Patricia Arquette recently spoke about the “terrifying” experience of filming nude scenes for the 1997 film Lost Highway.
During a recent panel at the Series Mania Festival in Lille, France, the Oscar-winning actress shared how uncomfortable she felt about the nudity in her role as Renee Madison and how some crew members made inappropriate remarks during filming.
According to Variety, she found the undressing scenes especially tough and recalled how crude comments from some crew members heightened her anxiety.
She spoke to director David Lynch about it, saying, “I am not comfortable.”
“They are saying gross things.”
Lynch responded right away, asking her to identify those responsible. After her conversation with him, she noticed the crew members looking down apologetically.
Arquette said, “I was so extremely modest — I would take a bath in the dark.”
“The scene when my character had to strip was terrifying to me. Some of the guys were saying crude things and I told David: ‘I am not comfortable. They are saying gross things.”
She went on, “He said, ‘You read the script. Wait, who said what?’ When I came back, all these men were looking at their feet, all apologetic.”
Arquette also shared a memorable moment from filming a s*x scene where she asserted control over the set.
She told the crew, “It was supposed to be a closed set. I said: ‘If I take this robe off and I look at you and I know you don’t have to be there, I am going to punch you in the face.’ Later, I told [costar] Balthazar [Getty], ‘Just keep your hands on my t*ts. I would rather you hold them than the whole world saw them.'”
Reflecting on the role, Arquette said that although she took it partly to confront her fear of nudity, filming these scenes didn’t cure her phobia.
To prepare for the role’s themes of power and submission, she even visited clubs, including a dominatrix venue, to study “power dynamics” and “micro-expressions.”
Arquette once told The Guardian, “One of the reasons I took the role was my phobia of nudity, but doing all those nude scenes didn’t cure it.”
She admitted she still “had to peek through my fingers when I watched those moments in the film.”
For research, she “visited some weird clubs to prepare for the part, including this dominatrix place where some customers paid to be used as tables.”
In Lost Highway, Arquette played Renee Madison, starring alongside Bill Pullman, Robert Blake, Gary Busey, Giovanni Ribisi, Richard Pryor, and others.
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