Inside the intimacy department of Gehraiyaan: Intimacy director Dar Gai and her team on the art of shooting sex scenes

What kind of food is served on a film set? Who picked out the paintings for the hero's bedroom? What does an Executive Producer do? Karishma Upadhyay's monthly column Bollywood Inside could attempt to answer these and other questions you might have about all things Bollywood but were too shy to ask.

*

“I was nervous; I didn’t know how I would shoot the intimate scenes. I remember speaking to Shakun [Batra, director], and he told me to relax because they had an intimacy department. I had no idea what that was. Just the fact that there was this department made me freak out more because I started wondering what kind of intimate scenes we’d have to shoot,” remembers actor Siddhant Chaturvedi about his first experience of onscreen intimacy in Gehraiyaan. By the time he finished shooting for the film, Chaturvedi was a convert. “I think every set that involves intimate scenes should have an intimacy coordinator just to make everyone feel comfortable.”

Across industries and through the ages, moments of intimacy, whether romantic or violent, have been clumsily executed at best, and have invited inappropriate behaviour at worst. There have been stories of embarrassment, confusion, exploitation, and at times even assault like when Maria Schneider revealed unsettling details surrounding the infamous rape scene in Last Tango in Paris [1972]. Not only was the scene a last-minute addition to the original script, Schneider did not know Marlon Brando’s character would use butter as a lubricant before forcing himself on her. A clip of director Bernardo Bertolucci talking about the scene resurfaced years later, in 2016, setting off wide media attention and sparking outrage in Hollywood. Two years later, the #MeToo movement sparked off more urgent conversations around the treatment of women on Hollywood sets, and triggered a much needed reckoning in the industry.

Starting with the series The Deuce [2017-2019], HBO adopted a policy of having an intimacy director on all its shows and movies with intimate scenes. This person would choreograph scenes that involved nudity, simulated sex or sexual content. In 2020, 23 Emmy-nominated scripted shows, including Euphoria, Watchmen, and Succession, had intimacy coordinators on their credits. Closer home, Batra’s Gehraiyaan, which also stars Deepika Padukone, Ananya Pandey, and Dhariya Karwa along with Chaturvedi, has become the first mainstream Bollywood film to have an intimacy department. 

While he was writing the film, Batra realised that intimacy was an integral part of this relationship drama. Not only did he want the intimate scenes to look different from anything the audience had seen before, he also wanted to create a safe environment for his actors. That is when he roped in India-based Ukranian filmmaker Dar Gai as the intimacy director.

In the feature films [Three and A Half and Namdev Bhau in Search of Silence] and music videos [Prateek Kuhad’s 'cold/mess' and Kasoor and Ritviz’s 'Raahi') that she has directed in the past, Gai has attempted to ‘show intimacy without concentrating on physicality, and creating chemistry that comes from the deep emotional connection between two actors.’ “The idea is to capture the butterflies that you feel in your stomach, and put it on screen”. Along with the intimacy sequences in the film, Gai has also directed two songs in the film, including 'Doobey,' the video for which recently launched. 

Led by Gai, the intimacy department for Gehraiyaan was a three-member team that included intimacy coach Neha Vyas and intimacy coordinator [and director’s assistant] Aastha Khanna. After being briefed by Batra, the next step for Gai and team was to meet with the cast, and explain to them in minute detail every shot in the intimate scenes, including the angles. “There are things that might sound explicit when said aloud but knowing the angles and the approach helps put the actors’ minds at ease. I can’t just say, ‘And then they kiss passionately’ because passionately can be interpreted differently. If they felt uncomfortable with any shot, even if it was my favourite, I would change it or at least discuss why it made them uncomfortable. And if I had to change it, I'd find a replacement shot they'd be happy with,” she explains.

Then came the workshops that were led by Vyas, an actor who got interested in intimacy coordination after personally experiencing the ad hoc nature of how these scenes were shot, and not having the agency to set boundaries. “I had this realisation that I didn't want my back to be touched without knowing. Even when I’d tell the director this, I’d be told that it was part of the scene. I didn't have the agency at that time or an advocate on set who would make them find another way to do the scene,” says Vyas. She likens intimacy coaching to the way actors are coached for any other scene except in this case, it is ‘preparing them for what's to come on intimacy.’ “There is setting a language of consent, and helping them realise their boundaries in a workshop so that when they actually do the scenes, there are fewer last-minute surprises,” she adds. 

The cast went through a week of workshops before the shooting began in Goa. “We worked on their physicality, explaining to them that their body is a tool. We created certain rituals which could be hand movements, that helped actors come back to themselves in a way. Say you are exhausted doing take-after-take or there is a technical issue that takes an actor mentally out of the scene. Just a gesture or movement, which was personal to each one, helped re-establish the connection with the scene,” says Gai. As the intimacy coordinator, it was Khanna’s job to deal with the costume department, making sure that the closed-set protocols were maintained, and footage was being safely transferred at the end of a day to ensure no leaks.

While Gehraiyaan might signal the mainstreaming of having an intimacy department, there were others that came before. ZEE5 Original film Season’s Greetings (2019) credits Manisha Basu as an intimacy supervisor. In 2020, the makers of MXPlayer’s erotic drama Mastram hired Amanda Cutting, an intimacy coordinator whose credits include The Good Doctor, Snowpiercer, and Maid. Since filming wrapped for Gehraiyaan last November, Khanna has worked as an intimacy coordinator on a dozen projects that include Netflix India’s The Fame Game, Cobalt Blue, Penthouse, and Choona, as well as Amazon Prime Video India’s Four More Shots Please! Season 3, and director R Balki’s film Chup. 

Her stint as the intimacy director on Gehraiyaan might have been a one-off gig for Gai but she hopes that intimacy coordinators would soon become as ubiquitous and normalised as dance or stunt choreographers are on a film set.

“The new generation of filmmakers are much more responsible when it comes to creating a safe space for their actors.

Also, having an intimacy coordinator makes life so much easier for the filmmakers themselves. Instead of all the awkwardness, you have a person who has their own way of making everyone comfortable,” she says. 

Khanna, who has been a director’s assistant on films like Andhadhun and Badlapur, trained remotely under Hollywood intimacy coordinator Amanda Blumenthal (Euphoria, The White Lotus, Being the Ricardos) during the first COVID-19 lockdown. The course included everything from closed set protocols to choreography and movement coaching, understanding sexuality, and how to be an advocate to a LGBTQ+ cast and crew.

Chaturvedi is not alone is assuming that intimate scenes equal to kissing, nudity or simulated sex. There is a lot more, Khanna maintains. “It could also be any kind of familial intimacy, stories that deal with the LGBTQIA+ community, scenes of physical or sexual violence, hyper sexualisation of characters like item numbers or scenes where a character is wearing skimpy clothes out of context. Even a scene in a doctor’s clinic that requires a physical examination would be considered an intimate scene,” says Khanna. 

Gehraiyaan will release on Amazon Prime Video India on 11 February.

Author of Parveen Babi: A Life, Karishma Upadhyay has been writing about movies and movie stars for almost two decades. On Twitter, she goes by @karishmau.