Director cut nudity from One Night Only

Will Gluck cut a lot of nudity from One Night Only.

The new movie stars Monica Barbaro as Allie, an aspiring singer and Callum Turner as pizza shop owner Owen, as the two strangers repeatedly run into each other during the one night in a dystopian alternate New York City where premarital sex is legal.

And, filmmaker Gluck revealed he cut out nudity from the movie as he believed it distracted from the story.

The Easy A and Anyone But You director told Variety: “I went through this on two movies. I have long pages of empirical data about it. The only thing is I don’t think it’s just Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I believe it’s been a societal shift from taking nudity in adult situations and putting them on your phones at home for everybody. Now it’s more of a private, intimate thing that people don’t want to see when they’re in a shared experience. Whenever people now see nudity or very adult situations in a [movie], they get uncomfortable.

“Once I’ve learned that, which was all through the editing process for my last movie, I applied it to this movie. But even so, I didn’t apply it enough. I cut out so much. There was so much nudity in this movie that we shot on the streets. I felt we needed to show the world that way. As we started to show it to audiences, we felt it takes you out of the movie. You’re engaged in the characters and what’s going on, and then you pan over and there’s two naked people having sex, and you watch the audience … it’s a physical thing. They turn to who they’re with and … the benefits do not nearly outweigh the negatives of it. So we just kept editing it out until we got a balance, and those comments went away.

“We had an incredible intimacy coordinator. And we cast real-life couples in various stages of relationships. It was never like we met an extra and were like, “you guys are kissing.” It was fun because there were married couples, people who broke up during the movie and people who became couples so they could do that.”

Gluck also spoke about the concept of a ban on pre-martial sex and how it affected his storytelling.

He explained: “You can’t really describe this movie. [The cast] goes on talk shows and spends 80 per cent of the time explaining the rules of the world, and that’s not what the movie is about. We have to just let people see it. That’s the best tool we have, especially for something that’s this crazy.

“Someone asked me ‘why don’t people just get divorced?’ Well, there’s municipal signage very prominently in the movie that says you cannot get divorced unless you were married for one year, plus one day. It’s like when COVID [started], there were rules, and then people started to do other stuff, so then more rules came out, right? That’s what I imagine when this mandate was passed. They had to keep doing amendments to these rules because, yes, the obvious idea would be just get married and divorce.”