The passages of Sade's work that are read in the movie are pastiche and not from his work at all. Doug wrote those passages in part because he didn't have rights to the translations, but he wrote these stories truly in the spirit of the Marquis, using the vocabulary that the translations have used. What's really interesting about that is that a lot of these words that were incendiary in their time now seem almost harmless and laughable, because they have this archaic quality. We went through all of that with Lenny Bruce. Now there's not a comedian in the world who doesn't stand up in a nightclub and use that word.
Children even use the word.
I don't think we soft-pedal anything. These stories are pretty extreme, but the way we're telling them makes them somewhat more humorous. And there's the story the Marquis tells through the walls to the other prisoners of ripping the prostitute's tongue out and cauterizing the wound with fire. That's in the nature of a Sadeian story. Where the film really becomes a sadistic, Sadeian tale is when the Marquis' tongue is being cut and turned against him.