Deep Water director Adrian Lyne reflects on decades of depicting sex on film
The director of Fatal Attraction, 9 1/2 Weeks, and Unfaithful looks forward—and back—to talk about how things have changed for erotically-minded moviemakers.

Across Flashdance, 9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, and Unfaithful, Adrian Lyne chronicled—and defined—mainstream sexuality on film for almost 20 years. While other directors might have offered more transgressive, idiosyncratic, or explicit depictions during that time, Lyne’s films attracted audiences by the millions with their expert combination of visual style and ideas just provocative enough to generate discussion, whether the director was exploring the legitimacy (and talent needed) in sex work, or reckoning with infidelity at the intersections of emotional and later financial investment.
Another 20 years after Unfaithful, Lyne returns with Deep Water, an adaptation of the 1957 Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name that taps into ideas that have been around in literature and art since long before he started working—updated for the screen with some inventive and particularly timely twists. Lyne recently spoke to The A.V. Club about returning to the director’s chair for the first time in two decades, discussing what has changed in portraying sex and sexual relationships, and what hasn’t. He additionally explored some of the cultural shifts that have impacted his approach to storytelling over the years, and reflected on the lessons he’s learned about intimacy, relationships and human interactions, both on film and in real life.
The A.V. Club: Watching this movie, I was reminded of Phantom Thread and David Cronenberg’s Crash, where there’s a relationship dynamic that works for these two people, but probably doesn’t and maybe shouldn’t work for anyone else. In a story like this, do you look at it in terms of the conflict being the thing that keeps these two people together, or is it the reconciliation that makes them forget all of the volatility of those conflicts?
Adrian Lyne: I don’t think they’ll ever forget it. I don’t know whether you read the actual book, but it’s about a man who’s disenchanted with his wife because she’s fucking around, but he’s not interested in her sexually, and eventually he bumps the lovers off and then finally her. So what I tried to introduce was a complicity between them so that, for example, when he looks through the window at the party at the beginning of the movie, she knows he’ll be there. She gets a sense that he’ll be there so that there is a feeling a little bit like she’s doing this not only for herself but a little bit for him so that he is interested in her sexually. He’s jealous, obviously. He tries to deal with it, like in that scene where he’s putting lotion on her and he says, “I wish you’d get somebody with brains,” but within 30 seconds, he’s coming onto her and getting turned down. So you’ve got the dichotomy, which I think is interesting. And so that’s what really what the movie was about: jealousy and how to deal with it.
AVC: It feels like the dynamic between these two characters is very much defined by stretching their relationship to the breaking point and then pulling it back, or maybe even fully breaking it and then repairing it. How difficult was it to strike the right balance where the two of them were testing and tormenting one another and then reconciling?
AL: Jealousy obviously is an aphrodisiac. In some terms it’s arousing, but it’s also immensely destructive. And it’s interesting because [Ana] was saying while I was shooting, “They’re gonna hate me, they’re gonna hate me.” And in a sense, they will; she has a kid. But what I found interesting was that she is not only doing it for herself, but I wanted to get a sense that she’s doing it for him as well. So when he looks through that window at the beginning, she kind of knows he’ll be watching. I liked the idea, which is an eccentric scene, a scene when Charlie De Lisle is playing the piano, and she’s all infatuated with him and introducing him and excited and dancing, and then there’s a moment when she suddenly sees Vic and goes over to him. And I think for a moment, either she’s compassionate or she loves him, and that moment of sex when she comes onto him within the framework of the guy playing the piano, I thought was just so interesting that she, again, involves him in it.
AVC: There’s a point of no return for Vic where he actually follows through on these jealous instincts. Reasonably speaking, how do you guarantee that audiences stay not just invested, but kind of sympathetic to him? Is that Ben’s job or is that something that you can do in the storytelling to make sure that we’re still following and investing in his plight?
AL: One associates [Affleck] with more outgoing, ebullient characters, and I wanted the reverse, really. I wanted him to be vulnerable and almost introverted, and then you suddenly see the rage come out. So I wanted to him to almost have a childlike quality—something that he hadn’t done before, but I think he pulls it off. But by the end of the movie, I had to get ’em together or try and pull ’em together via the picnic and via her looking at that book that he did. Also, there’s a love scene I think that they’re nice in at the house. There’s a sweet moment when they both laughed. And I always wondered what was happening. It’s funny.
AVC: The sex scenes in this movie feel very different than I would say ’80s sex scenes in general—they have this urgency and they’re less picturesque and smoke-filled. Was that a byproduct of the material itself? Is it a changing approach or growing as a filmmaker? What helps you decide how to depict those kinds of moments?