Press

Variety: ‘Normal People’ Creators, Actors Reveal Intimacy Process

26/8/2020

By Naman Ramachandran

Mescal and Edgar-Jones were part of the conversation from the very beginning in order for them to feel comfortable, Abrahamson said. As the intimate scenes were a central dimension of the story, the production worked closely with intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, who created a space where the participants were encouraged to be completely honest about a scene and speak out if they were uncomfortable.

“After the initial awkwardness of the nakedness, it became creatively satisfying,” Abrahamson said. “A lot of that awkwardness that would normally attend the entire process of shooting scenes like that in a conventional approach, a lot of that just went away.”

“The idea of shooting those scenes may be far more anxious than the actual shooting process from day to day,” said Mescal. “There’s an awkward 10 minutes when you’re like, okay, I have to be relatively naked in front of a group of strangers… from an actor’s perspective you’ve got to treat that the same way you would a scene where you’re speaking to each other.”

“Another element that I was proud that was part of the series was the equality in nudity between Paul and I, I think that’s really important,” said Edgar-Jones. “Also, if you’re trying to tell the truth about a relationship, you have to also include the truth of what that means in terms of intimacy.”

“Having a sense of why certain scenes are happening and what is being communicated meant that we could just approach them like we would approach any dialogue scene. It became about the story,” Edgar-Jones added.

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Harpers Bazaar: How I May Destroy You Navigates Consent and Trauma On-Screen

25/8/2020

BY ROSIE HUMPHREY

As trauma reverberates through these characters’ lives, it’s important that the actors portraying them are psychologically safe and supported. That’s why Ita O’Brien, a U.K.-based intimacy coordinator, was vital to the construction of these intimate moments, choreographing each move, or “beat” as O’Brien calls it, to create a seamless structure of intimacy and realism between the actors.

To ensure this realism is enacted safely, each beat is composed down to the placement of hands or a certain number of thrusts in order to protect the actors’ emotional and physical boundaries. As the architect of safe spaces on set, O’Brien worked closely with the artist well-being practitioner, Louise Platt, a qualified psychotherapist, who was on call to provide emotional and psychological support for the actors while they performed sensitive content.

This integrated approach of therapeutic support feels quite revolutionary, as Platt mentioned on Twitter and unfortunately is a practice that, until the Me Too movement, wasn’t always followed. The infamous sex scene in Blue Is the Warmest Colour is a prominent example where actors found a sequence distressing to perform; leads Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux described the 10 grueling days of filming as “horrible” and “really suffering.” After Hollywood's awakening, O’Brien pioneered the role of intimacy coordinator and developed the Intimacy on Set guidelines to ensure that scenes of nudity, intimacy, and simulated sex are performed safely without compromising the actors’ personal boundaries.

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Huffington Post: 'A True Artist': How The Unstoppable Michaela Coel Became The Most Exciting Talent In TV - By Those Who Know Her

17/8/2020

By Adam Bloodworth

“She’s there as a colleague, as a mate, and then she’s there jumping into the role of actor for a scene,” reflects Ita O’Brien, intimacy coordinator who worked with Michaela Coel on I May Destroy You. “And on days where she’s finished her scene she’s into her own clothes and bang, into co-director mode… And then, ‘oh sorry, I can’t have this conversation, I’ve got to go and have a production meeting’: into executive producer mode.”

This is only the briefest glimpse into what life was like for Michaela Coel during the shoot for I May Destroy You, the BBC drama which set a new precedent for how consent and sexual assault - moreover, just how lives in general - can be authentically portrayed on screen.

Soon after, when Coel appeared on the front page of New York Magazine captioned ‘Michaela The Destroyer,’ her small but robust international fanbase felt validated. I May Destroy You has seen Coel rise to a level of fame and prominence only those closest to her could have quietly predicted. Not that anyone would have listened.

“What’s brilliant about her is she’s calling the industry out: going ‘hold on a minute, you’re not really considering us,’” continues O’Brien of Coel. “I do feel it is groundbreaking. How Michaela writes, what she has written about, and also the fact that she’s a woman writer.

