Simon Baker in Sex and Death 101 Courtesy of Anchor Bay Entertainment

Paul Verhoeven has said that sex scenes are really character development. Given the number of sex scenes in this movie, would you agree?
Well, certainly. I didn't want to make the movie just this mindless sex montage of a dreary cavalcade of Maxim whores. A lot of my friends said, "Yeah, you could cut 10 minutes out, you could cut 15 minutes out." [But] I found the tighter I cut it, it became less a film about sex and more a film about fucking. I think what makes it unique is that we get to know these women a little bit and we get to see that he is as much a name on their list. It was something I wasn't aware of when I was writing the script, but except for Mindy Cohn, there are no supporting female characters. It's like, for their 10 minutes on film, everyone is the lead character. And it was great when the actors would come to the set because even though she may time-wise be in a small part of the movie, for that part of the movie she's in, she's the leading actress. There was a certain passion there so when you watch the movie together, you really feel like you're the Gulliver's Travels of sex. You're stopping at very specific different places. So it does incrementally develop into something bigger than itself.

Simon has a number of sex scenes. Did you shoot all of the sex scenes toward the end of the film when everyone was a little more comfortable with each other, or chronologically?
Well since a lot of the actresses, like I said, are only in it for 10 minutes of the movie, usually their first day was their fun dialogue day and the second day is — and it is bizarre, it's not something they teach you on Project Greenlight — how to make eye contact with an actress and not look down at her breasts.

One problem is, the day you're shooting a sex scene, it can't be the first thing of the day. That freaks everybody out. So it's got to be toward the end of the day. And toward the end of the day, famously of course, you're pressed for time. So it's almost like "Oh, if I just had another hour, I could have made a Paul Verhoeven movie." And I'm not ashamed to say that alcohol does [help]... One sex scene was the bourbon day and another was the tequila day... [As a director], I'm not the yelling James Cameron guy. Despite my caveman-and-wooly-mammoth [appearance] I do get [giddy] — I kind of run like Edith Bunker to the monitor. I keep everybody loose. And I think the fact that I'm the happy pervert — so out in the open, I'm not the closet pervert, I don't come on to my actresses at all — I'm just happy to be there so I think that [relaxes people].

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