It’s one of the crucial memorable scenes in “Babygirl,” a visible, musical huge display screen second that has taken on a lifetime of its personal on TikTok: A shirtless Samuel (Harris Dickinson) sensually dances to George Michael’s 1987 “Father Figure” for his older lover Romy (Nicole Kidman), the married CEO on the robotics firm the place he interns. While on a current episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, author/director Halina Reijn broke down the quite a few selections and inspirations that went into creating the scene, together with her personal expertise as an actress stripping on digicam and her want to play with gender roles. As to the selection of the tune itself, Reijn defined it was tied to the central query she posed to herself when she sat down to jot down “Babygirl.”
“For this movie my question was if it would be possible to love and accept all the different layers of myself, so not just the ones that I’m comfortable with showing my friends, or the outside world, but also the ones that I’m embarrassed about, that I’m nervous about, that I feel shame around,” mentioned Reijn. “And for me personally, it’s mainly that I really have this tendency to want to show my vulnerable side in romance and I’m ashamed of that, and this song embodies all of that in a fun, playful, sexy way.”
George Michael’s life itself — popping out as homosexual within the Nineties and confronting head-on doubtlessly embarrassing features of his private life that grew to become headline fodder for the tabloids — spoke to the film’s themes and was an inspiration for Reijn in making “Babygirl.”
“It’s also about freedom for me,” mentioned Reijn. “George Michael has a very famous song called ‘Freedom,’ but it’s his whole life, and how he slowly dared to become who he really was is very important for my life and a big inspiration.”
What Michael represents for Reijn’s technology, which she contains Romy as being a part of, performed a component within the alternative. As Reijn defined on the podcast, this scene is a part of one of many movie’s two longer resort sequences that function the movie’s two pillars, which have been supposed to reflect one another. The first low-cost resort room is Samuel’s territory, he rented it, and Romy is on unsure footing, not even figuring out how or the place to sit down. But the second resort room, shot at a real-life floor-through suite at an costly Manhattan resort, is one thing Romy paid for, and Reijn imagined Samuel as being akin to Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) in “My Fair Lady” when he’s shocked by its grandeur.
“I wanted these two specific songs, one in the cheap hotel room, INXS’ ‘They Never Tear Us Apart,’ and the one in the luxurious hotel room, George Michael, to be of Nicole’s world,” mentioned Reijn. “I thought that was very important [to be] of my generation. Harris dancing to that song was funny to me and amazing and moving because, of course, he’s younger, so he’s not her father, he’s not the daddy, she’s the daddy, but still he is carrying her around. And to me, why that is so important is because we all have that. We all, men, women, any human being, any person, has a young child inside of them that needs to be taken care of. Whether we are 80 years old or 6 years old, it’s still there. And that is what it taps into for me.”
While on the podcast, Reijn mentioned she considered the scene as remedy for the characters, because the lovers are serving to heal one another’s wounds. In working with Dickinson and Kidman, she had intensive conversations about what the characters are emotionally experiencing so that they felt a way of freedom on set, however throughout the scenes’ rigorously deliberate blocking — Reijn acted out the scene herself (together with Dickinson’s dance) when writing after which with cinematographer Jasper Wolf.
“[When Harris] is dancing, I just told him, ‘Nicole’s gonna sit in a chair just like Mickey Rourke in ‘9 1/2 Weeks,’ and you don’t have to strip, you’re not Kim Basinger in ‘9 1/2 Weeks,’ but I want you to dance and it should be sensual, but I also really want it to be vulnerable. And so whatever you’re feeling, if you’re feeling real nerves, as Harris, just use them. It’s okay. It’s all okay,’” mentioned Reijn. The director’s many years of appearing expertise meant she felt like she knew what Kidman and Dickinson wanted in these intimate scenes, nevertheless it additionally was, partially, an inspiration for the scene itself. “How many times did I do a striptease in so many movies that I acted in? On stage, it’s almost been 99 percent of the time I’m taking my clothes off in any play that I did, so, of course, I’m also playing with gender roles, swapping them in a light way, and hoping that people, while they’re watching, are thinking about all of these things and having fun with it.”
Reijn additionally talked about how the movie was as a lot about two completely different generations, because it was about gender, and she or he’s been pleasantly stunned how the scene has taken on a lifetime of its personal on social media.
“This whole ‘Father Figure’ thing becoming now this viral thing and everybody’s dancing on TikTok, and wives are forcing their husbands to dance on it, I love it,” mentioned Reijn. “I think it’s just a great way to be in touch with these kinds of subjects, to talk about them and to talk about it, our honest vulnerability, and that is something that I think is very important in life.”
To hear Reijn’s full Toolkit interview, subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favourite podcast platform. You may also watch the complete interview beneath, or subscribe to IndieWire’s YouTube page.
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