Take the scene in episode three of I May Destroy You (mild spoiler alert) where Coel’s character Arabella is hooking up with an Italian man named Biagio, who notices a blood clot in her period discharge during sex.

“The paraphernalia of a menstruation isn’t something that’s out there,” says O’Brien, who notes that half the population spend roughly half their lives engaged in a menstrual cycle, yet when has the reality of that been shown on TV before Coel?

“It’s so gratifying being part of something that is helping people have that awareness,” continues O’Brien. “Plus, when else have you seen a woman of colour with an Asian man?”

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Creative Review: HOW I WORK: INTIMACY COORDINATOR ITA O’BRIEN

12/8/2020

The intimacy coordinator has worked on TV shows including Sex Education, Normal People and I May Destroy You to help actors feel empowered in intimate scenes on screen. She talks about her work and why brands and advertisers need to take notice of it too

By Rebecca Fulleylove

Ita O’Brien is an intimacy coordinator and movement director for film, television and theatre. Previously a dancer and actor herself, she’s channelled this experience into creating safe, considered and consensual environments when it comes to working with intimacy, and in scenes with sexual content and nudity in film, TV and theatre.

O’Brien has pioneered the role of intimacy coordinator and she has spent the last six years developing the Intimacy on Set Guidelines, a best practice document that covers everything from the audition process to when the actors are on set. She also founded Intimacy on Set, a service that provides intimacy coordinators, consultancy, advocacy and training for TV, film and theatre sets.

The role of an intimacy coordinator has been put in the spotlight more recently because of O’Brien’s groundbreaking work on smash hit TV shows including Sex Education, Normal People and I May Destroy You, all of which tackle sensitive subjects around sex, intimacy and relationships. The beauty in O’Brien’s work is her ability to lay out best practice processes to ensure all parties feel safe and protected, all the while ensuring these intimate portrayals still feel authentic, engaging and a key part of the storytelling.

Here, O’Brien explains what the role of an intimacy coordinator actually involves, the challenges she’s faced and why anyone involved in portraying sex or relationships to the masses has a responsibility to do it from a position of “equality, safety and care”.

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The Cut: How to Build A Sex Scene

30/7/2020

By Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz

Between Normal People and I May Destroy You, we get good sex, bad sex, and everything in between, with the latter focusing on sexual assault and non-consent. Ostensibly, these two shows are very different outside of this emphasis on intimate content, which is perhaps why they also find common ground in a shared production member: British intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien.

Intimacy coordinators play a new role in the entertainment industry; as the name implies, they oversee and help direct intimate scenes. When used correctly, they’re brought in early in the filmmaking process, while the scene in question is still on the storyboard. O’Brien describes her job as akin to the stunt coordinators’, which, if you’ve ever watched a Fast & Furious film, is requisite. “They listen to the director, read the script, find out what the storytelling is for that stunt, what the risks are and then teach their actors or stunt doubles techniques in order to make that stunt safe. They put in place things like crash mats and then choreograph the whole thing really clearly,” she said when we spoke over Zoom last week. “Just as a stunt coordinator does, we’re putting in our ‘crash mats.’”

Hiring an on-set intimacy coordinator became more common in the wake of the Me Too movement, but O’Brien had been working closely on sex scenes for years before. She used to work as a movement director — she created a set of guidelines and best practices around scenes with sex and nudity in 2014 — and in 2017, she was hired in that specific capacity for the first time.

The Cut spoke with O’Brien about her job, the film industry’s relationship to intimate content today, and how she built sex scenes for two shows that explore completely different kinds of intimate encounters.

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Directors Notes: How Lenny Abrahamson Transformed Sally Rooney’s Best Selling Novel Into the Record-Breaking TV Event of the Year

27/7/2020

Another great strength of the series is that the sex feels authentic and engaging but not at all exploitative. You were initially concerned that working with an intimacy coordinator might be a barrier between you and the actors, how did that role integrate into and assist the production?

