Of course, when they were shooting, nobody had any real idea what they were saying. And amid an avalanche of riotously OTT sexual language, she also throws in unlikely expressions such as “fun gusset” and “toothy vulva” (possibly for the very first time on screen). Much to van Beek and Ballantyne’s amusement, in Davis’ version (another has been written by Australian comedians Celia Pacquola and Ronny Chieng), she decided to give Jackie an ongoing issue with thrush (something that is discussed at great length throughout the film). “Well, that kind of changes the dynamic of the relationship between myself and my husband!”

“I was like, oh my god, my character’s had an affair? I had an anal fling with my boss?,” she says. It was only on getting the finished translation back from Davis that van Beek noticed that, in one scene, her character Jackie tells her husband Bruno (played by Damon Herriman) that she’d had a “Christmas anal fling” with her boss. Set on a fictitious island (one that, funnily enough, bares an uncanny resemblance to various parts of New Zealand’s South Island), and shot entirely in this made up gibberish, the edited film was then given to British comedian Julia Davis (van Beek’s hero and known for her decidedly dark and sexual comedy) to add her own English subtitles. “And I was like … brilliant!”Īnd so, one of the most delightfully bonkers comedies ever dreamed up came to be. So I did and she said: ‘let’s have all the actors speak in a fictitious language, and then we invite comedians to write the dialog’,” says Ballantyne (who thankfully now lives around the corner from van Beek for any future early-morning lightbulb moments). “It was horrendously early, and she was like, ‘get in the car, I need to see you in person’. It all began with a brainwave van Beek had about the script after watching a number of foreign-language films at the New Zealand Film Festival. The Netflix Tax: Lawmakers Increasingly Take Aim at Streaming Giants to Fund Local Prioritiesīut this wasn’t quite enough for the filmmakers, who after a year or so of working on the script decided that they needed to turn the lunacy dial up a few notches. And with comic hero Jemaine Clement playing the camp’s charismatic and oversexed guru, it would have had all the hallmarks of being yet another wonderfully dry and awkward comedy that has become a Kiwi calling card. Nude Tuesday isn’t even close to being a normal film.ĭevised by its writer and lead star Jackie van Beek (best known for New Zealand comedies such as The Breaker Upperers and What We Do in the Shadows) alongside director Armağan Ballantyne ( The Strength of Water), the feature could easily have rested on a winning-sounding premise involving a conservative, middle-aged couple trying to save a floundering marriage with a trip to a new-age relationship retreat awash in sexual liberation and - on at least one day of the week - extreme nudity. And not just any affair, but a full-blown “Christmas anal fling.”īut then Nude Tuesday - being sold at Berlin’s virtual European Film Market (EFM) by Cornerstone - isn’t a normal film. It must be fairly uncommon for someone to write a film that they then star in to only discover when watching the final cut that their character - just to reiterate, which they wrote and played - is revealed to have had an affair.

The hidden movie nudity