Welcome to Sex in Cinema Week, Consequence‘s deep dive into movies, the Hays Code, and what society labels taboo. Check back throughout the week for essays, interviews, and lists examining censorship of movie sex scenes and the creativity it inspired in filmmakers. Today, we look at the new practices put in place for sex scenes on film, since the days of #MeToo.
Here’s the way it used to be: A film production would get to a scene in which a character might enjoy an intimate moment alone in a bathtub, and everyone would be too embarrassed to talk about it. “Because there wasn’t a forum by which you could logistically sit down and just contemplate it creatively and artistically,” says pioneering intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien (Sex Education, Watchmen). “So the director would be going, ‘You’ve read the script and then you’ve seen there’s a masturbation scene in there…’ But you get to the day of filming and the poor actor’s going into the water going, ‘Oh, what do I do here?’ And there wasn’t a practitioner to support the director, so often, the director was absolutely scared themselves. Because there wasn’t a forum to talk about it professionally.”
Intimacy coordination changes that, a relatively recent addition to the production process that exploded in popularity soon after the fall of 2017. While the rise of intimacy coordinators on set is without question a reaction to the #MeToo movement, experts in this field like O’Brien and Intimacy Directors and Coordinators (IDC) Creative Director Alicia Rodis were already deeply versed in exploring the topic and developing guidelines for its practice, well before Harvey Weinstein kicked off a worldwide discussion about sex, abuse, and the workplace.
Every intimacy coordinator interviewed for this piece came to the position with different backgrounds, though many had worked in theater and/or stunt coordination beforehand. IDC CEO Jessica Steinrock’s first love was improv comedy, and her research as a graduate student, she says, “was looking at how do we create spontaneous dynamic comedy in a way that is consent-forward and prioritizes the agency of all of the folks that are participating in it. So consent and improv was really like my core.”
In addition, Steinrock’s husband is a stage combat professor, and “through him, I got to meet some really incredible artists, who were looking at how we create moments of intimacy with the same level of care and choreography that we create moments of fights.”
Intimacy coordination and stunt coordination actually have a fair amount in common, as Steinrock explains. “There’s a lot of roots to this work in stage combat. When you’re punching someone in the face on stage, you’re not actually punching each other in the face. It’s an illusion to make it look like a fist is coming in contact with a face. And we use similar techniques to make it look like someone’s hand is coming into contact with someone’s genitals.”
The intimacy coordinator’s job usually begins well before shooting starts, as they meet with the director and actors to discuss the scenes in question, and determine what kind of boundaries they want to set up. Everything from where hands might go to exactly how much nudity will be present gets discussed, with the specifics added to a nudity rider signed by the actors, removing any possibility of a surprise on the day of shooting.