Interview by Elisa Leonelli
Nicole Kidman won the Volpi Cup as best actress at the Venice film festival for her courageous performance in the movie Babygirl, written and directed by Halina Reijn, Dutch actress at her second directorial effort after Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (2022).
A successful executive, married to a theater director (Antonio Banderas) and mother of two teenage daughters, Romy has a clandestine sexual affair with a young intern (Harris Dickinson) putting at risk her family and her career.
Nicole, who has never been afraid to confront sexually provocative characters, (just think of Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick with Tom Cruise, Fur about Diane Arbus with Robert Downey Jr.) says she had been attracted by the fact that the director was not only a woman but a European.
“I was interested in working with Halina in a film with such a seductive title, Babygirl, written by a European woman, in the genre of the erotic thrillers of the 90s, but interpreted from the female point of view in a different and totally original way. It was a field I had never explored before, an examination of a woman’s sexuality and secret desires, to discover herself, to understand who she really was. For me this was an unusual situation, because it’s true that I’ve made a lot of movies, but never one like this, and I would only do it with a woman as the director.”
Nicole Kidman-Babygirl © A24
This is how the actress describes the dilemma faced by her character.
“I wanted to represent a successful woman who achieved almost everything she wanted in her career, she lives in a beautiful apartment in New York, she has a husband, she has children, yet she’s experiencing an existential crisis, she’s feeling restless, a condition that many can identify with. Suddenly this young man enters her life, who could be an angel or a devil, and has certain disturbing qualities, but that means that it already existed within herself the willingness to be disturbed. She continually asks herself a string of questions: Who am I? What do I want? What do I desire? What excites me? Do I really want to sabotage myself? We see her in this psychological state of contradiction, to the point of feeling attracted by her complete self-destruction.”
Antonio Banderas, Nicole Kidman-Babygirl (c) A24
At the end, after a fight between the two men, the young lover and the husband, the couple married for so many years manages to resolve the conflict and find a new type of relationship.
“When I confess to my husband what is happening inside me and I try to explain to him feelings that not even I can understand, I tell him that I tried to be like he wants me, but I can no longer do so. After almost losing everything, and giving a young man the power to take everything I own, I go back to my relationship with my husband and discover a new way of coexisting with him. These two people have changed, but they choose to meet again with a huge amount of unconditional love, which ultimately helps them overcome difficulties, and who knows where this is going to go? We all have various facets in our psyche about who we are and our bodies, what we want and what we need. At the end of the film, this conclusion of hope becomes a metaphor for so many other things.”
Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson-Babygirl (c) Niko Tavernise
The Australian actress felt comfortable in sex scenes with both the young
British actor and the veteran Spanish actor, mostly thanks to the Dutch director who is also an actress.
“With Harris, I immediately had a very good relationship. As soon as we met, I felt incredibly comfortable, because he is a gentleman. And with Antonio, we have both accumulated a lot of experience over the years, especially in films that dealt with sexuality. But I had never done it with a female director. So I felt completely safe, because Halina understood the characters, since she had written them, she knew what she was trying to communicate, and could change the scenes and rewrite them accordingly. She was always there in our midst, and the motivations we wanted to express were very clear. At the same time, since she’s also an actress, she knows what it takes to create a thrill of excitement and capture it with the camera.”
Nicole Kidman-Babygirl (c) Niko Tavernise
The director worked intensely and rather quickly creating an emotional energy on the set during the shooting, with many changes made at the last minute, and a typically feminine understanding of the situations.
“From the beginning, the whole project has undergone a metamorphosis. The more we talked about it, the more we changed it, giving it a different shape. We sat down with Halina and discussed our sexual fantasies, the desires we were ashamed to try, and we’d never talked about them with anyone else. We wanted to explore sexuality in depth and authentically, to make new discoveries and have fun. Clearly, talking about orgasms with a woman is different from talking about it with a man, since there is a certain intimacy and understanding between women, and we could explore the power games between the two sexes and our liberation towards pleasure. It was wonderful working with a writer-director, because she continued to rework the script constantly throughout the production, which took place organically and very quickly, like a freight train in a run, because there was no time to waste. It was an advantage for us actors, because we couldn’t think about it too much. We reacted viscerally, we were exhausted, in a state of adrenaline and euphoria, which really helped us.”
Harris Dickinson, Nicole Kidman-Babygirl (c) Niko Tavernise
On certain sets, such as the hotel rooms where the two lovers meet secretly to experiment with various forms of domination and submission, in a complex power game between an employee and the woman he works for, only the two actors and the director were present, with the cinematographer operating the camera.
“Some locations, such as the bedroom and the hotel rooms, were very confined and safe, it was like being inside the mother’s womb. Halina put on music, for example the song “Father Figure” by George Michael, to sweeten the atmosphere and create a comfortable environment. It was a sacred space, and we could tell the other actor if there were situations that made us uncomfortable and discuss them openly. Every day we rehearsed on set, and we had a Director of Photography who would arrange the lights and film in such a way that he could follow and capture without cutting everything that we did, and that would change as we discovered other positions. This was fantastic because, during these intimate sex scenes, the camera was very close to us, but we didn’t even notice it. Since we had built a relationship of great understanding, we could exist within the characters, without even realizing what we were shooting.”
Nicole was surprised and gratified by the first public screening of Babygirl at the Venice festival and considers this movie a milestone in her career.
“When I saw the finished film on the big screen in Venice, I was really scared, because it might not work. I was sitting with Harris, Antonio, Halina, and Sophie (Wilde) and we were all terrified. But it was a glorious moment, because the audience’s reaction was tangible both during and after the screening. They understood the film and didn’t back down, they embraced it. They certainly felt uncomfortable during certain scenes, which were meant to be disturbing, but also to make people laugh. Hopefully they were mesmerized and sometimes aroused. It is rare during a career as long as mine to find the opportunity to continue exploring new territory as a human being on the journey of my life. So I was willing to put all the doubts behind me and jump off the cliff with people I trusted. It was embarrassing but also liberating, which is why I consider Babygirl a milestone. I hope people go see it on the big screen with other people around.”
Published on Best Movie, Italy–January 2025
Halina Reijn-Nicole Kidman (c) Niko Tavernise
Babygirl-Director-Screenwriter Halina Reijn said:
“Among the filmmakers who influenced me are Michael Haneke and Paul Verhoeven. I worked in Black Book (2006) as an actress with Verhoeven, a Dutchman like me.
“The films that inspired me for Babygirl are erotic thrillers such as Basic Instinct (1992), by Verhoeven, Disclosure (1994) by Barry Levinson, Nine and a Half Weeks (1986), Fatal Attraction (1987), and Indecent Proposal (1993) by Adrian Lyne, The Piano Teacher (2001) by Haneke.
“I was an actress in a theater company for 15 years, and I played the heroines of the classical repertoire in comedies by (William) Shakespeare and (Henrik) Ibsen, Mary Stuart by Friedrick Schiller, Hedda Gabler by (Eugene) O’Neill. And those characters live inside me. Those writers are geniuses because their works have survived over time and given me an education.
“My film Babygirl is a feminine response to those men, all male, who are alive in my creative life, but with a twist. Harris and Antonio literally collide, like two animals fighting head to head, arguing and pulling out their aggression, but in that moment when they are the worst of enemies they manage to become friends. And the woman is not killed or punished for her transgression. I wanted to end the story with a moment of joy and female liberation.”
Babygirl, in US cinemas from December 25, 2024, is out in Italy on January 30, 2025
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