A funny thing happened to Brett Ratner on the way to reviving Smell-o-Vision for a generation deprived of the aromatic arts: He tried filming Anton Yelchin and Olivia Thirlby fucking in a tree. In Central Park! Never one to do anything the easy way, Ratner bravely faced down layers of Gotham bureaucracy in the pursuit of his six-minute segment of the forthcoming omnibus film New York, I Love You:

“You can do what you want in Central Park, unless you’re doing it for a film,” Ratner tells us. “Then, you can’t touch anything. Olivia weighs about 80 pounds, but we weren’t allowed to have her hanging from a tree. We had to buy a dead tree from a prop house and bring it to Central Park. We also couldn’t walk on the grass, so we had to get a crane to stand the tree up on concrete, then put grass and mulch around it, so it looked real. … It was insane.”

It’s like Ratner’s own little tormented Herzog film; Fitzcarratner, perhaps, in which the embattled fauxteur, six minutes from “one of the most talked-about segments in the anthology,” quits grab-assing extras long enough to guide a small army of crew members and a dead-tree-wielding crane inch-by-inch through the treacherous trails of Central Park. “No, no, no, Anton, not like that” he says before shooing the young actor away from his limb-dangling waif and closing in with his sweaty mitts. “Like… this. Hold still, Olivia.” Some guys will do anything for their art.









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