Category: The Guardian

The Guardian: Top intimacy coach says too many TV bosses still do not value role

8/6/2021

By Mark Brown

Too many film and television bosses still do not understand the value of intimacy coordinators and hire them purely as a box-ticking exercise, one of the industry’s leading figures has said.

Ita O’Brien was celebrated on Sunday by the actor and writer Michaela Coel, who dedicated her best actress Bafta to the “essential” work she did on I May Destroy You. Coel spoke powerfully of the “internal devastation” she had felt working on shows that had no intimacy coordinator.

It was a description O’Brien was familiar with. “It is so fantastic that she put it like that because that is absolutely what happens,” O’Brien told the Guardian. “In every single workshop I do, everyone will have a story.”

After the Harvey Weinstein revelations and the #MeToo movement, demand for O’Brien’s services increased from 2018. But she said she had been hired for productions where the director did not want her involved.

“Really I was just a box-ticking exercise for the producers. I was told check in with the actors … and then do nothing,” she said. Was that still the case? “Yes, yes, yes … absolutely.”

O’Brien recalled one production where she asked for gender parity in the crew filming a sex scene, which otherwise would be almost all men. “I got told ‘don’t ask for that. What you’re doing is now impacting on the production adversely and we’ll have none of it.’ There have been many times I’ve walked away from sets and it has so been hard and I’m feeling: can I keep doing this?”

She said there had also been shows where the experience was a positive one, including Sex Education, It’s a Sin, Normal People and, of course, I May Destroy You, which was the standout show at Sunday’s Baftas.

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The Guardian: Baftas 2021: Michaela Coel dedicates win to intimacy coordinator

6/6/2021

Michaela Coel and her hit drama I May Destroy You won big at the 2021 television Baftas on Sunday – with Coel dedicating her acting award to the series’ intimacy coordinator.

Accepting awards for a show that dealt with sexual abuse and consent, Coel said film and television sets were vulnerable places for actors and crew members. Not to have intimacy experts was “thoughtless” and showed a “lack of mindfulness”, she added.

I May Destroy You was one of the cultural events of 2020, in any genre, described by the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan as “astonishing, beautiful, thrilling”. The BBC and HBO series was inspired by Coel’s own experience of sexual assault by strangers after her drink was spiked. It is about the aftermath of a rape and is often called a “a sexual consent drama” but it is also a story of fun, friendship and more.

Coel was named best actress and dedicated her Bafta to the series’ intimacy director, Ita O’Brien. “Thank you for your existence in our industry, for making the space safe, for creating physical, emotional and professional boundaries so that we can make work about exploitation, loss of respect, about abuse of power without being exploited or abused in the process.

“I know what it is like to shoot without an intimacy director. The messy, embarrassing feeling for the crew. The internal devastation for the actor. Your direction was essential to my show and I believe essential for every production company that wants to make work exploring themes of consent.”

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The Guardian: Olly Alexander on success, sanity and It's a Sin: 'All those hot guys. I loved it!'

11/1/2021

By Simon Hattenstone

He pays tribute to intimacy coordinator extraordinaire Ita O’Brien, who introduced the Intimacy on Set guidelines in 2017 and worked on Normal People as well as It’s a Sin. “Anything with sex in it, she’ll be involved. She’ll be on all fours at one point, saying: ‘Now I’m going to be like a cow and moo in ecstasy.’ She’s amazing, amazing, amazing.” And yes, he did start to enjoy the scenes.

Did he find them arousing? Now it’s my turn to blush and I apologise for the question. Did he start to enjoy it too much? “No, that’s what I want to know. What if someone gets a hard-on – how embarrassing would that be? Ita said: ‘It’s natural and normal for certain body parts to get excited and if you get an erection that’s absolutely fine, but it’s not appropriate for the workplace.’” He adds a caveat: “Depending on what kind of job you’re doing. And she said: ‘If that happens, you just take a time out. So you’re all there thinking, OK, how embarrassing – because you say time out and everybody knows it’s because you’ve got a hard-on. Hahahhaa!” Did he have to take a time out? “No!” Did anyone? “Not to my knowledge.”

