‘Red Sparrow’ director speaks out on Jennifer Lawrence’s ‘racy’ scenes
He's also discussed his reasons for leaving Vladimir Putin out of the film
The director of Red Sparrow has spoken out about the ‘racy’, Jennifer Lawrence-starring scenes in the upcoming film.
Much has been made of Lawrence’s nude scenes in the upcoming movie, which follows the actress as she portrays Dominika Egorova, a former ballerina who is involuntarily drafted into the Russian secret service to act as a seductress.
Speaking to the Radio Times, director Francis Lawrence – who worked with Jennifer on the Hunger Games – said she was all-in on the film from day one.“When she read the script she had to make the decision of ‘listen, do I want to make this movie or not?’ and she knew that ‘either I make it and I do what’s in the movie or I don’t do it. I’m not going to take this movie on and then say I’ll do it but just take all this other stuff out’,” the director said.
He also confirmed that he removed Vladimir Putin from the film – despite the Russian president appearing in the book on which the film is based – to avoid political entanglement.
“There’s two big things. One is I don’t view it as a political film – I love the human story of it. The other idea was that as soon as you have an actor portraying somebody that’s very well known within the world, I think it starts to feel like a very different kind of movie and suddenly it would be very distracting… It would just feel like a different kind of film and I wasn’t interested in that. I was just interested in the human characters within the story.
“It starts to feel political and I just don’t see the movie as a political film.”
Jennifer Lawrence has opened up herself on the scenes of nudity in Red Sparrow, admitting that they were an “actual nightmare”.
Last week, Lawrence opened up on the psychological impact of her nude photo leak, which left her dealing with “a long period when I didn’t want to be seen sexually and I didn’t want anybody to see my flesh”.
Now, the star has told the Today Show in Australia: “It was really scary to say yes to the [Red Sparrow] movie because I knew the only way to tell the story is if I agreed to really do the scenes and go full Monty.
“It took a while to say yes – and the night before I didn’t sleep at all and I was obviously really nervous because it is the actual nightmare of standing in front of a classroom naked. But then after I finished the scene, I felt empowered.”
