Ratner Puts Personal Paraplegic Sex Encounter Into New Film

25 September 2009 6:31 PM, PDT | WENN | See recent WENN news »

Moviemaker Brett Ratner lost his virginity to a paraplegic dangling from a tree - and now he has turned the sexual encounter into a scene in his latest film.

The Rush Hour director reveals his odd short, as part of new movie New York I Love You, is based on a real episode during his youth in Miami, Florida.

But he had to tone down the sex scene in the movie - because producers couldn't stomach the idea of his lead actor, Anton Yelchin, making love to a tied-up paraplegic woman.

Ratner explains, "It's probably my most personal film. When I sent the original script, which is autobiographical, the producers would not let me film it because, in the original ending, she (the girl) is a cripple, and they have sex as she's hanging from a tree in Central Park.

"Everyone was freaking out over my short, so I changed it to where she wasn't a cripple, but an actress pretending to be a cripple."

In the disturbing scene, the girl, played by Olivia Thirlby, insists Ratner's character (Yelchin) makes love to her, while she is suspended from a tree.

The moviemaker relocated the scene to New York's Central Park and admits he had all kinds of problems shooting there.

He adds, "I had just two days to shoot the scene. I thought it would be easy because it was Central Park... I go into the park and I take the girl, and she weighs, like, 75 pounds and I hang her off the tree. The problem was that the law in Central Park states that you're not allowed to touch a tree if you're a film crew; you can't go near a tree.

"So they said, 'You can't do this, can you make it a pole?' I said, 'I can't, it has to be a tree.' They wouldn't even allow us to go on the grass. So, in the gravel part of the park, I put all this fake grass down and we had to bring in, believe it or not, our own tree that we flew in from upstate New York! We put that tree up and it was a nightmare because there were park rangers watching us making sure we weren't breaking the law. It was crazy."

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