At an NYC reunion, Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly playfully spat over a nixed sex scene in their lesbian cult classic.
Photo: Jason Mendez/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival
As Pink launched herself into the rafters of Radio City Music Hall to sing a Broadway medley at the Tonys, an even gayer event was unfolding 50 blocks downtown. At Tribeca Film Festival’s 30th-anniversary celebration of Bound, co-director Lilly Wachowski strode onstage in the timeless cool-girl uniform of a black minidress, fishnets, and combat boots, took the mic, and yelled, “Are there any queers out in the audience?!” Five hundred fans broke into rapturous applause.
The Wachowskis’ debut film stars Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly as extremely hot lesbians who fall in love and outsmart the mob. Bound immediately resonated with the queer community even when — in Wachowski’s words — it appeared to be made by “two dudes.” Three decades later, both Lilly and her co-director sister, Lana, have transitioned, and it’s clear that — again in Wachowski’s words — they “were going through a lot” when they insisted their femme fatale, Violet (Tilly), should betray her mafia boyfriend with her butch lesbian ex-con neighbor, Corky (Gershon). “We left you all a trail of breadcrumbs,” Wachowski explained with a grin.
The screening — preceded by a showing of Leone DiSantis’s Bound-esque short film Wild Ones — was a rowdy affair punctuated by wolf whistles, whoops, and bursts of laughter at every lesbian joke. (Violet: “I bet your car is 20 years old.” Corky: “Truck.” Violet: “… Of course.”) The appearances of Christopher Meloni and Joey “Pants” Pantoliano — as an unhinged mobster and Violet’s deadbeat boyfriend, Caesar, respectively — inspired thrilled applause. By the time Wachowski returned to the stage alongside Tilly, Gershon, Pantoliano, and Meloni, the room was practically vibrating with the adrenaline only a cult classic can inspire when its rabid fans finally find one another in the wild.
A rumor that Lana Wachowski might make a rare joint appearance with her sister persisted right up until showtime; it was officially squashed when Lilly enlisted us all to make a “Wish you were here!” video for Lana. Moderator Julie Klausner — whose yet-to-be-released debut feature film, Hello Cruel World (which Klausner describes as “Harold and Maude meets Big Daddy meets Brazil”) was co-produced by Lilly — proceeded to ask a few basic questions. She quickly ceded control of the panel to Tilly, however, whose breathless questions to Wachowski became their own riveting monologues. Even extreme extrovert Christopher Meloni was rendered near mute by the ensuing chaos. (We love an ally who knows their place during Pride.)
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Tilly began, “but I heard that one of the reasons you wrote Bound is you weren’t really happy with the way Assassins turned out and you’d written The Matrix and you wanted to direct The Matrix and your agent said, ‘Nobody is gonna let two unknown directors direct a $120 million film,’ which is what it was budgeted at the time, and that’s why you wrote Bound, so that you’d have a calling card.” [Quick gasp for air.] “Was that a fever dream? Did I imagine it?!”
“There are partial truths to that,” Wachowski said. “We did not write Bound to convince people [we could] direct The Matrix … We really loved noir. We wanted to make a film with two strong women characters. The fact that they were queer was a foreshadowing. That Matrix stuff just came along later. It was part of this dance we were doing with Warner Bros. right after Bound came out. They had put the remake of Diabolique out, and it was not a very good success for them. So they were like, ‘Diabolique cost $60 million. Bound cost $4 million. What are we doing? Who are these guys?’” Wachowski paused, letting her cheekily gendered joke sink in. “So yeah. We showed them!”
Undeterred, Tilly jumped into her next question. “I like to throw half-truths out there,” she said, instantly delighting this reporter, “but didn’t Warner Bros. say to you that they would give you $12 million if you made Corky a man, and you said, ‘Well, Corky’s a girl,’ and you left?” Wachowski dodged the cash-offer claim but allowed Tilly’s essential question: “People were interested in changing Corky to a man, and we said ‘No way.’”
