The “sacredness of the set”, an intimacy coordinator and “sharing stories” helped shape the sex scenes in Halina Reijn’s Venice title Babygirl, according to cast members Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson.
“I’m a huge believer still in the sacredness of the set or the actors’ space and it never being violated,” said Kidman, speaking at the press conference for the Competition film. “It’s ours, it’s the bubble, and then there’s the world outside.”
Babygirl stars Kidman as a powerful CEO of a technology firm, who begins a passionate affair with a young intern, played by 2017 Screen Star of Tomorrow Harris Dickinson.
Responding to a question from Screen about how the pair reached a point of comfort with their sex scenes, Kidman said they met properly for the first time over Zoom, before working together in “a little rehearsal space” in New York. “We sat in a room for six hours with Halina and we just talked,” said Kidman. “We had not a lot of time to make the film, that’s why we needed to rehearse.”
“We sat and we went through things, and we just shared stories. A lot of it was talking about ourselves, which is a really great way for actors to come together because you share things.”
Reijn’s experience as an actress was a bonus. “Because Halina is an actress herself, she’d be throwing herself around the round playing all the roles,” said Kidman. “That was fascinating, I’d never experienced that before. She can play every role in the film and very well.”
“That is going to be the sequel,” quipped Kidman.
Intimacy coordinator
Dickinson credited intimacy coordinator Lizzy Talbot with creating the comfortable environment. “She was important for the film,” said the actor, “and broke the unnecessary barrier and conversation around what you have to do. Ultimately it’s choreography; when you get into the nitty-gritty of those kind of scenes, you have to be very precise with it and she’s very good at getting straight into it on a pragmatic basis.
“That helped me – it’s always nerve-wracking constructing a scene anyway, then you add something intimate to it, and it’s very vulnerable.”
“I knew Halina wasn’t going to exploit me,” said Kidman of her decision to take on a role with significant sex scenes. “It’s the story I wanted to be part of, that I wanted to tell. Every part of me was committed to that. There was enormous caretaking by all of us, we were all very gentle with each other and helped each other. Harris, Antonio [Banderas, who plays Kidman’s husband], Sophie… It felt very authentic, protective and real.”
Responding to a question about how her film differs from the erotic thrillers of the 1990s in which women were frequently punished for their sexual freedom, Reijn said, “We all have a beast inside of us. For women, we have not gotten a lot of space to explore this. I don’t want any of my characters to be punished, I just want them to be. That’s when we can really connect to them and feel less alone.”
Dickinson said his character “represents the specificity to the confusion within a young man of now. There is a general confusion about how to conduct yourself, and within sex, and the conversation around what that means. Halina was always ready to dissect and challenge that, and challenge the nuance of the behaviour. That opened up a whole new world of the film for me.”
Banderas said the film is an exception to our current “world of politically-correct established self-censorship with artists.”
“I used to come to these types of festivals, in Venice, Berlin, Cannes, with movies that nowadays it would be impossible to do – they would be very highly criticised or in the territory of politically incorrect,” said the actor. “When I read the [Babygirl] script, I found somebody who is thinking out of the box. The strength and courageous mind to put on the screen the things we all think. We are prisoners of our own instincts. There is nothing democratic about nature. We didn’t ask to be born, to be human.”
A24 produced the film and will release it in the US, with Entertainment Film Distributors handling UK-Ireland distribution.
Babygirl has its world premiere on the Lido in Venice this evening (August 30).
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