Babygirl used a former stunt coordinator to choreograph its sex scenes

Intimacy coordinator discourse is perennial, but a year of pretty horny movies has certainly put the conversation back on the forefront. Babygirl is one of 2024’s most sensual movies, and writer-director Halina Reijn had help crafting the BDSM-flavored intimacy scenes from Lizzy Talbot, an intimacy coordinator who previously choreographed fight scenes. Talbot’s experience is particularly useful because in Reijn’s eyes, “A good intimacy coordinator is like a good stunt coordinator,” as she told Elle. 

In another conversation with W Magazine, Reijn elaborated, “You can’t do a fight without a stunt coordinator. Your actors will get hurt, and it will look lame on camera. It’s the same with sex scenes. It’s very, very useful to have someone who knows all the little tricks and makes everyone feel safe. Within the structure of a choreographed plan, the actors can let go and be totally free.” She added, “Funny enough, the days with intimacy scenes are often the most clear. There are still nerves, but everybody comes to set super prepared.”

Reijn says that having a background as an actor, “safety is my priority at all times” when she is in charge of her own sets as a director. (That extends beyond the actual sex scenes to the actors’ “emotional safety” of the rest of the film.) She herself has “experienced a lot of male directors sitting in a North Face jacket on a high chair while you’re crawling around on the floor,” she recalled. “I’ve always felt very unsafe and just embarrassed, to be honest with you. I felt like an open wound.”

With those memories in mind, she aspired to better conditions on Babygirl, including making sure the set itself—like the seedy motel that serves as the location for one of the characters’ first trysts—was clean. “Even though it looks dirty with stains on the carpet, I wanted everything to be clean and soft. Those are things people don’t think about. But how often I have crawled over floors in my acting career that were so dirty and gross…” she told Elle. Those scenes were also meticulously planned for lighting and sound so only the director of photography needed to be in the room while Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson acted. “That creates an intimacy. We choreographed it very, very clearly so that in the moment, they could let go and react to each other,” Reijn said. “That’s how you create electricity and risk in a very safe way.”

Reijn can still recall feeling “so much shame and awkwardness” performing intimate scenes—something she wouldn’t have had to experience if the people in charge of the sets were more proactive and took better care of their actors. “I was 16. I was still a virgin and I had to play in an episode of a TV show that I had sex with someone. I remember the male director just saying, ‘Okay, let’s go for it.’ That’s all he said. I didn’t even know what kind of movements belonged to that,” she reflected to Elle. “I wish we had [intimacy coordinators] before.”