40 Days and 40 Nights (2002)

40 Days and 40 Nights, a no sex comedy, is set in the hip and wild world of freewheeling singles in San Francisco. Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down) plays Matt Sullivan, a handsome, smart twenty-something who is trying to gain control of his life, which has spiraled out of control since his recent devastating break up. Suffering from a broken heart and a series of failed one-night stands, Matt seeks solace in sacrifice: a vow of abstinence for the 40 days of Lent. But for someone who's never been able to finish anything in his life, it's not going to be easy as he must fight off doubters and resist the seductive world around him.

The idea for a sex comedy based on abstinence came straight from the pages of the screenwriter's diary. "40 Days and 40 Nights is a semi-autobiographical story about a young woman who broke my heart," Rob Perez says of his first original screenplay. "I kept a journal during the period and didn't do anything with it. But I saw a few films in a row that sort of reminded me that cinema just isn't sexy anymore. With this story. you can have a lot of fun because there's a real sort of obstacle," Perez states.

Finding a director for the comedy was not a challenge. Michael Lehamann, director of such memorable comedies as The Truth About Cats & Dogs, Airheads, and Heathers. loved the concept. "[Producer] Michael London, an old friend of mine, called me one day and said that he had gotten a pitch from a young writer for a movie idea that he thought I would really relate to," director Michael Lehmann recalls. "After he described the story, I got very excited. It's truly a unique comedy."

Lehmann was particularly compelled by the freshness of the concept. "This movie is not a sex comedy as much as it's an abstinence comedy, and nobody's ever seen that," Lehrnann explains. "Nobody's ever really had the chance to have fun with the idea of what happens when you give it up." The result, ironically enough, is a very sexy film.

Griffin Dunne, who portrays Matt's sexually challenged boss, Jerry explains, "It's very youthful in feel, yet it's an adult comedy. Everybody in this movie's extremely horny, and they think and talk about sex all the time. I don't think that changes, from the time you hit puberty to the time you're on your deathbed. This is a very kind of intensified exaggeration of that phenomenon."

The younger stars concur. "If you abstain from sex," muses Paulo Costanzo, the young actor who audiences loved in Road Trip and co-stars as Matt' s roommate Ryan, "it suddenly dominates your life, to the point where you have to do it. That's what I've experienced when I've made a decision to abstain for a while. I can tell you this: forty days and forty nights would drive you insane."

Lehrnann sought to capture that insanity by heightening the sexual imagery that is all around us, and for a guy desperate to not think about sex, this becomes a serious problem. "Sex is so much a part of our psyche and how we view the world and relate to each other," Lehrnann explains. "One of the aspects of Rob Perez's original concept was that after a certain number of days of abstinence, all the simple objects in Matt's life become eroticised. We took it a few steps further and created sequences that have huge fantasy elements to them. It's ironic and funny that sex comes back to him in its worst forms as well as its best."

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