The Halina Reijn Interview

The 'Babygirl' director on 'The Piano Teacher', Paul Verhoeven, directing one of Nicole Kidman's best performances, the enduring influence of Ophelia, and the erotic pull of milk.

Halina Reijn by 200%

There’s a scene in Babygirl, the A24 erotic thriller directed by Halina Reijn, that was still rattling around in my head days after I saw it. Nicole Kidman—the film’s protagonist, Romy, an uptight robotics company CEO—and Harris Dickinson—the 20-something intern with whom she embarks on an ill-advised sado-masochistic affair—are having sex for the first time. The camera is tight on Kidman’s face, she’s face down on the floor of a sleazy hotel room. Dickinson is largely out of view, obscured, doing his thing in the background. Kidman’s Romy—who we learn has never had an orgasm with her husband of 20-something years—finishes, lettting out a deep, animalistic howl. No pornified performance, no breathy feminine insincerity, just a primal release. It’s a sound that echoes from somewhere deeper than her own soul, a howl escaping from the eons of time, a death rattle, for every woman who has ever and will ever fake pleasure for a man.

It’s one of the most powerful sex scenes I’ve ever seen, and a large part of what makes Babygirl, Reijn’s third feature, such a marvel. Online, there has been much emphasis on the scene in which Dickinson dances shirtless to George Michael’s ‘Father Figure’ (and rightly so, Dickinson has the natural charisma and exacting emotional complexity that one only sees in truly great actors) or the scene in which Dickinson commands Kidman to get on her knees and lap milk out of a saucer like some sweet, domesticated creature. What the virality of these moments showcase is Reijn’s remarkable ability to reframe eroticism through a decidedly feminine lens. In her first two films, the Dutch thriller Instinct and the comedy slasher Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (adapted from the short story by Kristen Roupenian) the former stage actress revealed an exacting directorial eye and an ability to deftly read the cultural temperature. But with Babygirl she has stepped assuredly into the role of auteur, unapologetic in her vision and unwavering in her ability to wrestle great performances from great actors.

Here, my interview with Reijn, where we touch on everything from Isabelle Huppert’s performance in The Piano Teacher to Paul Verhoeven, the erotic thrillers of the ‘90s, the legacy of Reijn’s most memorable stage characters (Ophelia, Hedda Gabbler) on her writing, and more.

I imagine it's been a very hectic year for you. I feel like the release of this movie has been a growing tidal wave, the momentum has just just grown and grown. Does it feel that way to you?

Definitely. I started writing the screenplay in my apartment, by myself, and I thought it would be a small movie about shame, and about my fantasies that I struggle with. And now it's become this huge thing, which is amazing, but it's also a lot to deal with. But I'm so grateful, especially for the conversations that women are having about it with each other, it's beautiful to see, it gives me a feeling of connection.

I saw Babygirl in November at the A24 screening in London, and you were there with Nicole and Harris. Before we watched the film you said something so beautiful, succinct, and profound, which is that this film poses a single question. Could you talk about what that question is?

Paul Verhoeven is one of my mentors. I worked with him as an actress in Black Book (2006). At the time I was always nagging every director I worked with, “I really want to direct”, and he told me that if I wanted to direct I should start with a genuine question. That question will carry you through the enormous process that is making a movie, which is almost like birthing a child. And so my question for Babygirl was “Is it possible to love all the different layers of myself?” As women, we only recently got the right to vote, until 1987 [in Amsterdam] we had to bring a male guardian to a bank if we wanted to get a business loan to start a business. So really, it was such a short time ago that we even started exploring who we are. And I think we are still conditioned to think that we need to be these perfect beings that have no rage, no aggression, no greed, no sexual desire. Those are emotions and tendencies that arise in us that we're still not at ease with. And there's still an orgasm gap. If you look at the statistics, it's incredibly depressing. So I thought it would be interesting to make a movie about those aspects of being a woman, the things that we're embarrassed about, that we don't want to even talk to our girlfriends about because we're like, aah. I think we're still way more conditioned than we admit to please men, we say, “I get aroused when he gets aroused.” And it's a myth, you know? And I'm talking to myself here, because I struggle with this still. The movie didn't really help me! (Laughs) I do feel way more connected to other women, but I cannot bring it into practice in my own love life or anything. But I do think it's amazing that I got the space to create a story about a woman who has everything, she has a beautiful family, she has children, she has a very powerful job, she makes a lot of money, she lives in a beautiful apartment, and yet she's completely unhappy because she only tries to be perfect in the eyes of others.

The movie that kept running through my head when I watched Babygirl was The Piano Teacher. I watched it again after watching your movie, and it’s just so fucking good. Your film stands on its own as a singular piece of work, but I think there’s a dialogue between those two films in the sense that we see two women who have these perfectly calm, restrained exteriors, and just beneath the surface is this whole world that is ready to explode. And in both Isabelle Huppert and Nicole Kidman’s performances we see this wonderful kind of awkwardness in the way they express their desires. It’s messy and uncomfortable, and they know they want something, but they don’t necessarily know what it is that they want…

Oh, I love that film. It was definitely one of the biggest inspirations for Babygirl. I think what was so revolutionary when that movie came out was that it was about female masochism, sexual masochism that is connected to trauma. What I thought was so genius was that it shows there is an aggressiveness in masochism, it’s not at all weak, in fact it can be insanely dominant. Some feminists say Babygirl is not a feminist movie because we see a woman crawling around on her knees.