When it comes to sex on screen, intimacy is so much more than skin deep.
That’s something intimacy coordinator Yehuda Duenyas knows well. A leader in the field who’s been doing this work since before Hollywood knew what an “intimacy coordinator” was, he’s helped write the industry rulebook, negotiating with SAG-AFTRA to get the role formally recognized, co-founding CINTIMA to train the next generation of professionals, and launching the Flicker Festival, a celebration of what human connection looks like on screen.
How about we take this to the next level?
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So, when it came time for Gregg Araki to find an intimacy coordinator for I Want Your Sex—his new movie that includes plenty of kink-exploring, boundary-pushing, whipping, biting, twisting, and all manner of sex—it made sense that he’d seek out Duenyas, one of the very best.
True to its title, I Want Your Sex proves that, for his first feature in 12 years, Araki remains as fun, flirty, and provocative as ever. But there’s something much deeper on his and co-writer Karley Sciortino’s minds as they poke at the notion that we’re losing touch with touch, that especially younger generations are turning away from sex on screens—and in their bedrooms.
These ideas have been on Duenyas’s mind, too. To him, intimacy, in all its forms, is at the very core of what makes us human, so to ignore it is to deny ourselves. That makes the work of the intimacy coordinator even more vital to the future of storytelling… even when it involves a leather-clad Olivia Wilde putting Cooper Hoffman in a pig mask and paddling his bare bum.
With I Want Your Sex opening in select theaters on July 31, we spoke with Duenyas about the unique creative challenges of working on Araki’s latest sex-positive romp, the role’s rapid evolution in the industry, and why intimacy coordinators just might help humanity get back in touch with itself. Literally.
QUEERTY: Before we get into I Want Your Sex, I’m curious to learn how you got into intimacy coordinator work in the first place?
YEHUDA DUENYAS: I was in the performance world in New York City in the 2000s, and I was directing shows that had very intense, sexual content in them. I was surprised that there were so many protocols for if someone was going to have to fight on stage, yet when it was time to do the incestuous assault scene, it was like, “What do you want to do, director?” And so I was really concerned! There was this real dynamic of wanting to serve the artistic vision of the playwright, and also make sure that the actors can do this 50 times and stay sane doing it. So I just started developing protocols for how to do that, and that’s really the genesis of the work..
Just to date myself, that was 2007, so our cultural conversations around consent and boundaries and all that stuff was not top of mind. But, for all I knew, I was doing something out of necessity. From there, people were like, “How did you do that?” So I started to codify those protocols for live performance, and then it continued to develop with the industry. I think I was brought on as just that role for a TV show in 2015, and then a filmmaker friend was like, “Hey, we’ve got these intimate scenes; could you help with those?” Cut to me being the LA chair of the negotiation committee for the SAG-AFTRA contract—obviously that was a lot of work with many people involved, but we’ve just continued to evolve and contribute to the community with this little niche of the industry.
You mentioned “dating yourself,” but I think the dates are incredibly relevant context here as we talk about the evolution of the intimacy coordinator role, because it is relatively new work, at least in an official, named capacity. And it feels like it’s a role the industry has really only begun to take seriously in the last decade or so.
I think that’s true. If you just look at our cultural discourse over the last 10 years, that’s changed, too, and I feel like our role in the industry has really followed suit. Every set I’m on, I hear, “How did we do this before without you?” It’s shocking how much there is to look after when it comes to scenes of intimacy, from agreements to boundaries to interpersonal things to paperwork to legal writers to padding to making sure a scene looks anatomically correct—so there’s so much that goes into it!
The first use of the phrase “intimacy coordinator” was in 2018 on the showThe Deuce. It had been a slow evolution, but then once it hit, it really took off quickly. And I think a lot of that’s because of the nature of how quickly our culture moves.
And it wasn’t even a discovery—everyone knew how much harm was happening, but it finally became this public outcry. These stories of intimacy are so important—intimacy is what it is to be human—and storytelling is so important to us as well, so how can we tell them better? And I don’t just mean better by making them more safe on set, but how do we deepen those stories, and how do we make them more culturally relevant, and how do we make them more endemic to the people who are telling them and who they are about?
Would you say the job has gotten easier then? In the sense that you don’t necessarily have to explain yourself & why you’re there, versus a decade ago?
Definitely! Even just that we’re in a unionized position now—we have a contract with minimum and all those things, which is amazing. So it’s not a surprise that we’re there, and the way that productions work with us, there’s a pretty standardized protocol.
