Nicole Kidman Says Making Halina Reijn’s Erotic Thriller ‘Babygirl’ Was “Very Freeing” – Venice Film Festival
Nicole Kidman brings more star power to Venice today with her lead role in writer-director Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller Babygirl. Screening in competition, the A24 movie will have its world premiere this evening, but ahead of that, Reijn, Kidman and cast members Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas and Sophie Wilde met with the press corps to discuss the film’s layers and themes.
The story centers on Kidman’s high-powered CEO who puts her life’s work on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much-younger intern (Dickinson).
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Kidman described Babygirl as being about much more than sex. “The film is obviously, yes, about sex, it’s about desire, it’s about your inner thoughts, it’s about secrets, it’s about marriage, it’s about truth, power, consent… This is one woman’s story, and I hope a very liberating story. It’s told by a woman through her gaze… and that’s to me what made it so unique was that suddenly I was going to be in the hands of a woman with this material and it was very deep to share those things and very freeing.”
Reijn agreed. “I was delighted to be able to make a film about feminine desire, but it’s also about an existential crisis, it has many layers.” At the core, she said, the film is “about the question, Can I love myself in all my different layers?” which she hopes will function as “a tribute to self-love and liberation.”
Still, Reijn added that women’s relationships with their bodies was “exactly why” she wanted to make this movie, and show that “the huuuuge orgasm gap still exists,” she said, quipping, “Take note, men.”
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On her relationship to her own body working on the film, Kidman said, “I approach everything artistically, so I don’t think of the minutiae, just how do I give over to this character fully without censoring my director.”
Kidman also said that her connection to Babygirl “is that I want to examine human beings, I want to examine women on screen, I want to examine what it means to be human in all the facets of that… But this definitely leaves me exposed and vulnerable and frightened when it’s given to the world, but making it was delicate and intimate and very, very deep.”
Dickinson gave a shout out to the film’s intimacy coordinator who “broke the unnecessary barrier around what you have to do… Ultimately, it’s choreography… It’s really nerve-wracking constructing a scene anyway, so if you add something intimate to it, it’s very vulnerable.”
For Banderas, Babygirl marks a departure from political correctness. “When I read the script, I found somebody thinking out of the box,” he said, adding it takes a “courageous mind to put on the screen things we all think.”
Babygirl will next head to the Toronto Film Festival with A24 setting a December 25 domestic release date.
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