“Babygirl ”director says the film is her answer to Nicole Kidman's “Eyes Wide Shut” role

Babygirl is a tale of sexual fantasy made real.

For writer-director Halina Reijn, it was also a chance to further the narrative of an early role in Nicole Kidman's career, Eyes Wide Shut's Alice Harford. In the Stanley Kubrick film, Alice tells her husband, William (Tom Cruise), about a sexual fantasy she had about running away with a man she saw while they were on vacation.

The admission sends William spiraling, leading him down a dangerous road involving sex cults and murder. But the Dutch filmmaker always wondered what the movie where Alice actually acted on her fantasy might look like — so she wrote Babygirl.

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"It's about marriage; it's about monogamy," she says about both films. "What is monogamy and can you possess someone else or do you have to set them free?"

The difference, though, is that in Eyes Wide Shut, "we follow Tom Cruise everywhere," Reijn continues. "We don't even know what [Alice is] going through. We're totally in his mind, heart, and soul. I want to know, 'What if she would've gone and actually would've lived her fantasy?' That's what this is — my answer, playfully and humbly, to the male Eyes Wide Shut.... All of us women are ready and hungry to see and hear stories about how we feel and from our perspective."

Reijn also wrote Samuel (Harris Dickinson), the intern Kidman's Romy has an affair with, as a purposefully fantastical being, much like the one in Alice's imaginings in Eyes Wide Shut. "It's my playful revenge on all the movies that are made by men where all these women are either a femme fatale or a Lolita," Reijn says. "[Samuel gets] a fairy tale introduction. So, I almost want to have people wonder, 'Is this real or did she dream him up?' Because we start and end the movie with orgasms, we can see the whole movie as a metaphor of one big sexual fantasy."

Eyes Wide Shut also helped Reijn cope with an unexpected schedule change. She had planned to shoot Babygirl during the summer, but the double Hollywood strikes bumped production to the winter. "My movie was a summer movie and it all took place in the Hamptons," she notes. "But then the strike hit us and I had to reschedule it to Christmas. I was very frustrated about it, to be honest with you, and very sad. I thought white picket fence, the Hamptons, The Truman Show. But then I rewatched Eyes Wide Shut, and I was like, 'Oh, it can be done. You can make a very beautiful, deep movie with Christmas songs, trees, and carols.'"

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Reijn, also known for her acting work in mostly European productions, also took inspiration from Hedda Gabler, the Henrik Ibsen play that Antonio Banderas' character, Jacob, is directing in Babygirl. She uses the play as both a way to signal that Jacob doesn't understand his wife Romy's desires, as well as a rebuttal to what it says about women who pursue their own liberation.

"Who is Hedda Gabler now?" Reijn asks. "In the end, it's about a woman who destroys her life to be reborn. My movie is my version of Hedda Gabler. Romy thinks she's trapped in a marriage. But in the end, she's just trapped in herself, which is Hedda Gabler. But in our movie, she chooses to live and she doesn't kill herself. I was very frustrated as a stage actress that all the characters I played who are looking for freedom end up dead. I was so fed up with that. We want to see a woman who liberates herself and actually continues living."

Reijn may have found inspiration in numerous stories, but one thing that is very much her own is her decision to make this erotic tale a film that actually features very little nudity. "I'm playing with taboos, and I'm provocative and want to provoke a discussion about sexuality and freedom," she says. "But at the most, you see two very short snippets of an actual sex act. The rest is all suggestion."

It was a choice largely predicated on Reijn's own acting career. "I was naked as an actress in every film, every play," she explains. "I was done. I wanted to create a sexual movie where you didn't show anything, but yet it's super central. We do show bodies, but it's very elegant and graceful. You almost see nothing. It's done in a way where that would hopefully connect to other women. This is how women see sex."

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Indeed, Reijn thinks the sexiest, most provocative scene of all has nothing to do with naked bodies. "I find the most shocking scene is when he orders her the milk and she drinks the whole glass and he says, 'Good girl,'" she notes. "They don't even touch. That, to me, is super arousing. Because, for women, often it's all about the story. It's about what is in our minds. We don't like two bodies just banging into each other. That means nothing to us. We need a whole foreplay of chapters and stories, and that's what I'm trying to do with the film."

In addition to forgoing explicit nudity, Reijn also didn't want the domination and submission of Romy and Samuel's relationship to be linked to any one kink or community. She wanted any woman in the audience to be able to see themselves in Romy's struggle to express her desires, whatever they might be.

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"It's not really about the specificity of what BDSM is," Reijn explains. "I always personally had these fantasies. And when I went to therapy when I was young, it was still [considered] a disease. It made me feel so alone. I did do a lot of research with it — and I like a little bit of a power play, but I don't like a whip and a blindfold. That scares the s--- out of me. I wanted this to be a movie where the specific sexuality that they share is a metaphor for any sexual fantasy that anybody may have. The moment we feel our own hunger, our own desire, we immediately feel shame. We need to liberate ourselves."

Babygirl hits theaters Christmas Day.

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