She did what to him? Even if you know nothing else about “The Paperboy,” you may have heard about the film’s most gee-whiz scene — the one in which Nicole Kidman pees on Zac Efron.
The polarizing movie from Oscar nominee Lee Daniels, director of “Precious,” inspired loads of chatter after its Cannes premiere earlier this year, where it was both applauded and booed.
“I’m always attracted to provocative characters and situations that we don’t get to see on-screen often,” Daniels says. “Sometimes, people can’t deal with it.”
“The Paperboy” is set in the Florida swamplands during 1969. A newspaper reporter (Matthew McConaughey) and his younger brother (Efron) attempt to exonerate a slimy death-row killer (John Cusack) at the behest of the town hussy (Kidman), who has struck up a pen-pal relationship with the convict. The story is based on a 1995 Pete Dexter novel.
Daniels explains some of the more shocking moments in the film that have had people talking for months.
Cusack pleasures himself while Nicole Kidman spreads her legs across the room during a prison visit.
“That was shot on the second day. The first day was a sex scene with Cusack. The second day was the prison scene. The third day was the famous pee scene. Nicole was game. I was nervous at first because it was Nicole Kidman. I didn’t know the girl. She said, ‘You gotta get over this stuff. I’m just a working girl. You gotta direct me.’
“Her character was supposed to say the N-word, and she wouldn’t say it. I was angry. My producer tells me, ‘Are you serious? She bends over a washing machine and takes it from John Cusack in the first day, she has telepathic sex with Cusack in prison on the second day, she urinates on Zac Efron on the third day, and you’re angry because she won’t say the N-word? Give the girl I break.’ I said, ‘All right.’ ”
Efron appears often in nothing but tighty whities, leading one Cannes questioner to ask if Daniels “eroticized” the actor.
“Maybe subliminally, somewhere deep in the back of my head, I did that, but I wasn’t conscious of it. From the time that I was 5 to the time that I was 16, I walked around in underwear. And I didn’t look like him. You can’t help but look at Zac. I tried to make him ugly. I tried every trick in the book, ‘Shoot him from here, shoot him from here.’ I didn’t [eroticize him] intentionally, but, yeah, I’m a gay man — look at him.”
Kidman dons a white-trashy wardrobe of tight pants, bright lipstick and teased hair.
“I told Nicole, ‘Look, I can’t get some Hollywood makeup artist to do their Hollywood take on it. You have to do this yourself.’ I thought she was gonna quit after that because she was so shocked. I said, ‘You can’t be this girl if you don’t understand her. You have to figure out who this tramp is.’ I put her in a room with actual women who wrote [to] men in prison, and she’s a really good student. She sat and studied. She sent me a photo of what her interpretation was. It was important that she put on some weight. I said, ‘I want you fat. I want your butt jiggling, I want your thighs moving.’ She put on 15 pounds. We went to some thrift stores and got some stuff. The look was very unique.”
Efron’s character has a brief fling with the much-older Kidman.
“You could see that Zac was nervous about working with Nicole. During the sex scene, was that awkward? Yes. It was the most awkward scene for me to shoot. I had forgotten about that scene, because it was mild compared to some of the other scenes. I wasn’t psychologically ready to deal with them making love and the awkwardness of it all. I cut the scene short. I said, ‘You guys don’t have to do this. Let’s just begin it and then cut.’ So the narrator, Macy Gray, speaks for me, ‘I guess y’all seen enough about this.’ ”
Kidman pees on Efron after he’s stung by a jellyfish.
“I’ve talked about this so much. Bottom line is: It was in the book. It’s what the character would do. But then I got a little nervous and I told Nicole, ‘I don’t know. People are gonna make a big deal about this as opposed to looking at the movie.’ She said, ‘Lee, if you wrote it and you made me pee on him, you better put this in the movie.’ I said, ‘OK.’ In hindsight, I don’t regret it. I’m just trying to tell a story. People are thinking that it’s over the top and shocking, but we’re just having fun doing it. [What subbed for actual urine] is a Hollywood secret that I promised Zac and Nicole I’d keep quiet about.”