In the wake of #MeToo, TV networks, streaming services, and film studios in Hollywood began implementing safeguards to ensure that actors were not subject to sexual harassment or violence. TV and film producers hired “intimacy coordinators” to help make sure that scenes with nudity or sex were entirely consensual. SAG-AFTRA codified the job and describes the role as that of “an advocate, a liaison between actors and production.”
The French, meanwhile, scoffed. From afar, they dismissed the practice as yet another example of Anglo-Saxon prudishness. To the French way of thinking, cinema is an art form—one that they pioneered—and directors are artistes who must be entirely free to express themselves, without interference or limitation.
Except that, these days, the money for that art is mostly coming from Americans. Companies such as Netflix, which are producing more and more content in Europe, want their productions to meet the same standards regardless of where they are filmed. Enter the coordinatrice d’intimité, or, as some French directors see it, the “purity police.”
“In the beginning, it was … complicated. With everything that is new and that comes from the U.S., there is a little apprehension,” Monia Aït El Hadj, who was France’s first intimacy coordinator and who worked on Emily in Paris and the first season of Marie Antoinette, tells me. “Is she going to censor? Be the police?”
For some directors, the mistrust extends much further. “If I arrive at a moment in the history of cinema where I am legally obliged to have some kind of police on my set telling me what I’m allowed to do, I would rather stop filming sex scenes completely,” Mia Hansen-Løve, the French director of, most recently, One Fine Morning, starring Léa Seydoux, told The Telegraph. “As artists, we need to be respectful. But we also need to be free.”
The French film industry has been roiled in recent years by high-profile allegations of sexual abuse. Just this week, the actress Judith Godrèche pressed charges against director Benoît Jacquot, accusing him of raping her when she was 14. She is also one of several women accusing the director Jacques Doillon of sexual assault.
Most notably, late last year a documentary outlined sexual-assault claims against the actor Gérard Depardieu by 16 women; President Emmanuel Macron responded by condemning the “manhunt” against Depardieu, whom he said “made France proud,” and 56 high-profile industry insiders signed a text published in the right-wing Le Figaro newspaper supporting the embattled thespian.
While their defense may seem regressive, the very fact that these accusations are being aired is an indication that social mores are changing, albeit slowly.
“If I arrive at a moment in the history of cinema where I am legally obliged to have some kind of police on my set telling me what I’m allowed to do, I would rather stop filming sex scenes completely.”
“In France, there is a real cultural resistance to what intimacy coordinators do, and a lot of directors have been very vocal about the fact that they think it’s censorship,” says Iris Brey, a critic and director. Brey, who lives in France and is half American, chose to use an intimacy coordinator for her French television series Split. “For me, it was never censorship; it was asking me to be very precise.”
Aït El Hadj says that much of the resistance comes from people who have never worked with an intimacy coordinator. Her job is not to take control away from directors, but to help them more clearly realize their vision. “I first ask the director how they imagine a character, how do they make love. If these scenes aren’t prepared, it’s the intimacy of the actor that will play out on their set, their own intimate sexuality,” she said. “We have tools for choreographing and de-sexualizing—how are they going to touch, breathe? I know what questions to ask. I have a methodology. It’s collaborative work.”
“When French directors come out against it, I think it’s because they don’t really understand what the job is,” Pauline Chalamet, the actress and sister of Timothée, who starred in Split and has worked on sets with intimacy coordinators both in the U.S. and in France, says. “To not want someone on set who’s just another advocate for actors is to be somewhat perverse. Their role is to let the director direct the scene the way they want to and, behind the scenes, make sure the actor feels safe to express any reticence they may have, to serve as a liaison. It’s the exact same way a stunt coordinator is used.”
“As artists, we need to be respectful. But we also need to be free.”
Part of the disconnect is cultural. “In the U.K. or in the Americas, they see film as an industry,” says Paloma Garcia Martens, a Brussels-based intimacy coordinator who also worked on Split. “Europeans see film not as an industry but as a craft.”
While Brey plans to always use an intimacy coordinator going forward, she isn’t convinced the practice will enter the mainstream in France any time soon. That is partly due to the “French resistance to change and wanting to remain a patriarchal system,” she says, and partly because of the power dynamics in French cinema—unlike in the U.S., French directors regularly write their own screenplays, and it is they, not the studios, who wield the power. “Both male and female directors from the older generation don’t want to give up power to the actresses,” she says.
Ultimately, they may not have much choice, with the younger generation of actors, notably female actors, increasingly speaking up for themselves. “There is something that is shifting in France right now,” Brey says. “Actresses are understanding that they have a lot of political and economic power.”
Today, there are still only a handful of intimacy coordinators in France, and even fewer who have gone through a recognized training process. Yet the profession is slowly winning hearts and minds. “It’s going to be a slow burn, but it’s happening,” Garcia Martens says. “Every single time [I work on a production] there are people whose minds are changed.”
Monique El-Faizy is a Paris-based journalist and the co-author of All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator