Don’t Look Now – did they do it?

We’re talking Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now from 1973. It is a fantastic film, no question, with Christie and Sutherland, both sexy as hell, directed by Nicholas Roeg. The question is, did they do it?

On the one hand, we have this, in the Daily Telegraph:

The sex scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now is so passionate that viewers often wonder whether the stars were making love for real.

Forty years on, a new book is to claim that the stars did indeed have intercourse while filming the scene.

The Hollywood Reporter, a showbusiness newspaper, posted a blog by a journalist who had seen an advance copy of a book, Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob, (and Sex), written by Hollywood veteran Peter Bart.

In the book, Mr Bart claims that the sex in the scene was real.

Mr Bart, a former executive at Paramount Pictures and editor at another entertainment publication, Daily Variety, writes that while at Paramount he watched the scene being filmed and saw the pair of actors engaged in sex, the blog posting claimed.

On the other hand we have this on Stuff:

“Not true. None of it. Not the sex. Not him witnessing it,” Sutherland said. “From beginning to end there were four people in that room. Nic Roeg (director), Tony Richmond (cinematographer), Julie Christie and me. No one else.”

And whom do we believe? Donald Sutherland, obviously. There is not a man dead or alive who would deny having had sex with Julie Christie, however much a gentleman he may be. So if Sutherland denies it, it didn’t happen.

Of course it didn’t happen. What they did is called acting. And what Mr Bart does is called trying to sell a book.

Here is Randy Travis with “On the Other Hand” to reinforce the idea that what is on the other hand is sometimes what matters most.