The Brown Bunny (2003)
Trivia
The oral sex scene was filmed using remote cameras with only Vincent Gallo and Chloë Sevigny in the room.
Roger Ebert called the film "the worst in the history of Cannes." He posted on his website "The audience was loud and scornful in its dislike for the movie; hundreds walked out, and many of those who remained only stayed because they wanted to boo." Vincent Gallo responded that Ebert was a "fat pig with the physique of a slave trader." Ebert paraphrased a remark of Winston Churchill and responded that "Although I am fat, one day I will be thin, but Mr. Gallo will still have been the director of 'The Brown Bunny.'" Gallo then put a hex on Ebert's colon, to which Ebert responded that "even my colonoscopy was more entertaining than his film." (It should be noted that the version screened at Cannes was much longer than the final version.)
Chloë Sevigny claimed in interviews that the fellatio scene was not simulated. She said "It was tough, the toughest thing I've ever done, but Vincent was very sensitive to my needs, very gentle. . . . And we'd been intimate in the past."
The opening scene of Gallo driving was originally almost 20 minutes of him just driving until it was cut down because it was too long.
When Roger Ebert first viewed the movie in May 2003, he stated that he thought it was the worst movie in the history of the Cannes Film Festival. In August 2004, after watching an edited-down, shorted version of the film, Ebert gave it a thumbs up on his show, stating its editing changed the film.
Both Winona Ryder and Kirsten Dunst were already on the set, shooting scenes, when director/star Vincent Gallo fired them from the project. Gallo revealed this during a press conference in Cannes 2003. They were originally cast as Rose and Violet respectively.
On 31 July 2004, a billboard of the film was put up on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. It depicted the infamous fellatio scene, cut off and blurred. Because of limited (but vocal) community outcry, the billboard was taken down on 5 August.
In a 2017 interview, Chloe Sevigny said she accepted the role and agreed to perform unsimulated fellatio on Vincent Gallo to push back against her growing fame at the time. "I think it was a way of kind of reclaiming myself, which sounds odd, but after the celebrity and stuff, being like: 'No, that's not who I am, I'm this other thing, and this is what I stand for.' Or wanting to push the envelope." Sevigny explained that she didn't think the part really affected her career, but it may have affected some of her personal relationships. "I got my first studio film after that. I'd never been offered a studio film. It was Zodiac. I don't think it really hurt me, necessarily. I mean, it hurt me, in a lot of ways. Some relationships have had trouble with it. Of course, my mom and I don't talk about it."
Gallo had been infatuated with Winona Ryder since they worked together on The House of the Spirits (1993). He cast her in the role as Daisy but ultimately fired her due to on-set conflict.
The region-1 (North America) DVD version of the film contains about 304 shots in just under 92 minutes of action. This equates to an average shot length of approximately 17.9 seconds and a median shot length of approximately 18.6 seconds. This contrasts with most contemporary Hollywood films that usually contain a few thousand shots and average shot lengths of around 2 to 5 seconds.
The film was shot in 16 mm and then blown up in 35 mm, which gives the photography a typical "old-school grain".
For the film's promotion, a trailer was released featuring a split screen in the style of Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls, depicting on one side of the screen a single point-of-view-shot of a driver on a country road, and the other side various scenes from the end of the film featuring Chloë Sevigny. Both sides of the screen had no audio tracks attached, although the song "Milk and Honey" by folk singer Jackson C. Frank played over the trailer's duration.