I come from a space where I’ve worked as every department on a film, so I feel like I have an understanding of what each department needs in a particular moment, and I think that that’s kind of a superpower that some intimacy coordinators can really bring. There’s a lot of needs, and at the end of the day, we have a story to tell: The creatives have every right to their creative vision, and the actors have every right to their boundaries about what they want to do with their bodies at work, so how can we come to a really great artistic solution for all of these things? Ultimately, the point is to serve the artists who are telling these stories, and who are putting their emotional selves and their bodies on the line to entertain us.
Beyond entertainment, storytelling is such a fundamentally human survival mechanism. And I think that we can tell stories of intimacy with more nuance, more depth, more understanding. Intimacy is not just something that you slap on to a film for more views just because there’s something really exciting about it—which, there is! But it actually can reveal so much about people’s character, what their needs and desires are. I think it’s such a big win for us as a human culture.
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To dive into I Want Your Sex, I’d love to hear about how & when you came to be involved with the production, but I’m also curious what your familiarity was with Gregg Araki’s work beforehand?
I grew up on Gregg Araki films, so I obviously have known his work for so long. I was living in LA in 1995 and two of my friends were working on the art department for Doom Generation, and we were all like, “Oh my god!” [Years later,] I was the intimacy coordinator on Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, the Ryan Murphy project, and he was one of the directors that came in. So I met him there even though we didn’t have any scenes together. It wasn’t until a different show that we got to work together, and he’s like “Intimacy coordinator? Never worked with one of you before!” [Laughs.] I was like, “Listen, I’m a huge fan. You have moved this genre forward in so many ways, so I’m really here to just help tell the story.” So we kind of took it from there and just established a really beautiful collaboration.
He’s such an incredible artist in the way that he really relies on all of his department heads as collaborators—like, he really wants their input, and he’s brought everyone on board because he’s confident in what they do. So he was very collaborative in that way, while maintaining—which is so rare—this very singular vision of what he wants and the type of story that he wants to tell. So it’s this really beautiful balance of auteur, filmmaker-artist who works with his collaborators so intricately and beautifully.
So, to get more specific about what your role entails, with this film as an example, where and how does the work begin?
The first step is to read the script and to get to get an idea, contextually, of everything that happens. We do what’s called a script breakdown, so we’ll take out every scene where we think at least some sort of conversation needs to happen. And sometimes those are not obvious scenes—you know, it could be “so-and-so’s in the bubble bath.” So it’s like: What are we seeing in a bubble bath? What are we seeing of this particular performer, and how are we going to handle them in the bubble bath? Are they wearing a bathing suit? Are they covered with bubbles? There’s a lot of things that aren’t obvious intimate scenes… and there’s the very clearly obvious intimate scenes, which there are a lot of in this script, as you know. [Laughs.]
So then we’re having a conversation [with the director,] just going scene by scene, and really asking questions: What do you want to see here? It’s about getting into a real understanding from the director of what their vision is. And there’s zero judgment about this—we really want to know what the director sees, how do they want to tell the story. Then we talk about how they want to approach executing it all. We obviously have our understanding of how to shoot these scenes, and ways that we can do these with all sorts of tips and tricks.
And from there we’ll have a conversation with the performers: we’ll say, “This is the creative vision, this is the ask. How are you feeling about this?” Like I said earlier, the creative has every right to their vision, and the actors have every right to say “yes, and” or “no, but” or “this is all great”—there’s many different ways that that can happen. It’s about understanding how we’re gonna shoot these scenes, and how much time do we have to shoot them. With I Want Your Sex, I think we did all of the intimate scenes in the first six days—from day one to day six, all of the intimacy—so it was really sort of front-loaded in that way, which was fun! It was really great that we just dove in.
Is the idea, then, that you are present on set for every one of those scenes you initially flagged in the script—whether that be an actual sex scene, or just a bubble bath?
For the most part, yes. We’re there for all of the scenes that involve some kind of intimacy, particularly if there’s nudity or simulated sex. And we’re typically brought on more and more for kissing scenes, and make-out scenes, and shower scenes, or medical intimacy, and birthing scenes—all sorts of things like that. Intimacy can can be spoken about in many different ways, and I think if you ask 20 people what their definition of intimacy is, you’re going to get 20 different answers.
As it relates to the screen, if it involves physical contact, if it involves a couple holding hands walking down the street, you don’t really need an intimacy coordinator for that—they’ve probably got that, But if it goes further and starts to involve, like, touching, making out, being exposed in some way—or, you know, people don’t shower with their clothes on, so even if the actor is clothed in the shower to mask their body parts, how is that masking being handled? How is the actor being treated on set? There’s those types of scenes is what we’d typically be there for.
Given that this is a film all about intimacies and boundaries and kink and consent, would you say that made the job feel like a different experience than, say, other projects you’ve worked on?
