Halina Reijn on Using Intimacy Coordinators for ‘Babygirl' Sex Scenes

Director Halina Reijn emphasized the importance of intimacy coordinators in filmmaking.

In a new interview with IndieWire, the 49-year-old recalled her past as an actress filming intimate scenes without clear choreography or respect for boundaries.

“I’ve been an actress, so I’ve experienced a lot of men sitting in high chairs with North Face jackets, eating pizzas while I was crawling around like a turtle on my back. And I hated that feeling,” Reijn said.

She continued, “I thought, ‘What the fuck are you doing in that chair?’ I would feel, sometimes, the enjoyment of that power, and them saying — this is all before #MeToo — ‘just try something,’ where there wasn’t [anything] even on paper or in the choreography, nothing. What’s so scary about that is you don’t know what the boundaries of your scene partner are… it’s incredibly traumatizing.”

For her directorial work on Babygirl starring Nicole Kidman, 57, and Harris Dickinson, 28, Reijn collaborated with intimacy coordinator veteran Lizzy Talbot to help facilitate some of the film’s sex scenes.

“I’m obsessed with intimacy coordinators. I’m in love with them, not only on set but what they can do with your writing,” Reijn added. “If you use them in the right way, they are just as useful as a stunt coordinator and just as important. I wish I had one as an actress, but unfortunately, they were nowhere to be seen.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Reijn said that she will act out a sex scene for her cast members upon a request “so they can see it, and they can see my body doing it, and then they get reassured because they can actually look at it.”

Reijn’s emphasis on intimacy coordinators comes after Anora star Mikey Madison told Pamela Anderson that she opted to not use one during filming. During a recent episode of Variety’s Actors on Actors series, Madison explained to Anderson that she and her Anora co-star Mark Eidelstein were offered by director Sean Baker to bring on an intimacy coordinator.

“We decided that it would be best just to keep it small with us,” said Madison, who plays a sex worker in the film. “We were able to just really streamline it, shoot it super quickly … They're less sex scenes, more sex shots, that's what Sean likes to say. I think there's a lot of humor involved in them as well and so it was a very positive experience for me.”

Madison’s comments were critiqued by intimacy coordinators such as Lauren Kiele DeLeon who told Variety, “We’re really only hearing from the two lead actors, the director and the producer. We’re hearing from the people who have the most power on this set, but they can’t speak for how every extra felt on the film.”

“These actors felt comfortable with their director — that’s great,” she added. “But I think we leave out a lot of other people when we focus on the people who have the most power. Throughout history, we’ve had cameramen who have to sit there, silently, and literally record assault, and not feel that they could say anything. We are in an industry of people who are trained to just say ‘yes’ and not think about anything further. That’s a hard thing to rewire.”