As the filmmaker behind Nine 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and Indecent Proposal, director Adrian Lyne knows a thing or two about the erotic thriller genre. But after a two-decade absence from our screens – his last film was 2002’s Unfaithful – Lyne is now readying his return with his much-delayed Patricia Highsmith adaptation Deep Water. Originally set for release in 2020, and now finally coming to Amazon Prime Video in March, the film stars Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck as the Van Allens – a bored couple whose marriage becomes complicated when they start playing mind games with each other, and bodies begin piling up.
Having met while making Deep Water, de Armas and Affleck soon began dating in real life – though they’ve since parted ways. But Lyne recalls their chemistry right from the moment the pair first read lines together. “I tested [Ana] with Ben in my house. It’s more fun to do it that way, it feels a bit more real,” he tells Empire in the Moon Knight issue. “There was banter between them, [it was] flirtatious but angry.”
The film’s first trailer didn’t shy away from the ‘erotic’ part of erotic thriller – centred on a tense scene between Melinda (de Armas) and Vic (Affleck) in which she gets, er, hands on with her husband. But for Lyne, it’s all about the more relatable, human parts of the narrative – which, for the vast majority of relationships, includes depicting what happens between the sheets (or elsewhere). “I always find it difficult to detach the sex from the rest of it,” he says. “People endlessly ask about the fucking over the basin in Fatal Attraction. I just always like relationship pieces, things about you and me.”
Read Empire’s full Adrian Lyne interview in the Moon Knight issue of Empire, on sale Thursday 17 February – and available to pre-order online here. Deep Water comes to Amazon Prime Video on 18 March.