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The Guardian: Paapa Essiedu: 'Michaela Coel captures the reality of lives that I recognise'

25/5/2020

By Claire Armitstead - "I May Destroy You"

For Essiedu, this means a deep dive into what masculinity means when its boundaries are broken, not by racist thugs or harassing police, but by demons unleashed by its own desires. “I’m into everything,” boasts Kwame on another casual date, minutes before he is reduced to pleading: “Not that.” The representation of the moment when good sex turns bad is so up-close and personal that I wonder if he had any doubts about taking on the role?

“I’ve done scenes before where we’ve had nothing to support us and it’s so stressful,” he admits. “But I didn’t have any qualms, mainly because of how sensitively it was handled – like we have an intimacy coordinator at all times. We spent a lot of time in preparation for those scenes.”

The intimacy co-ordinator was Ita O’Brien, who also worked on the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. For all that it is being hyped as a #MeToo drama, Essiedu rejects the idea that I May Destroy You is “pandering to a zeitgeisty type thing”. Obviously, he says, “it’s a series that confronts and challenges our current ideas around sex and consent and romance, and our responses to trauma as well. But a lot of it is inspired by things that have actually happened.” In 2018 Coel spoke out about being assaulted. “Michaela is jumping from a place of authenticity,” Essiedu continues. “She captures the reality of lives that I recognise.”

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The Guardian: Sex has as much meaning as words: how Normal People handles intimacy

6/5/2020

By Zoe Williams

The sex, though, was its own conundrum, televisually speaking, and much was made of the hiring of an intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien (she’s the best in the business, apparently – which comes across a bit droll, if you didn’t realise that was a business). How do you tell the story of two characters whose entire journey is sexual, without just making a soft-porn film? These two questions – how do you present a story so clear without telling it too simply? How do you put the sex in the centre, without making it the point? – are in fact the same question. I only realised that when I saw this quote of Rooney’s: “When I hear the phrase ‘sex scene’, I think about a dialogue scene.” There is no such thing as some sex that just happens, it is as freighted with meaning as words are. The characters are saying something important to one another, something that will propel them forward. If sitcom characters chat and characters in drama talk, then by extension, in the Rooney school, sitcom characters shag, and these characters, well, they do something other than shagging. I wouldn’t say “make love”, so let’s just say “fuck” and let its Anglo-Saxonness transmit the vitality of that. I found their first sex scene really moving, and not especially erotic. I wouldn’t write off anyone else finding it erotic – and there have been some complaints about the volume of sex scenes – but I think I’d defy anyone not to be moved by it.

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The Guardian: Sex Education creator Laurie Nunn: 'You can't make sex scenes flowery!'

27/4/2020

The show has an “intimacy coordinator” called Ita O’Brien, who choreographs more explicit scenes. “Nobody is going to be touched anywhere they’re not prepared for. Everyone can speak up in a very open and safe way. I think a lot of the actors have felt empowered by that. It’s made them feel they can be braver in those scenes, because they have that back-up.”

Despite how explicit the show can be, Nunn says she’s never had anyone tell her they were upset. “I think the opening scenes of season one and season two are quite graphic, so if it’s not for you, then you’re probably not going to get to the anal douching bit.” She’s laughing, but she knows that really isn’t what Sex Education is about. “At its heart, the show’s about communication and honesty. There’s a sweetness to it. I think you’d have to work quite hard to get really offended.”

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The Guardian: Sexy beats: How Normal People’s ‘intimacy coordinator’ works

25/4/2020

(Sian Cain)

Once on set, “Daisy, Paul and I would talk through where they could touch each other, where they could kiss each other – as an example, in the early scenes Daisy had to wear a wig, so she had a rule about Paul not running fingers through her hair,” O’Brien explains. “While that might sound banal, it is really important because an actor doesn’t want to have to worry about that while filming sex, they want to be relaxed.”

Then, when everyone is ready, time for a quick hug as an icebreaker – and filming can begin.

In interviews, Edgar-Jones and Mescal have raved about O’Brien. “She’s the go-to,” Mescal told the Observer, while Edgar-Jones called her “brilliant … it was her job to worry about how it would work and we just turned up, did the choreography and carried on”. But director Lenny Abrahamson has cheerfully admitted that he was anxious about working with O’Brien, “because I thought the most subtle and important moments would be between me and the actors.”

