Cooper Hoffman (the late Phillip Seymour’s son) had never shot a sex scene before appearing in the erotic thriller I Want Your Sex, Gregg Araki’s comeback (first decent film in decades)!

When he arrived on the set, he found himself surrounded by ball gags, stilettos, whips, chains, dildos and strap-ons.

“Even if you’re nervous to do it, you’re gonna do it,” Hoffman said at the Los Angeles premiere. “Because there’s no reason to not do anything in this life just because you’re scared.”

Intimacy coordinator Yehuda Duenyas likens the job to a choreographer or stunt coordinator. “If someone is going to get their head blown off, people are like, ‘Go grab the goo gun, get the exploding head with the squibs in it, press the button and boom.’ No one really bats an eye about violence,” he says. “But when it comes to intimacy, everyone gets squishy and weird.”

“There are so many things to look after with intimacy scenes,” he continues. “It’s the same way that, with a stunt, you’re not seeing the padding or fake hits. It just looks real, but you know there’s lot of movie magic behind the scenes.”

“He might have been terrified, but it wasn’t. It was, ‘I’m terrified, and I do want to do this,’” Duenyas says of Hoffman. “He was more like, ‘Yeah, it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done. Let’s do it.’”

Duenyas talks about how he prepared Wilde and Hoffman for their intense on-screen moments, the challenging scenes to shoot and the film’s message on sex and experimentation:

High-intensity montages

With those montages, we had moments where we would say, “Okay, I’m hitting you this hard. What is that on a scale of one to 10?” Cooper would say, “That’s a zero.” She’d say, “Really?” Then she would go harder, and he’d say, “Okay, that’s a two. That’s a three. That’s a five.”

Olivia realized, “I can hit you really hard, and it’s only registering as seven or  eight.” We had a bunch of little things like that so they could, number one, have a language for communicating about the physicality and, number two, feel like they could talk about what was happening while also making it look good.

Olivia came onto the set with experience doing nude scenes

If you’ve ever gone skydiving, you might be terrified, but you really want to go skydiving. You’re there to do it. Or, if you’ve ever jumped off a cliff into water or stood on a high diving board, even though you’re scared. He might have been terrified, but it wasn’t, “I’m terrified, I don’t want to do this.” It was, “I’m terrified, and I do want to do this.”

“This is a no for me. This is a hard boundary, but I’m involved in this thing and I already said yes, so what am I going to do?” Are they biting their nails or is it, “I’m fucking terrified. Let’s do this really well.”

Gay Directors, Gay Films? By Emanuel Levy (Columbia University Press).

That was Cooper’s stance. If you’ve ever talked to him, he’s super cool and very together. He was more like, “Yeah, yeah, it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done. Let’s do it.” It was very matter-of-fact. He approaches everything by diving headfirst into it in a beautiful way. He’s an incredible performer.

Dom-sub type of sex scenes

In terms of the way we approach intimacy coordination as a craft, it’s not that different. Olivia had also done a lot of research. Everyone brought what they knew and the type of story they wanted to tell.

In this film, we’re dealing with specific, blurry, complicated power dynamics. The story shows up in their relationship, their work lives, their sexual lives. It was fun finding their intimacy together.

Every intimate scene hasa different type of character. Is it different? BDSM and these kinds of lifestyle scenes, if you want to call them that, are different from a “Heated Rivalry” scene. It’s a different type of intimacy, but we approach it like we would approach anything else.

From intensity perspective, that scene required a lot. It wasn’t, “Oh my God, this is so hard.” It was a puzzle to put together in terms of the traffic patterns, the handcuffing and how to get out of the handcuffs quickly. Are we fiddling with keys, or are we just getting out of them? There are a lot of little details. Which details are you going to skip for the sake of the story, and which details are you going to keep in to maintain the flavor and the vibe of the story?

Gay Directors, Gay Films? By Emanuel Levy (Columbia University Press, August 2015).

Gregg wants people to argue about it and say, “Well, I thought it was this,” or, “I thought it was that,” or, “I think that’s bullshit,” or, “I think that’s true.” He wants those conversations.

I learned about intimacy through watching Gregg Araki films as a young person. I feel like we owe him for his contribution to intimacy in cinema. He has contributed so much to the film canon. Where would we be without those pieces he has made and the work he has put in?

I can’t speak for Gen Z, I don’t know whether Gen Z is having less or more sex. But I hope people see this film and want take chance on love, on experimentation, chance on feeling something and allow themselves to be taken to a place they haven’t been before.