Can you talk a little about how you went about staging the sex scenes in the film between Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson (in Little Children)? I’m not trying to be cute or get salacious details–those sequences have a raw emotional power to them that takes them out of the realm of mere titillation and was curious as to how you achieved that.

I’ve been in this position myself as a young actor, which is that people always think of such things as “the sex scene”–even the filmmakers and writers and actors think of them as “the sex scene” and I didn’t want that and Kate and Patrick certainly didn’t want that. They understood that these were scenes that were about something–there were things to act within them and they just happened to have their clothes off. What we did, so that we could concentrate on the scene instead of the titillation factor and the odd strangeness of being like that around 200 people, was to send the entire crew on an extended coffee break for two days. Kate and Patrick and I went into the house alone with a sound man to operate the mike and an assistant cameraman to load for me and pull focus while I operated the camera. We talked through every scene practically and then we shot. It was very comfortable, it wasn’t strange and we were able to focus on the intent of the scenes so that Kate and Patrick could get the most out of them with their performances.

Todd Field
from an interview with Peter Sobczynski