Yeah, I was concerned about that. I had never heard of that role so I thought, what is this and are we sure we need it? There have been great sex scenes shot in the history of film, we do lots of difficult things so do we really need a special role there. But actually, when I met Ita O’Brien my feelings changed. What she’s trying to do is to take away all of this fumbly embarrassing conversation and provide a really open forum where you can all talk like grown ups. What are the images that we’re trying to create and how do we go about doing it involving everybody in a way that makes them feel heard. Ita’s very practical as well. She has all these garments and padding and she’s very good at devising how to support the actors’ body weight in ways that make it look like they’re in insanely close proximity but in reality not so much. She also provides a forum for us to talk. For example, for me to be able to say, “Oh I think this would be good”, without the actors feeling any pressure to say, “Oh yes of course. I’d love to do that.”

If you’re an established filmmaker, it’s understandable if young actors feel like they want to please and say “yes of course”, and do something because I think it’s right, not because they feel right about it. It would make me anxious to ask if I felt they were going to say yes just because they didn’t want to disappoint me. Ita’s brilliant, she has a way of talking about this stuff which makes it really clear to the actors that they are central to this and that we’re all working in a collegiate way around what they’re comfortable with. And so I never felt that there was ever any pressure which was a great thing to be able to know.

Did Ita’s presence and the back and forth between the four of you lead to the restaging of any of the planned sex scenes?

Well I tend to be pretty flexible, at least around script anyway, so I move things to different locations, I change dialogue. I do all sorts of things all the way through production including on the day. So actually that fitted with me really well because Ita would suggest that something might fit better with the meaning of the scene as she’s very involved in discussing character as well. We talked about every intimate scene in advance and if it ever felt like, it would be better to do this here or this doesn’t feel like a scene that should happen in this way as written let’s do it that way, we would always make that change.

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Who What Where: Unraveling Fashion, Beauty, and Trauma in I May Destroy You

20/7/2020

by DREW ELOVITZ

Not only was the BBC happy for Coel to write the entire series, but it also wanted her to star in it, direct it, executive-produce it, and maintain ownership rights over the original content. “This was a dream. … They really gave me what I needed, which is still quite hard to fathom,” she says, smiling. In addition to having more agency behind the camera, Coel advocated for both a full-time therapist on retainer for cast and crew members as well as an intimacy director, Ita O’Brien, to create a safe and supportive atmosphere on set.

I noticed O’Brien’s name in the credits, prompting me to ask Coel if she had ever worked with an intimacy director before. She hadn’t, and neither had Weruche Opia, the actress who plays Terry, Arabella’s best friend. “I’ve seen how complex things can get when you don’t have an intimacy director,” Coel explains. After first learning about O’Brien from an article in The Guardian, both Coel and her co–executive producer, Phil Clarke, felt that this off-screen role would be an essential element of the show, particularly given its subject matter. “It’s not just sexual intimacy,” Coel explains, “Some of it is sex without consent.”

O’Brien, who also worked on Hulu’s Normal People, played a significant part in empowering actors on set. This included Opia, who opted to use a body double for her character’s sex scene. “[O’Brien] was very inclusive,” recalls Opia in a separate Zoom interview. “She showed me what Terry would be doing as my character and made sure I was comfortable with what was being shown. I felt respected, and I felt heard,” Opia affirms, concluding, “I think it’s essential in filming scenes that are so intimate and vulnerable. I think it’s a brilliant idea and should be an industry standard.” Coel concurs, noting that it was important to her to create an environment in which her colleagues were supported. “You may be empowered [by O’Brien] to do the scene, but you’re also empowered to say I don’t actually want to do this,” she explains. “I love the fact that [Opia] felt she could express that. … To have that happen was incredible.”

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Tyla: Why The Period Scene In 'I May Destroy You' Was So Important

17/7/2020

By JOANNA FREEDMAN

Creating a scene so viscerally relatable to half of the UK's population, and showing it authentically, is no mean feat.

Of course, it's down to Michaela's writing, first and foremost; then there's the props department, the actors and the production team. But the one woman tying all of those departments together was the show's intimacy co-ordinator, Ita O'Brien.

Intimacy co-ordinators are a pretty new phenomenon, only emerging in TV and film in the wake of #MeToo, with a long way to go before their use is standardised.

But their work couldn't be more essential; not only ensuring the safety and wellbeing of the actors, but choreographing the sex scenes down to every fine detail, and ensuring that every tryst looks as real and honest as possible on screen.

