It’s funny that after the success of Precious, people seem to think of director Lee Daniels as Oprah’s innocuous little buddy, because the guy’s pretty twisted. Like, having-AIDs-and-two-retarded-babies-from-your-dad twisted. The first movie he directed, Shadowboxer, has a scene where Cuba Gooding Jr. is having fairly graphic sex with Helen Mirren, which is intercut with another scene of Gooding murdering a guy. Which is a little bit of background to bring us to today, when Daniels’ new movie, The Paperboy, premiered in Cannes. Apparently, this one has a scene that involves Nicole Kidman peeing on Zac Efron. Nice, that was always my favorite Nicholas Sparks novel.

The movie casts Kidman as a small-town vamp whose tacky sensuality proves mesmerising to the fresh-faced youth played by Efron.

When Efron’s character Jack is caught in a bank of jellyfish, Kidman shoves aside a gang of girls about to urinate on his stings — as received wisdom would dictate — and proceeds to do it herself.

“I’m not here to please everybody — I’m here to tell truth,” Daniels said when quizzed about the sequence, suggesting the buzz of amused disbelief it caused on the Internet was because people “have a fetish about it”.

“Jellyfish cure is by urinating on the skin, that is just the way Pete Dexter wrote the book, I executed the vision,” Daniels told AFP after a press screening of the film, which he based on a novel of the same name.

“He is frustrated because he can’t get his girlfriend, he wants this woman, he goes out to swim because he’s furious, he’s swimming off his frustration… and half way through he is attacked by jellyfish.”

Matthew McConaughey, who plays Jack’s crusading reporter brother Ward in the movie, chipped in a word, saying: “That is, practically, what you are supposed to do for a jellyfish sting!” [AFP]

Adds Vulture: “And yes, you get a close-up of the stream.”

Oh thank God McConaughey was there to put things in perspective. “Hey. Y’all should know: peein’ on Zac Efron is illegal. …But ah think ah see a lotta lawbreakers out here tonight.”

Here’s a couple excerpts from early reviews:

The instigator of it all is Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), a trashy blond of a certain age with a thing for felons; she announces that, after a long correspondence, she’s now engaged to Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack), the swamp rat due to be executed for the cop killing. Determined and sharp-witted behind her loud outfits and heavy eye makeup, Charlotte puts on quite a show when she accompanies Ward and Yardley to their first meeting with the crumpled, stringy-haired Hillary; the betrothed couple indulges in a heavy-breathing bout of mutual auto-eroticism at first sight. [HollywoodReporter]

A hypersexualized cartoon, Kidman outdoes even Cusack, hitting a career low with crude, villainous role involving consistently inane behavior that the movie asks of her. These include coaching an orgasm out of Cusack from across the room while the other characters watch in awe, a crass vignette matched only by the scene that finds her urinating on Efron to ameliorate jellyfish wounds when the two make a trip to the beach.  [Indiewire]

This sounds awesome. Definitely a shoo-in to win the Golden Lion.

[banner picture via Collider]