Why ‘One Night Only’ Director Cut ‘So Much Nudity’ From Sex Scenes: ‘Takes You Out of the Movie’

It turns out Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro’s new romantic comedy, One Night Only, was pared way down — and for good reason.

“I went through this on two movies. I have long pages of empirical data about it. … I believe it’s been a societal shift from taking nudity in adult situations and putting them on your phones at home for everybody,” director Will Gluck told Variety on Friday, August 7, of various sex scenes in big-budget flicks. “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 big theater, they get uncomfortable.”

To accommodate the viewing trends, Gluck, 47, “cut out so much” while editing One Night Only.

“There was so much nudity in this movie that we shot on the streets. I felt we needed to show the world that way,” he explained to the outlet of the original script. “As we started to show it to audiences, we felt it takes you out of the movie.”

The Easy A filmmaker added, “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. We just kept editing it out until we got a balance, and those comments went away.”

One Night Only takes place on the annual evening where premarital sex is legal, making it possible for Allie (Barbaro) to meet Owen (Turner) as they dodge the commotion of singletons hooking up across New York City. In the background of Allie and Owen’s meet-cute, the pair encounter an array of couples celebrating their so-called night of freedom.

“We cast real-life couples in various stages of relationships,” Gluck told Variety of the movie extras. “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.”

Even ahead of One Night Only’s release, the concept went viral for its comparisons to The Purge — but with sex instead of crime. (For the uninitiated, the dystopian Purge franchise takes place during a 12-hour period where all criminal activity is legal.)

“You can’t really describe this movie. [The cast] goes on talk shows and spends 80 percent of the time explaining the rules of the world, and that’s not what the movie is about,” Gluck quipped of One Night Only’s premise. “We have to just let people see it. That’s the best tool we have, especially for something that’s this crazy.”

He continued, “These characters are living [in] this little alternative world that could easily happen … but I really wanted the world to live in the background. I didn’t want the movie to be about that. It’s more about how our characters navigate life.”

One Night Only is in theaters now.