Interview: Christopher Sun director of 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy
26th August 2011
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Christopher Sun is the director of the 3D erotic film; 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy. So far it has broken box office records in Hong Kong and Singapore and is due for release in the UK on the 2nd of September.
Inspired in part by the ancient text, The Carnal Prayer Mat (essentially the Chinese Karma Sutra) Sun describes the film as 'an exciting, erotic love comedy.'
In order to get the film into the UK two minutes of cuts had to be made. The British Board Of Film Classification said that;
“Compulsory cuts were required to two scenes of sexual and sexualised violence, which included elements with a tendency to eroticise and endorse sexual violence.”
TNS makes a long distance call to Hong Kong to find out what the controversy is all about...
What can viewers expect from the film?
I think there is a surprise element, the title is very inviting. But when the viewer goes into the theatre they will see something different than what they expected.
What will be different?
The comical element, the very strong message of true love prevails and the audience will find that the way we tell the story is actually very fast paced. But not like hardcore pornography. Compared to what we can view on the internet nowadays the sex is actually undertoned. But the beauty of it we escalated, we tried to show it as classical and beautiful as it should be.
What do you think the 3D effects add to the film?
Some people have mistaken the CGI stuff as the 3D official. Actually what we are showcasing is the wide shots and medium shots that gives a very good quality of every little thing, to showcase the artistic element. This is the kind of 3D stuff we are going to sell to people in our movie, not CGI.
How much was the film inspired by The Carnal Prayer Mat? Does it follow the plot/themes closely or did you take a lot of artistic license?
We took out the main character of the novel but the story is more or less the same. In the novel our villain character; the Prince of Ning is not there at all. The novel is more about karma, for the time being we just ripped that part away because people are not convinced by karma. There is no way karma has anything to do with Chinese erotica so we’ve found that it’s wise to take it away.
Did you tone down the sex/violence, or is the film more graphic than the book?
We didn’t tone it down, we just treated it differently. I do believe there is a swarm of pornography over the internet already and people have seen enough. So the sex scenes are used to introduce the characters and the way they think. You can see the differences between the actresses through the sex scenes, you can tell from the way they do that kind of stuff what their character is like.
How about the violence?
We want to use the violence to stretch the sacrificial part of the main characters. Wei and his wife each sacrifice themselves to rescue their loved ones. We also wanted to tell people it was a brutal time in main dynasty, in ancient Chinese history brutality was filled within the upper class.
In an interview for The Bangkok Post in June you say that you; ‘have a strong belief that you're doing an entertainment production, nothing vulgar.’ Which explains why you stayed away from using hardcore pornography, but what about the sexual violence?
It is not as vulgar when compared to some occult Japanese films, we don’t even match the part. Hong Kong cinema in the 70’s and 80’s were even more violent and more vulgar than what we did today.
How do you think the comedy moments sit in with the high action violent scenes?
What can viewers expect from the film?

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