There was just so much to do that it was so exciting and fun. And there were so many conversations about, number one, just as humans what the actors’ relationship to one another is. They’re all incredible people, and so funny, too, and so game.
Zooming out—not this cast in particular—we talk about what the actors are comfortable doing, and then what these characters are doing, and how are we actually approaching these things on set. But particularly to this production, there are a lot of boundary violations in this story, and so how do we tell the story of these boundaries? These characters are engaged in very intense and comical and funny, but also very extreme emotional states—a lot of them involving intimacy and sexuality and sex. And since the actors are at work, how do we keep them in a zone where they can act and just worry about their performances, inhabit their characters, and go full tilt? The idea is that they can be those characters and not worry about their own personal, physical boundaries being crossed in some way.
So I was really just blown away by their craft, how open they were about wanting to tell the story and wanting to serve Gregg and Karley’s vision, and just how collaborative the process was. It was really a beautiful experience, and they’re incredible. Just from an acting perspective, that’s a master class. Olivia’s scene when Erica’s drunk and she calls Elliot to her house and dresses him up? That’s just a masterclass, as both a comedic and dramatic performance.
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It’s my understanding that, on some level, this movie was kind of borne out of this idea that Araki has spoken to, that audiences today—and especially Gen Z—don’t want to see sex on screen. Do you think that is, or was, true? And, if so, are things changing? I mean, the success of something like Heated Rivalry feels significant, in that it’s a show that became a phenomenon because of the sex.
Yeah, this conversation has been coming up a lot in just cultural discourse lately. And it’s what Gregg speaks to in the film: about younger people having a disconnect from one another, from personal experiences, from not going out—I think there’s some direct quote about, like, “getting drunk and hooking up and learning something from it.” I’m not condoning or not condoning that behavior, but that’s really a sentiment in the film.
I think what we’re seeing in the media is less of an appetite for just empty sex, right? This isn’t, like, ’80s cable TV anymore where just seeing breasts, or where seeing some nudity on television is going to be like, oh my god. I see that people —and Heated Rivalry is a perfect example that you just brought up—they’re really wanting meaning behind the intimacy that they’re seeing, and not the gratuity. We need these stories of how to interact with one another, it’s very important. So how do we tell those stories well? And even if they’re challenging stories, even if they’re mistake stories, I think that they’re all really important.
So what I see is a yearning for meaning, not a yearning for “I don’t want to see sexuality or see nudity” or something like that. I see them wanting to have more meaningful representation, more meaningful experience, they want to see themselves reflected. I mean, this is what we all want—I’m not speaking for a generation that I’m not a part of—I’m feeling this on a much deeper sort of human level.
Don’t we all want to be acknowledged, seen, and represented in some way? Don’t we want the experience of resonating with a story that feels like a truth? So I think, as intimacy coordinators, that’s really what we are after: we’re after a sense of truth. How can these scenes feel true to the people, to the characters, to the environment? And how can we poetize the discomfort of what it is to be human? That’s what drama is, isn’t it? Otherwise it wouldn’t be very interesting!
“Intimacy coordinator” is now a SAG-accredited, unionized role, and you’re specifically also training new folks to do this work, too. Looking ahead, where does the industry go from here, and what’s something you want these intimacy coordinators-in-training to take out in the world with them?
In terms of training, we want to be putting intimacy coordinators in the world who have a really deep understanding of the spectrum of human sexuality—whether that’s their lived experience or not, understanding that it exists. Knowing what you don’t know, I think, is very important, and being able to ask the right questions. Not every intimacy coordinator is the right person for every project. So how can we train people who have those types of specialties? And if not, you can ask the right questions and understand, like, “Oh, this is a slice of life that I’m not totally aware of.”
And it’s about being really well-rounded in that, from a film perspective, too. By the way, one of the very first film experiments was a silent film with two men dancing with a violin playing, which is really, really interesting. Intimacy has been on screens for as long as there’s been images on screens. Again, it’s such a deeply important part of what it is to be human, and so it’s about building better, deeper, larger, bigger stories that are not afraid of intimacy.
I’m really interested in erasing the constructed and conceived boundaries that we feel like we have between us as humans on this planet, because I think that we’re all wired in very, very similar ways, and we all really want very, very similar things. I think if we can drill down into that place of what it is that we really need, and that story of intimacy—where we all come from—I feel like it’s a real cultural win for humanity, which is at a really interesting inflection point right now.
I’m not a doomer, and I’m not an optimist, either: I’m seeing a few different paths that we can be going down, and so our work in this field is to help tell that story of humanity and hopefully create deeper connection between people.
I Want Your Sex opens in theaters beginning July 31. Be sure to follow all of the great work Yehuda Duenyas is doing with CINTIMA here.
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