All summer, franceinfo makes you discover surprising or unknown professions through the column “Is it really your job?”. Friday, July 21: the job of intimacy coordinator, with Monia Aït El Hadj.
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Everyone has necessarily wondered, in the cinema, in front of a scene showing a sexual relationship, how it really happened during the filming. Recently, a profession has developed, following the “Me Too” movement and the Harvey Weinstein affair: coordinator or intimacy coordinator. Their goal: to ensure that these scenes go well.
This is precisely the profession chosen by Monia Aït El Hadj. This former lawyer worked in particular on the Netflix series Emily in Paris. Today she is one of the very few to exercise this profession in French cinema. And impossible, of course, to meet her on a set: “These are intimate scenes so it wouldn’t make sense to bring people in!”
“My job is to come and support the directors and the actors in the creation of nudity and intimacy scenes. I make sure of the consent of the actors and I help to choreograph and professionalize these scenes”, details Monia Aït El Hadj.
Don’t hurt yourself emotionally
In front of a French production for Netflix, on which the intimacy coordinator worked, she explains: “On a stage like that which is quite explicit, you have to protect the actors. It seems like they are completely naked but in fact they are not. So we discussed the limits of each one, what were one and the other ready to do, not to do, to show or not to show”.
For Monia Aït El Hadj, her work is similar to the preparation of a cinema stunt: “The body, we can hurt it physically or emotionally when things are not going well”. In front of another film, with other actors, younger and less experienced, Monia Aït El Had remembers: “We did a rehearsal with the director, we choreographed everything in advance. On a love scene, if no one explains to you what is expected of you, it’s your own intimacy that you bring on the set, and that’s not what we want at all”.
“I am not the morality police”
But Monia Aït El Hadj’s work goes beyond managing sex scenes: “We don’t all have the same definition of intimacy. It can also be a mother giving the breast, for example”. But she wants to clarify: “My job is not to come and censor or erase sexuality or nudity. I always say that I am not the morality police”.
Today in France, it is mainly Netflix which has taken up the subject and which calls on Monia Aït El Hadj.