During the creation of I May Destroy You, Ita worked with the cast in rehearsals where they'd discuss each scene moment by moment, ensuring "every touch had intention".

And, as she tells Tyla, it's for this exact reason that scenes like the period sex ring so true.

"With I May Destroy You, it was amazing having Michaela there [on set]," Ita tells Tyla. "Because she's seeing it play out detail for detail and we were discussing everything. I'd be like, that's amazing - why is that not happening here?'

"And she'd reply: 'Oh it felt too much'. We always had that dovetailing back and forth."

In the past, on-screen depictions of periods have warily cowered away from this very notion of being 'too much' - after all, it wasn't only recently that sanitary commercials stopped using blue liquid instead of red on screen.

And when films did dare to show blood, it would be used as a somewhat icky or shameful plot device - like the shower scene in Carrie, or when a horrified Emmeline thinks she's bleeding in Blue Lagoon, only to discover its just her time of the month.

But, Ita explains, I May Destroy You does quite the opposite, relishing in its own realism and showing us Arabella's blood so matter-or-factly we're left wondering why any TV producer had ever raised an eyebrow at such moments in the past.

"Isn't it incredible that half of the population spend 480 weeks of their lives in menstruation?" Ita says. "And yet think about how little we see it."

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Syfy: BRAVE NEW WORLD SHOWRUNNER: ALDOUS HUXLEY 'WOULDN'T BE VERY SURPRISED' BY THE CHANGES

17/7/2020

By James Grebey

One thing that didn’t change from the book? The sex. New London is a promiscuous society, something that Wiener says was always going to be part of the show, even when it was being developed for network TV rather than Peacock, which, as a streaming service, can show more than viewers might otherwise see while channel-surfing.

“I think [executives] realized there was no way to adequately serve the idea of New London without being able to show how New Londoners achieve pleasure and how they spend their time and how their attitudes in terms of modesty and sexuality are different than us,” Wiener says. But, in perhaps another way of showing how our culture has evolved, behind-the-scenes, he stresses that the series’ intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien, was essential to bringing New London to the screen safely, respectfully, and consensually.

“She empowered everybody and everyone felt really secure, and it kind of demystified [the sex and nude scenes] in a way that allowed everybody to kind of be free in the way that New Londoners would be,” Wiener says, also complimenting his actors for being “brave enough to go there.”

All of this results in a version of Brave New World that feels both of-the-moment and indebted to its trailblazing, nearly century-old book. And, before you ask, Wiener is aware of the irony that, ultimately, Brave New World, a work about a populace who have been made complacent with titillating pleasure and entertainment, is now yet another new series on yet another streaming service.

“We don't expect that irony to be lost on the audience either,” Wiener says with a laugh. He actually leaned into it. The fake commercials for The Savage Lands and new varieties of Soma were intended to blend seamlessly with real commercials, back when Brave New World was being developed for ad-supported TV.

“On some level, we are part of what Huxley was concerned about,” Wiener says. “At the same time, I hope ultimately that awareness and that intentional irony allows people to ask the questions that I think Huxley would want them to ask.”

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TV Insider: 'Brave New World' Takes a Dark Turn

17/7/2020

By Martin Holmes

Let's start with that sex scene, shall we? Actually, let's talk about Brave New World's obsession with sex, nudity, and orgies in general. Do they serve a thematic purpose or are they merely cheap titillation? Honestly, it's probably a bit of both. But it's not as if any of this is widely off-book from Aldous Huxley's version, which was full of frivolous fornication. What should be noted is how the show worked with intimacy coordinators Ita O'Brien (who also consulted on I May Destroy You and Normal People) and Kate Lush. I think this goes a long way in giving the actors agency in scenes which can be rather exposing and uncomfortable.

"Kate and Ita gave our actors such confidence, command and ownership of the experience of being vulnerable," showrunner David Weiner told Drama Quarterly. "You're exposed, and they just embraced it." You can definitely tell how much it helped with Lenina's (Jessica Brown Findlay) sex scenes. Lenina's character remains present in these vulnerable moments. She's not just a naked body thrown in for the raunchy thrill of it all. You're still emotionally connected to her and her reactions to what is happening in the moment.

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