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Intimacy on Set

Screen Daily: Micheal Ward on ‘Empire Of Light’ nude scenes: “If Jude Law can do it, I can do it!”

13/12/2022

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When filming began in February this year, Ward and Colman’s differing processes dovetailed neatly. Ward “had done a lot of work to understand Stephen — I knew the text and was super-prepared”. Colman “is incredibly raw — we go to set and read it once or twice, and she just knows it. It’s electric.”

The production brought in intimacy co-ordinator Ita O’Brien (TV’s Sex Education) to guide the duo through several sex scenes. “It felt like a dance routine,” says Ward. “We would do counts — ‘and one, and two’. If you were getting too invested to the point where I’m becoming Micheal rather than Stephen, you just go back to the counts. It’s quite magical.”

This rhythm helped Colman overcome initial nerves about the scenes, which the actors again approached from differing perspectives that mirrored their characters’ emotions. “Olivia was so uncomfortable that I felt nervous for her,” remembers Ward, “so [the counts] got us to a place where we could tell the story in the most amazing way.” Conversely, Ward had few qualms about the scene where Stephen sprints naked onto an empty beach. “I’m there for the story,” he laughs. “I watched The Talented Mr. Ripley with Jude Law. He’s got an arse scene — if Jude Law can do it, I can do it mate!”

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Screen Daily: ‘Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power’: Sundance Review

22/1/2022

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BY FIONNUALA HALLIGAN
...

Audiences will hopefully never look at perspective, slow-mo, fragmented bodies or female faces presented in 2D in the same way again, thanks to Menkes’ two-decades-plus of research. She certainly proves that shot design is gendered. As her eloquent interviewee Amy Zierling notes: “It’s invisible, and you don’t notice the air.” 

Menkes moves beyond the predatory camera and the subject-object set-up, though. With her commentators  — who also include Eliza Hittman, Julie Dash, Laura Mulvey, the intimacy co-ordinator Ita O’Brien and Joey Soloway, amongst others, she talks about the implied violence hidden in these tropes. The up-the-bum shot, the slow-pan down the body, the whole idea of a beautiful unconscious woman — taken to an extreme, recalls Rosanna Arquette, when her dead character was embraced by the camera in a sexual manner in Scorsese’s After Hours. Dead women, silent women - as with Cathy Moriarty’s character in Raging Bull, who literally couldn’t be heard - women seen bent over from behind - these turn into women whose consent is immaterial. The ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ trope where Harrison Ford, for example, smacks a resisting Sean Young in Bladerunner and she’s suddenly aroused, as with Jessica Lange in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). It’s disempowerment at its essence and, as Menkes said, it worms its way into the collective consciousness through the global power of Hollywood. (Or, in other words, forms the “bedrock of the language of rape culture”.) 

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Screen Daily: Perspectives on 2020: Ita O’Brien on the new challenges for intimacy co-ordinators

21/12/2020

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BY NIKKI BAUGHAN

The UK’s Ita O’Brien has become one of the industry’s most in-demand intimacy co-ordinators, with credits that include Normal People, I May Destroy You, The Dig and Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel. She has spent six years developing best practices around scenes of intimacy, sexual content and nudity on stage and screen through her company Intimacy on Set, but it has been the rise of the #MeToo movement that has propelled her work into the spotlight. O’Brien is now working on Reed Morano’s adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power and Sarah Adina Smith’s Birds Of Paradise, both for Amazon Studios. 

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Screen Daily: Emmys spotlight: Daisy Edgar-Jones on catching the zeitgeist in ‘Normal People’

7/7/2020

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By Wendy Ide

​The 12-part series was divided between two directors: Lenny Abrahamson took the first six episodes and Hettie Macdonald helmed the second tranche. Edgar-Jones pays tribute to the harmony of approach brought by two filmmakers she describes as “actor directors”.

Perhaps equally important, however, given the number of sex scenes and the weight that was placed on the sexual dynamic as a means to explore the broader relationship, was the involvement of intimacy co-ordinator Ita O’Brien, whose input Edgar-Jones calls “invaluable”.

“I really cannot believe that’s a new thing,” she says. “I hope it becomes the norm. I know if I were ever to do a scene like that again, I wouldn’t do one without having somebody there to look after not just the actors, but also the directors and all the people who are on set. It’s important they don’t feel like they’re ever taking advantage of anyone or putting anyone out of their comfort zone.”

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