Story #4: A scantily-clad fight
First off, I'll say that this story does not contain any nudity, exactly, but is one of my favorites all the same. And don't worry, I still have a few more stories of bona fide nudity, which we'll return to next time...
It was about three weeks after the story I told in my last few posts, later in the same semester of directing for film, second semester freshman year. As the semester went on, the restrictions got a little looser - we were allowed to do whatever genres we wanted, the one-minute time limit had been bumped up to three minutes, and we had added sound. We hadn't added color yet (that would come last) and were still supposed to keep dialogue very minimal, if not completely absent (one thing made clear early on was that this was a class about camera operation, cinematography, lighting, and editing, not screenwriting), but things had loosened up some.
So I ended up in a group where I was the only straight guy - the rest of the group was two girls and an openly gay guy who also happened to be a horror fanatic, obsessed with movies like Halloween and whatnot. His movie he wanted to direct was kind of a stalker horror thing where a girl is walking home from work and notices a guy who might be watching her, then, back in her apartment, is getting ready to take a shower when she sees the guy under her bed in the mirror. She tries to escape, he attacks her, she ends up stabbing him.
The Bourne Ultimatum had just come out and the ultra fast-cutting fight scenes from that movie were very "in," so he wanted to do something just like that for the fight scene, with them grabbing a mug, a frying pan, butter knife, etc. before they finally get the butcher knife. He wanted 40+ shots to cut between very quickly, too many for just one camera, so he operated one, I operated the other, and one of the girls in our group did sound and the other was in charge of fight continuity/choreography/the shot list.
So I showed up at the apartment we were going to shoot at a day or two later (we were shooting the apartment scenes first, then going to try to get the shots of her walking home in "magic hour" lighting, the time when the sun is setting). I met the actor playing the attacker and the actress playing the heroine. And let me say, I described the actress in my first story as "pretty," the second as "cute," but this girl, an acting student about 20 or 21, was a full-blown babe. Tall, slim, long blonde hair, gorgeous face. Small breasts, but otherwise she pretty much looked like a model. Very friendly too, with an easy smile and an easy laugh, talking to me and everyone else on set about everything from school to the movies we'd seen.
First we filmed the shots of her getting in the door, being nervous, putting her stuff down, then heading into the bathroom, then turning on the shower and then, yep, taking her top and pants off. She was totally laughing before the shot, talking about how she felt like such a horror movie scream queen, putting everyone at ease. The director set up his camera in a wide shot, I set mine on a close-up of her face. Then action on her, off the top came, then she unbuttoned her pants and slid them down, revealing a gorgeous, slim, cream-colored body in nothing but a white bra and panties. The panties were nowhere close to a thong or anything, but showed enough of the bottom of her ass cheeks to be sexy.
Again, this girl was a BABE. In a bra and panties. In a small apartment. In front of five people: An actor and four crew, including me.
Of course, now we were only a handful of shots into a long day of shooting this fight scene. I was curious what was going to happen next - was she going to put on a robe and then do the fight scene or what? I didn't ask though, because, even with how friendly she was, the situation was still enough to make me a little awkward and shy. I just rolled with it, doing whatever the director said. And... we moved right on to the shot of her seeing the attacker under the bed in the bathroom mirror that looked back into the bedroom. The actress stayed in her bra and panties while we set up the lights and the cameras and angled the shot and mirror to see him. She even talked to me during this time about film school and whatever, while I tried my best to keep eye contact.
Once we took this shot and moved on to the shot of her trying to move towards the door and him coming up behind her, still clad in her underwear, it occurred to me that, holy crap, she's really going to be in her bra and panties for the entire rest of this film. And she was!
I won't go into how it played out shot by shot, because that would make this a 5,000-word story, but it was like I said before: It was a highly choreographed fight sequence with a lot of fight props and tons of shots. We were going from shot to shot pretty quickly and only doing a take or two each, and the actress absolutely never put a shred of clothes on at any point. (The only additional thing she "put on" was some fake blood on her face and fake sweat on her face and matting her hair down, which were added as the shoot went on.) It was really sexy watching her try to focus on stunt work and choreography while gorgeous in her bra and panties a few feet away from us the whole time.
How sexy is was for the actor who was grappling arm-in-arm, eventually rolling on the floor with her I can only imagine. But probably REALLY hot. They had body-to-body contact for probably like a whole hour. I'm sure he had to spend a lot of time thinking about baseball and terrorism to keep his boner down. Not that I asked, of course (actually, for whatever reason, he and I barely spoke).
I mentioned before about how the crew was half-women and had an openly gay director, leaving me and the other actor the only straight guys on set. This was probably really important to keeping her comfortable wearing so little around us for so long! If she had been, say, the only girl on set with five straight guys, I can't imagine she would have been quite so cool with it all. Everyone in film knows it, though you aren't supposed to talk about it: actresses become ten times, a HUNDRED times more willing to strip off for a film if the director is a women or gay. It's not fair but it's how it is. Thankfully, all of us can reap the benefits!
And then once were done and she had stabbed the villain with the fake knife, her now covered in lots of fake blood and sweat and breathing hard, she cleaned off and got dressed and we headed outside to film the beginning of the film on the streets outside!
Now, like I said, there was no nudity on the set that day (beyond, I suppose, some of the bottom of her ass cheeks). The bra firmly kept her breasts in place; I didn't see so much as a hint of nipple. But three things make this story one of my all-time favorites from film school all the same:
One, just how completely friendly she was the entire time. The whole thing was very intimate, with her in her bra and panties, the entire crew VERY close around her in a pretty small apartment combined-kitchen/entryway, constantly rehearsing and doing fight choreography, her standing right next to us looking at shots and choreography drawings, being physically readjusted (and the guy actor too) for continuity. She even bumped into me a couple times during shots! And all this would have been awkward if she wasn't smiling and laughing the entire time (except for when "action!" was called and she began panting and screaming, of course, then the smile returned as soon as "Cut!" was called). There's something pretty awesome about engaging in friendly small talk with a 10/10-hot actress wearing only her underwear and some fake blood!
I actually liked working with her that day so much that I brought her in to act in two of the films I directed over the next couple years (fully clothed, sadly, ha!). I would have brought her in for more but she graduated and moved before I did.
Two, she was in her underwear for a LONG time. Probably close to three hours between when she first took her clothes off in the bathroom and when she finally emerged from that same bathroom, cleaned and re-dressed, ready for the exterior shots. And during that time she did not put a robe or anything else on EVER, including when she sat at the kitchen table with all of us for a fifteen-minute snack break while the director went over the remaining shot list. If she gave the slightest shit about her state of near-nudity, she never showed it. (The fact that this was inside a small apartment in Los Angeles probably didn't hurt her willingness to stay undressed and cool.)
Three, and this is interesting, I discovered years later that she got entirely out of acting and the arts altogether, apparently went back to school for education and is now a teacher (of what subject I don't know). There's something kind of hot knowing that there's this teacher out there spending her days educating the youth of America and going over coursework and grading homework and making her syllabus, innocent-seeming as can be... who once, almost a decade ago, spent three hours fighting a guy to the death in front of me and a few other crew members in a Los Angeles apartment, clad in nothing but her bra and panties. I wonder what her students would think!
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