we all fell on top of each
other sobbing. It was like it was in Wyoming, it was 20 degrees, it was freezing
... they literally had to rip us apart and put us in our trailers. We were
frozen, we were on the ground, and we had black hands because it was so cold."
Although the MPAA and others apparently view the film as an extreme portrayal of college, Van Der Beek and Somerhalder both said they felt it was an accurate portrayal. Somerhalder even said the film was tame compared to what he saw going on during his teen days as a Guess model. "In the modeling times, it was times five or 10. The accessibility of everything was a little higher, and a little more sophisticated, and yet still in some way more primal, if that makes sense.
"This is the way it is. College is that way, and hopefully this movie will raise the bar of the way this genre is personified because it's just so sugar-coated, the stuff that these kids see. Now that people are becoming so much more media savvy and Internet savvy, kids are becoming just smarter. Why not give them films that are smarter, films that are not so sugar-coated?"