“You have to take the glamour away from the kink”: Halina Reijn on Babygirl

The Dutch writer/director Halina Reijn began as a theatre, television and film actress before moving behind the camera. Her directorial debut was 2019’s Instinct before making horror-comedy 2022’s Bodies Bodies Bodies for A24 and now following it up with the erotic drama Babygirl, which earned her lead actress Nicole Kidman the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at last year’s Venice Film Festival. The film sees Kidman play Romy, a glamorous married CEO who embarks on a complex and kinky affair with an intern played by Harris Dickinson.

How have you found moving into the world of American filmmaking? 

Babygirl was an opportunity to bring my Dutch, more liberated ideas about sexuality to the US, where it is a little more suppressed. But I also very much identify with the suppression, because even though I come from a very radical hippie upbringing and I’m a child of the sexual revolution, I have a fear of intimacy and [I’m] drawn to structured ways of dealing with inner desire. So I thought of Americana as a metaphor for the danger of the suppression that still exists within me.

Has any of the reaction to the film been surprising?  

I was very surprised that it was picked up so warmly. I did think I was on to something, but I’ve been part of so many theatre productions I thought would be a huge success and they weren’t. I think success comes down to when the world is ready for something. What I enjoy most is the conversations after the movie that are not even about the movie but are about people’s own private stories or struggles or emotions around a subject like the orgasm gap, female liberation or desire. But for me the sexuality is only a metaphor for a woman in an existential crisis. Underneath it is just a person who cannot integrate all these different parts of herself and that’s relatable.

It’s like that classic quote isn’t it? That everything in life is about sex except for sex, which is about power.

I had that quote on my script when I was working on it. Every time I would remind myself of that because that is absolutely a starting point. No, it’s true. And I think, like you say, that you could argue that every classical play is in the end about sexuality, it is what drives us. But there is a layer to this movie that is kind of juicy and maybe a little bit arousing hopefully, but then there’s a deeper undercurrent that we’re all going to die and we’re just pretending that anything matters. This woman is in this midlife crisis and an existential crisis [and] thinks, “Oh shit, I haven’t really looked at myself with the honesty that would actually bring me self-love and self-acceptance.”

How do you look back on the 1990s heyday of the erotic thriller?

Films like Basic Instinct [1992] or 9½ Weeks [1986] were incredibly important to me because it was the first time in my life that I didn’t feel embarrassed about my own darker thoughts. I felt very seen, but then always in the final acts someone would get punished and it lost, for me, a sense of reality. We are definitely in conversation with history and playing with the audience’s expectation of what a sexual thriller is, but we’re going to do it in a different way. I re-watched all of them before I started writing and with a lot of them I’d think “Oh, doesn’t age well at all.” But films like The Piano Teacher [2001] did age really well. 

Was The Piano Teacher a reference for you?

So much. And that is why Isabelle Huppert being the head of the jury in Venice was a total dream because she, more than anybody else, understands that we not only want to create stories about women but we also want to create roles for actresses that are not only heroes. It’s such a great thing when this actress gets to play a part, when Nicole Kidman gets to play a part in which she can be vulnerable, raw, but also greedy and corrupt and lying. We want to be Richard III, we don’t only want to play Lady Anne. And that’s something that Isabelle Huppert has tried to do all her career and it’s amazing that now there are more female writers and more female creators that can have fun exploring the dark sides of our personalities. 

Did your background as an actor influence how you directed this cast?

As a stage actress I’ve always really wanted to be incredibly honest with everything that I was doing, even within these very artificial circumstances, because all those classical plays that I did were from another century. So there’s nothing real about what you are performing, it’s not a documentary, but you try to bring your most honest behaviour into an artificial circumstance. And Nicole spoke a lot about that and if you look at her body of work that’s totally there, right? And everything she does, she brings that rawness, the vulnerability. And that was absolutely what I was looking for with this movie. But also with Harris Dickinson and Antonio Banderas, I had these conversations where I explained “I’m not really looking for tone, what I want is [something] that is completely honest. You are not the character, but you have to bring your whole backyard of traumas and personal experiences to this ritual that we’re going to do here.” 

That’s just a tradition in the theatre and the people that I used to work with in the theatre have influenced me and informed me of how I want to create movies. What makes their performances special is that they are able to do that. When Harris Dickinson tells [Kidman’s character] “get on your knees”, and then right after that, he’s laughing about his own behaviour, it’s really his own sort of experiment of being a masculine dom. That brings a realness to the movie and a relatability that we don’t often see. Because if we think about kink, we just think about these people being kinky. But that’s not how life works and if you bring that accompanying shame into the film it becomes very funny, but it also becomes more sexy because it’s way more human. So you actually believe that this is happening and you are there with them instead of just looking at a hot story and this deep glorification. In some ways you have to take the glamour away from the kink. 

The chemistry between the characters is something that’s been widely picked up on. How do you cast for that?

Well you can never completely be a hundred percent sure, and these people are giants, so you can’t really say “let’s do a chemistry reading”. But I think good casting comes from just talent. If people are very talented, they will be able to do that acting style that I love so much, that kind of honesty, because that creates an electrifying chemistry in the room. So then it doesn’t even matter really. But second, with Antonio Banderas and Nicole Kidman and this marriage they both needed to be incredibly attractive because we don’t want the people to think, “Oh, of course she’s cheating, look at her husband.” I wanted people to really believe in their marriage, to root for him as well because the movie is also about masculinity and how hard it is for men to be men right now with what is expected of them. So we cast two icons on purpose. 

And then Harris, he brings a whole new thing that I really am obsessed with, when you look at him. Of course, he’s insanely talented and he presents his masculinity with his body, his face, everything. But then he has this capability to look [like an] altar boy all of a sudden. That combination is dangerous and is exciting and is new. It’s just fresh. It symbolises a new generation that has a different view on sex, control, surrender, power, liberation, gender and orgasming. 

► Babygirl is available in UK cinemas now.