When it comes to filming sex scenes in film, most would be deeply awkward.
A sweaty camera-person tracking your every move, a set full of people around you as you’re in the nude with often just a tiny modesty cover.
While the prevalence of intimacy co-ordinators have made these less stressful situations, there are other ways this may be made a bit easier.
One is if you’re filming them with your real life partner.
This is something that Nicole Kidman encountered when filming Eyes Wide Shut alongside her husband at the time, Tom Cruise.
Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut (Warner Brothers)
The filming experience was an utterly utterly bizarre one, with Kidman and Cruise signing on an indefinite contract, essentially promising to keep filming until director Stanley Kubrick was done.
There were also orgy scenes, full frontal nude scenes, and Kidman even had specific clauses put into her contract.
Eyes Wide Shut is legendary for its bonkers production, with Kidman and Cruise’s kids developing British accents. It was supposed to take a few months to shoot, but ended up taking two years.
When it came to the specific clauses in her contract though, Kidman was nowhere near as laissez-faire as she was in signing on for indefinite amount of time.
She told New York magazine: “When I went to work with Stanley Kubrick, he was like, ‘I’m going to want full-frontal nudity,’ and I was like, ‘Ahh, I don’t know.’
The pair were married at the time (Warner Brothers)
“So we came up with a great agreement, which was contractual. He would show me the scenes with the nudity before they made it into the film.
“Then I could feel completely safe. I didn’t say no to any of it. I’d wanted to make sure that it wasn’t going to be me standing there nude and everyone laughing at me.
“I was protected, so I got to explore a complicated marriage and the way in which Tom [Cruise’s] character is having those jealous images.”
The film is heavily focused on sexuality, with Cruise and Kidman playing a couple engaging in sexual exploration, including infidelity in marriage.
She said: “Sexuality is over here in a box, and we don’t deal with it.
“I’m happy to deal with it, but there needs to be a place where you can go, I’m not going to be exploited.
“Then I’ll go down the road with you. I love the relationship between a director and an actor. When it’s pure, it’s exquisite. And the other actors, when you’re all there doing the work, it’s exquisite.”
Regarding Stanley Kubrick, who died shortly after finishing the film, just six days after showing Warner Brothers the final cut, she said: “We loved working with him.
“We had two kids and were living in a trailer on the lot primarily, making spaghetti because Stanley liked to eat with us sometimes. We were working with the greatest filmmaker and learning about our lives and enjoying our lives on set.
“We would say, ‘When is it going to end?’ We went over there thinking it was going to be three months. It turned into a year, a year and a half. But you go, ‘As long as I surrender to what this is, I’m going to have an incredible time.’”