“But working with Ita, it was a lovely creative conversation and there was always a way in which they could say no. They were encouraged to talk about whether they felt OK or not. “It was never, ‘Will you do that?’” he told the Observer.

O’Brien laughs: “I didn’t know that Lenny was sceptical when we first met. But he knew very quickly that I wasn’t there to get between him and Daisy or Paul. I’m there to provide some professional structure that hasn’t been there before.”

Not all of her experiences are as happy as Normal People. She recalls one director shouting at his actors: “Give her a good rogering, harder, harder, harder!” (“I had to say, ‘Can we maybe pause and talk about penetration and the rhythm of intercourse?’” she said). And while demand for her skills is higher, O’Brien feels that she is often viewed as a tick box by producers and directors who want to be seen as observing best practice in the wake of #MeToo, but don’t want to provide it.

“This year, more than ever, I’ve worked for producers who don’t actually want me there, who say to me, ‘Come in, get our nudity waivers ready and then stand back and do nothing’,” she says. She describes one set, where an actor asked for help while performing her first ever oral sex scene. “The director refused her a rehearsal and I stepped in and the director said, ‘Well, you’re directing now.’ It’s absolutely awful and the poor actors are then working in this terrible atmosphere. I’m still encountering this and it feels like I’m on the frontline of a war.”

Rooney herself has likened sex scenes to just another form of dialogue; for O’Brien, the sex in Normal People “isn’t just there to show us sex – those scenes chart the delicacy, the beauty, the openness of this incredible, something-other relationship. It was crucial for me to honour Sally’s writing. There is nothing gratuitous. But there is also a lot of sex.”

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The Guardian: 'The stakes were really high': the stars bringing Sally Rooney's Normal People to TV

12/4/2020

But the representation of those love stories is inevitably different in a novel, which deals in words, and on film, where articulacy lies in the manipulation of the human body. “The sex was a big challenge and we took it really seriously from the beginning,” says Abrahamson. “What we would aim to show, but also literally how we would do the sex in a way that was positive, safe and healthy for everyone involved both in front of and behind the camera.”

Not least of the challenges was the issue of asymmetry – of both gender and status – which has cast such a shadow over the media world in the era of #MeToo. The theatre, film and TV director Hettie Macdonald is responsible for six of the episodes. “I wanted to make it a more gender-balanced crew right from the start,” says Abrahamson. “It’s often the case that crews are very male-dominated, especially in the camera department, and I’m beginning to see that there’s less and less reason for that.”

“But here’s the biggest thing for me,”he adds. “I’m in my 50s and as far as the young actors are concerned, I’m successful. My worry would be – because I’m squeamish about ever doing anything uncomfortable for them – that they would feel under pressure to do what I wanted, and my fear of that would stop me from asking.”

The breakthrough was the decision to hire the services of “intimacy co-ordinator” Ita O’Brien. “I was anxious to start with because I thought the most subtle and important moments would be between me and the actors,” admits Abrahamson. “But what’s brilliant is that she would come in and talk to the whole crew and production about simple things like not using euphemisms, about getting explicit consent every time you’re about to do something and finding a language to talk about lovemaking, and the shapes and moods of it, that is empowering for the people involved.”

“She’s the go-to,” agrees Mescal. “She’s brilliant,” says Edgar-Jones. “The sex scenes were a joy to us because it was her job to worry about how it would work and we just turned up, did the choreography and carried on. We just had to think about the emotional beats.”

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The Guardian: 'Everyone's heard the horror stories' – how to shoot an ethical sex scene

5/2/2020

Taylor found the challenges of directing Sex Education – the hit Netflix show in which a young cast often perform explicit scenes – more considerable. He brought intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien on board. “A big part of what she did was help to demystify and take the fear away,” he says. “So actors weren’t dreading performing a sex scene.”

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tHE gUARDIAN - Rules for screen sex scenes issued to British directors

21/11/2019

British film and TV directors have been issued with guidelines on simulated sex scenes and nudity, with industry figures saying they will help the UK catch up with the US and eradicate “grey areas” that leave actors vulnerable to exploitation.

Directors UK, the professional association for screen directors in Britain, issued the 96 guidelines, which are meant to create “clear and shared professional expectations” with the aim that they will become standard working practice within the industry.

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