Last month I had the very mixed blessing of playing a, shall we say, supporting role in a pornographic sci-fi flick. I’ve had the honor previously in my scattershot performance career of playing diabolic night club singers, seditionary aristocrats, and even a condescending 3D projection, but this part was something else. Because, for the first time since I played one of the three Wise Men at age five in my Catholic primary school, I was cast as a character who was in no way haughty or sadistic, but rather naive, good natured, and even rather wholesome. (Well, as wholesome as one can be when surrounded entirely by dominatrix drag queens, junkie coppers and a chorus line of jerk-off boys.)

I could say that I have never seen so many naked bodies in one place at one time, but I’d be lying. (I did after all enjoy a psychedelic university education in Northern California, and spend the second half of my twenties on the floor, covered in nothing but mashed potato in the aftermath of various “dinner parties” in Berlin). However, what I had genuinely never seen before was the strange mechanics of exporting nudity and sexual exchange onto film.

When I first arrived on set, I was whisked through to costume, past a row of boys in jockstraps masturbating against a wall of fluorescent urinals, all moaning and throwing their heads about in ersatz-pleasure. Just as I stepped into the make-up room, I heard, “Cut”, called and watched my co-stars fall immediately from their eternal cusp-of-climax pose into a swift, deflated accidie. It was dazzling. Reaching for their fluffy dressing gowns, they immediately picked up previous conversations about German class, last weekend’s parties, and when lunch might be ready. (Lord knows I could write a tome on the catering too, but having recently read Crime and Punishment, and being thus aware of the power of literature to cause lasting psychological discomfort, I would never want to inflict such cruel insights on you, dear reader).

Over the next two weeks I saw a conveyor belt of seductions and enticements, both destined for the screen and not. Seemingly for each diegetic cum shot there was an emission of equal intensity happening just off-camera. If, say a make-up artist and an actor were missing simultaneously, they could casually be discovered choking on their professionalism in the bathroom. And if, whilst bored in the green room, two actors were discussing the insistence of their libido, it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow should one of the pair hook his thumb in his underwear, pull against the elastic, and reveal the full extent of that hankering. It was almost as if such kindness evolved naturally as a way of comforting each other amidst the ever expanding wait-times between shots, the days spent outside in -10 degrees wearing nothing but a plastic trench coat, and the entire oceans of synthetic semen we endured licking off each other’s faces on the daily. Cinema can be an ordeal, making magic can be arduous.

On set you begin to exist outside of time, as you repeat over and over, often out of scripted sequence, the same actions again and again on that stark white set in some agonising deja vu, in which it always has to seem like the first time. When you make initial eye-contact with the object of your desire for the 14th time that day, sequential order begins to seem quite useless. The hours upon hours spent dawdling, flirting, and loitering in doorways between takes only add to the feeling of floating in a timeless airlock. And yet, conversely, the boot of time is pressed firmly on your face, as on the other side of the camera the crew become more and more panic-stricken with every new first time you perform, agonisingly aware that time is money, and the budget is sparse. You can see the encroaching fear in their eyes, you catch it in their voice after each take, when the machine breaks down to reassemble for another shot, and the cacophony of “Five minutes!” (itself a permanent temporal misnomer) comes.

Enraptured couples pull apart, someone from the art department wipes them down, offers them a robe for brief comfort, they perhaps offer each other consolation or apology, as a troop of extras roll out of the green room for the long shot. Quite akin to, “The King is dead! Long live the King”, the imperial holler of, “Quiet please!” announces another whirl of the kinky carousel, and the ecstasy begins again, for the very first time.

Sources: Shu Lea Cheang’s Fluid the Movie