Per Gershon, Corky’s haters even included her own agents, who said she’d “ruin” her career by playing another queer woman so soon after she played Cristal Connors in Showgirls. But Gerson had read the Bound script and insisted on meeting the Wachowskis anyway: “The second I walked in the door and we started talking, I got that weird feeling that I get when I know people are insanely talented … I was in.” When her agents balked, Gershon said, she fired them.
Gershon’s Corky, lithe and tattooed, ended up being the stuff of butch lesbian dreams — which apparently held true offscreen as much as on. With the guidance of artist Susie Bright, who acted as Bound’s consultant on all things queer, Gershon went on her own lesbian bar crawls and did, as she put it with a leonine smile, “a lot of research.” “When we were filming,” Tilly said, “she’d come in and say to the Wachowskis, ‘You need to change this pickup line, because I tried it last night and it didn’t work.’”
Dino De Laurentiis, the Italian film producer (and grandfather of Giada De Laurentiis), ended up funding Bound. The cast could’ve spent the entire panel exchanging Dino stories but settled for just a few, including Tilly explaining how he wanted an “unbelievably good-looking guy” to play Caesar, but “y’know, Joey is believably good-looking, so …” (No one laughed harder at this line than Pantaliano.) Talk then turned to how Bound almost got an NC-17 rating — not because of the graphic mobster violence, but because of an intimate sex scene between Tilly and Gershon.
The actors’ recollections of the scene — told with an impatient familiarity that made it feel like they were filling us in on past dramas at an overdue family dinner — contradicted each other. Tilly’s, delivered via another perfectly unraveling monologue, included everyone on the filmmaking side being earnestly concerned about mimicking the salaciousness of Penthouse magazine (“Do they even have Penthouse magazine anymore?”) and wanting to instead create a film with atypically positive portrayals of lesbians. But Tilly claimed that the near miss with the NC-17 rating was because the MPAA thought the sex scene looked so much like she and Gershon were actually having sex that audiences wouldn’t believe they were acting. “You saw my hand on Gina’s very lovely crotch, and my fingers were sort of, you know, doing the finger thing,” Tilly said, twinkling, “and the board academy said, ‘It looks like they are really doing it!’ So let me get this straight: If us girls were not such good actresses, you would let it pass? And they said, ‘Yeah, kind of.’”
Gershon begged to differ. In her recollection, the MPAA’s biggest problem was how the sex scene wasn’t just about sex but about how much love and intimacy there was between the two women, period. Between herself, Tilly, the Wachowskis, and cinematographer Bill Pope, she explained, “It was like all five of us were having sex. It was a real team effort … and there was one take that unanimously we were all like, ‘Oh wow, that’s the take.’ And what I recall about it is that you don’t see boobs, you didn’t see any party parts, but we were so connected. It was much more of a love scene.”
“It was erotic,” said Tilly.
“It wasn’t erotic,” said Gershon.
“It WAS erotic!” Tilly burst. “There’s nothing more erotic than women IN LOVE.”
“You told your story, Jen, let me tell mine,” Gershon countered, to light “oohs” across the crowd. “It was a very beautiful, intense scene where you see two women really connect and were making love. And they were like, ‘No, no, we can’t show that.’”
Wachowski played referee, claiming “those are both accurate portrayals” of the studio nonsense Bound’s iconic sex scene had to endure before hitting the big screen without an NC-17 rating — at least in the U.S. “We cut some of the violence … We cut out a couple of gunshots. But when we returned with the same sex-scene shot, they were like, ‘No, this lesbian sex scene has to be different.’ So we put in this shot that you’ve seen tonight.” But, Wachowski revealed, “there is a foreign version of Bound that has the original shot” for any enterprising fans who want to scour eBay for other editions. At the very least, everyone onstage agreed that keeping the sex scene as loving as it was intense was crucial to Bound’s success.
In the immortal words of Dino De Laurentiis (as recalled by an absolutely delighted Joey Pants): “‘I don’t understand. It’s okay to cut off the finger, but not to fuck with the finger?’”
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