A look at the making of a sexy, sweet motel scene
All the messy psychosexual complications – and all the magnanimity – of “DTF St. Louis” emerged in one scene that goes from a motel room to a swimming pool.
Series creator Steven Conrad “was able to deliver these very uncomfortable, original moments in a way that just transports you as a viewer to a place you didn’t think you would go,” Jason Bateman said during Variety‘s Making a Scene conversation, presented by HBO Max. This scene is a good example, moving from farce to something tender: Floyd (David Harbour) watches Carol (Linda Cardellini), his wife, and Clark (Jason Bateman), his best friend, be intimate from behind a closet door; Carol and Clark are well aware of his presence, as this is all a sex game between the trio. Suddenly, Floyd, an American Sign Language interpreter, sees through the window a young man swinging toward the motel’s pool, about to fall in. Floyd has the presence of mind to realize that the drifter, who does not respond to shouted directions, is both blind and deaf, and as such will likely drown if not stopped. He intercepts the guy and signs in his hand to communicate.
The progression of the scene reveals Floyd’s empathy and ingenuity. It also gave Harbour, who had stood motionless watching the sex between two people he loved, a real physicality to play. “ASL communication between two deaf people is one thing, but when you share ASL with someone who is blind, there is a real physical element to it,” said writer-director Conrad. “The signs are placed in the palm of the blind man’s hand.”
This aspect allowed Harbour, an actor adept at using his physicality, to use the language skills he had learned for the show. “I learned some ASL when we did it, before we started shooting,” he said. “The interesting thing about any language is that it is fluid – there is a certain fluidity.” Harbour, who worked with ASL interpreters on set, adapted the written lines to fit the rhythms and structures of ASL language use.
All of this reads beautifully on camera, thanks in part to cinematographer James Whitaker, who had experience filming a deaf character in “Hawkeye.” “You might want to be a little wider if you’re capturing someone using sign language, because a lot of those hands are right here in the frame,” he notes. “We also really wanted to do close-ups of the hands, because not only was it beautiful how these two men moved their hands together, it felt so intimate and close, but they are also communicating.”
This is a kind of connection that Floyd hasn’t had access to in his family life or with his best friend; indeed, it is a physical connection that Clark and Carol enjoy without him. That’s a contradiction that the actors enjoyed. “We have our own language with gestures and touches,” Cardellini said of her character and Bateman’s, “and it should be a little bit sexual and kinky, and you should give them their own version of it and it’s so pure and beautiful. I just love the idea of both things happening in the same space.”
“From sin to caring,” Bateman said.
