It’s depressing to read the complaint that the Nicola Six production company filed against the actor Amber Heard, for breach of contract regarding her work on the film “London Fields,” an adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel, directed by Mathew Cullen. It’s the latest round in a series of disputes between the film’s producers and its cast and director that were made public last year. At that time, the Toronto Film Festival was preparing to show the version of the film that the company had delivered—a cut that was said to be drastically different from the one that Cullen had made and that the actors favored as well. Cullen sued the producers over their version of “London Fields,” Toronto cancelled the première of the film, and it remains unreleased.

Cullen claims that he and members of the crew went unpaid; the producers claim that Cullen missed deadlines and went over budget. Cullen claims that the producers wrongly altered the film; the producers claim that they, not he, had final cut. The producers charge that Heard, supporting Cullen, refused to do publicity for the film and refused to do needed voice-over recording for it. Yet none of this is the depressing part; the depressing part has to do with sex.

The Nicola Six company (which gets its name from the character in Amis’s novel that Heard portrays) is suing Heard, in part, for “conspiring with Cullen to make unauthorized, material changes to the shooting script.” Specifically, they contend that Heard signed a “nudity rider,” which acknowledged the sex scenes she’d be doing and also allowed her the right to approve them in post-production, and that, despite this agreement,

during principal photography, Heard and Cullen secretly made unauthorized changes to certain of the screenplay’s more provocative scenes including scenes containing nudity, without notifying Nicola Six or obtaining Nicola Six’s consent. By unilaterally changing the content of the screenplay, Heard interfered with Cullen’s director agreement and contractual relationship with Plaintiff.

As I’ve written before, I think that very few sex scenes—and even fewer scenes featuring the sort of exposure that’s described in the “London Fields” nudity rider—are ever of use in movies. Most sex scenes simply check boxes for viewers, providing visual confirmation that a relationship has been consummated; the pneumatic heaving and thrusting has no additional dramatic or emotional significance. And most of the sex scenes that provide mere box-checking could do without nudity—could be done with faces, hands, gestures, or other more inventive implications; the rest is pornography. For the producers of an ostensibly substantial movie to presume to sell it on the basis of Heard’s nudity is repellent, if not entirely surprising.

There’s an underlying notion at work, however, and it isn’t even a matter of sex; it’s a matter of art—the idea of producers treating a screenplay not like a springboard for directorial imagination but like a contract in itself. I haven’t seen the actual contract between Cullen and the producers; if it required him to film the events described in the screenplay, then the relationship between them can only have been distorted and doomed, if not to legal conflict, then to artistic failure.

Here’s an example involving not sex but violence. I wrote in The New Yorker a few weeks ago about one of Kenji Mizoguchi’s best films, “The 47 Ronin,” Parts 1 and 2, from 1941-42. Its climactic event is the revenge killing of a court official by the Asano clan’s forty-seven samurai of the title. Mizoguchi’s filming of that event is done with vast inspiration. It avoids all violence. Rather, Mizoguchi sets the scene among the women of the Asano household as they read of the killing from a scroll dropped at their doorstep. He then shows the ronin approaching the grave of the late Lord Asano (whose honor they were avenging) as their leader places the victim’s head there as an offering. The sublime cruelty of the scene is as noble and refined as it is quietly terrifying. Yet, as Ryan Fernandez writes, the director Akira Kurosawa complained that Mizoguchi “didn’t understand the Samurai emotion . . . , citing that 47 Ronin even lacked the vital final samurai battle scene.” It’s the difference between Kurosawa, a director of talent, and Mizoguchi, a director of genius.

I haven’t seen “London Fields” (only a few critics, who attended the Toronto press screening in advance of the cancelled première, have), so I can’t say whether Cullen is a director of genius or even of talent, but his unwillingness to film nude scenes that he no longer felt were justified is a mark at least of a brave defiance both of the producers’ prurience and of their perversion of the cinematic process. It’s even more repugnant that Heard was put in the position of having to agree to nudity in advance; I wish that the Screen Actors Guild would leap in and repudiate even the notion of a nudity rider. There are movies in which an actor’s nudity comes about as a result of the artistic process—even when it hasn’t been planned in advance, even in the absence of paperwork. That’s the spirit of freedom that distinguishes a good movie from a mere audiovisual product. If actors and directors are to be of any merit at all, the definitive act of filmmaking must take place not in the writing room or the boardroom but on the set. Whatever other conflicts may separate the artists from the producer, this one is fundamental, and can only foretell disaster.