The recent phenomenon of on-set “intimacy coordinators” has not been adopted by everyone. It really depends on the studio, directors, producers and/or actors involved.
If you’re unaware, Intimacy Coordinators review scripts, facilitate group discussions about the sex scenes and meet individually with the actors. It’s all about clarifying the personal boundaries one may have for any given scene. They, more or less, turn into directors for certain scenes.
There has been a very slight pushback on intimacy coordinators. Not many are willing to call them out, and for good reason. Some of the names who have come out against the protocol include Gaspar Noe, Mia Hansen-Løve and Toni Collette.
Hansen-Løve went as far as to call ICs the “virtue police.” Noe bluntly stated, “that doesn’t exist in France.” Whereas, Collette admits she tells them to “leave the set.”
Speaking to The Telegraph, Michael Douglas gave his opinion about intimacy coordinators, and he’s not a fan. In fact, he’s says they harm to the art of filmmaking, stifling the creative process by taking away control from directors.
It’s interesting with all the intimacy coordinators. It feels like executives taking control away from filmmakers […] Sex scenes are like fight scenes; it’s all choreographed. In my experience, you take responsibility as the man to make sure the woman is comfortable; you talk it through. You say, ‘OK, I’m going to touch you here if that’s all right.’ I’m sure there were people that overstepped their boundaries, but before, we seemed to take care of that ourselves […] But I talked to the ladies, [because] I did a few of those sex movies — sexual movies — and we joke about it now, what it would have been like to have an intimacy coordinator working with us…
Douglas starred in a handful of ‘90s erotic thrillers (“Disclosure,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Basic Instinct”) so he knows the territory.
It comes down to this: what’s helpful to one person might not always be helpful to the next. In the post-MeToo era, public discourse around consent has changed a lot of on-set behaviors. As film writer Eric Kohn noted last year, “everyone’s so focused about what they can or can’t ask people to do that they stop asking them to do much at all.”