While most Pride & Prejudice adaptations stay demure with hand-touching and the occasional wet Mr. Darcy, Fire Island ups the debauchery level with its modern sensibilities on sex and relationships. Yet, it looks like Regency-era attitudes still prevented the production from going where no Pride & Prejudice had gone before: full-frontal male nudity.
Speaking in an interview with Vulture, director Andrew Ahn details how he had to make a bit of bargain with Searchlight Pictures. “I was like, ‘I want a dick,’” Ahn tells Vulture. “It’s Fire Island. It’s sex scenes. It’s orgies. Like, you’re going to see dick.”
He continues, “I understood that erect dick was going to push us into NC-17 territory, which would seriously limit who could see the movie. But I remember asking, ‘Can I have two soft penises, one for each orgy?’ And to their credit, our producers were like, ‘How many? Where?’ Then, finally, they came back to me being like, ‘We’ll give you as many butts as you want.’ And I was like, ‘You know what? I’ll take that deal.’ I could have put more butts in it.”
The penis-debacle was part of a larger struggle, though, as Ahn explains elsewhere in the piece that it was a “tough process” to blend what the studio wanted with keeping “the authenticity” of the film.
“They had a certain kind of expectation of what a gay film should be,” says Ahn. “There were music cues where they were like, ‘Do you want to throw in Dua Lipa in there?’ And I was like, ‘I love Dua Lipa—I don’t know if this fits in that moment.’”
Fire Island is a modern, LGBTQ+ adaption of Jane Austen’s classic Pride & Prejudice that follows a group of friends as they spend a week at the iconic queer vacation spot off the coast of Long Island. The film stars and is written by Joel Kim Booster (Shrill), with a cast that includes Bowen Yang (Saturday Night Live), Conrad Ricamora (How To Get Away With Murder), Margaret Cho (The Flight Attendant), James Scully (You), Matt Rogers (I Love That For You), Tomás Matos, and Torian Miller.