SCREEN AFRICA EXCLUSIVE:
Galvanised by the #MeToo movement, film and TV producers around the world have acknowledged the imperative to recruit experts when working with intimacy, simulated sex scenes and nudity.
In July, Sisters Working in Film and TV (SWIFT) invited Kate
Lush from Intimacy on Set in the UK
to run a workshop at the Durban International Film Festival (DIFF). Intimacy on Set was founded by intimacy
coordination pioneer, Ita O’Brien, who – with others – developed a set of best
practice guidelines.
Interviewed on BBC Radio 5 in June this year, O’Brien
described what her work involves: “My role on set is very much about sending out
my antenna and trying to listen to everybody – from producer, to director, to
actor. While the structure really helps to put in place a clear process that
allows you to choreograph a sex scene safely, it is absolutely, fundamentally,
about the whole industry having a process, just like you have if you have
somebody choreographing a dance or a stunt coordinator making the best fight
possible. So the intimacy coordinator is lifting the intimate content that has
fallen through the cracks before now because there hasn’t been an understanding
that actually we need a craft, we need a structure to allow the actor to bring
their craft of acting to the intimate content just like anything else, and to
allow the actor to have autonomy over their own body.”
Actor and movement director, Kate Lush, felt
manhandled on the sets of the UK low-budget horror scene, where actors in a rape
scene would be told by the director to just “go for it.” And when asked to train drama students to act
in intimate scenes found that directors contradicted what she taught. “Actors
would come back to me and say: ‘He stuck his tongue in my mouth, what am I
supposed to do?’ Or, ‘The director told me to take my clothes off and it wasn’t
in the audition.’”
In despair, Lush approached O’Brien and trained to become an
intimacy coordinator.
For film director and founder member of SWIFT, Sara Blecher, exposure
to the concept had such an impact that within weeks she was winging her way to
London to participate in O’Brien’s training.
“It was an extraordinary experience because this was the
first group of women from all over the world that she was training and I think
for all of us it felt that we were at the beginning of a very important moment
in history; that there was the world before intimacy coordination, where people
just do intimate scenes, and then
there is the world afterwards, where intimate scenes are understood in a
completely different paradigm.”
In South Africa, where women are leaving the industry because
they feel unsafe, intimacy coordinators could bring the change that is needed.
“If you have to do a sex scene with a director who has never
done a sex scene, with a crew that do not respect a closed set, for many, many,
many actresses, it’s so traumatic, they stop acting. When you sign up to act,
you don’t sign up to be a porn star, and in many cases, actresses are expected
to do porn or to expose their own personal, intimate sexuality, rather than
becoming the character they are playing. Intimacy coordination is a way of protecting
them,” Blecher said.
The potential for lasting psychological and emotional damage is
very real.
“There is an inherent risk in un-choreographed sex scenes; a risk of
trauma, and a risk of sexual harassment,” O’Brien says. “Any scenes involving fights
or stunts are discussed in advance and mapped out to avoid anyone sustaining
injury…It could be argued the emotional and physiological injury sustained in a
poorly directed sex scene could have much longer-lasting implications, and
cause much more hurt, than any physical injury.”
Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 film Last Tango in Paris came under renewed scrutiny with the #MeToo movement in 2016. In one
scene, Marlon Brando’s character, Paul, rapes actress Maria Schneider’s
character, Jeanne, using a stick of butter as lubricant. Schneider said the
scene wasn’t in the original script and Brando and Bertolucci told her about it
just before they began filming.
Bertolucci said: “I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an
actress. I wanted her to react humiliated.”
“Even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears….I
felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci,” Schneider, who
spent years battling addiction and attempted suicide several times, said. She
never acted nude again.
Angela Sithole, who stars in DIFF’s
opening night film, Knuckle City participated
in Lush’s workshop, together with Thembikile Komani, who plays Duke in the
film.
Sithole, who believes intimacy coordination should have
happened years ago, said: “I have had experiences where I was told at the last
minute that this is a sex scene and so go and figure yourselves out…
“I learnt so much from that workshop,” she said, “learned that
there is so much that needs to be taken into consideration before an intimate
scene happens. There needs to be rehearsals before an intimate scene, just like
there are rehearsals before a fight scene.
Before a fight scene, there is always a build-up, there is always a
rehearsal, there is always a demonstration, there are steps that take place
before you do a fight scene. In exactly the same way, there should be steps
that you take before you do an intimate scene.”
Actress Terry Pheto said: “The worst
thing that one can do, especially for a young actor – or for any actor – is to
just walk into the scene… you can’t just do your own thing.” An actor must be
adequately prepared and know where the camera is going to be and what the
camera angles are, “otherwise you are playing with emotions.”
Norman Maake, director of the film Love Lives Here, which contains several sex scenes, said he would
“embrace” the idea of intimacy coordinators in South Africa. Maake is very
conscious of protecting his actors. He does not allow crew to socialise with
actors on his set. “Some crew come from undisciplined sets and they bring bad
habits with them,” he said.
“For me preparation is everything. The actor first gets to
read the script and understand what the role of the character is demanding from
them and to question if that is something that they want to do… The idea is
always for us to reach our story goals. So that conversation in the
beginning is very important, because it tests the comfort of an actor; what
they have done before, what they are willing to do, what they are not willing
to do…I always insist that the two people who are going to do the sex scene
also form their own boundaries.
“In Love Lives Here,
that is how it was done. So that by the time you see it on screen, it looks like
the ideas we talked about. And I feel that why it also looks great is because
the actors were in control.”
Blecher will be joining forces with Kate Lush, who is
relocating to South Africa, to offer intimacy coordination in South Africa.
