It is one of the most memorable scenes in “Baby girla visual, musical moment on the big screen that has taken on a life of its own TikTok: A shirtless Samuel (Harris Dickinson) dancing sensually to George Michael’s 1987 “Father Figure” for his older lover Romy (Nicole Kidman), the married CEO of the robotics company where he is an intern. While on a recent episode of Filmmaker Toolkit podcastwriter/director Halina Reijn broke down the many decisions and inspirations that went into creating the scene, including her own experience as an actress stripping on camera and her desire to play with gender roles. As for the choice of the song itself, Reijn explained that it was connected to the central question she asked herself when she sat down to write “Baby girl.”
“For this film, my question was whether it would be possible to love and accept all the different layers of myself, so not just the ones that I’m comfortable showing my friends, or the outside world, but also the ones that I” I’m ashamed , that I’m nervous because I’m embarrassed around, says Reijn. “And for me personally, it’s mainly that I really have this tendency to want to show my vulnerable side in romance and I’m ashamed of it, and this song embodies all of that in a fun, playful, sexy way.”
The life of George Michael himself – who came out as gay in the 1990s and directly confronted potentially embarrassing aspects of his personal life that became tabloid headlines – spoke to filmthemes and was an inspiration for Reijn when he made “Babygirl.”
“It’s also about freedom for me,” Reijn said. “George Michael has a very famous song called ‘Freedom’, but it’s his whole life, and how he slowly dared to become who he really was is very important to my life and a great inspiration.”
What Michael represents to Reijn’s generation, of which she includes Romy, played a role in the choice. As Reijn explained on the podcast, this scene is part of one of the film’s two longer hotel sequences that serve as the film’s two pillars, which were meant to mirror each other. The first cheap hotel room is Samuel’s territory, he rented it, and Romy is on shaky ground and doesn’t even know how or where to sit. But the other hotel room, shot in an actual walk-through suite in an expensive Manhattan hotel, is something Romy paid for, and Reijn imagined Samuel related to Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) in “My Fair Lady” when he is shocked by its greatness.
“I wanted these two specific songs, one in the cheap hotel room, INXS’s ‘They Never Tear Us Apart’ and the one in the luxury hotel room, George Michael, to be of Nicole’s world,” Reijn said. “I thought it was very important (to be) in my generation. Harris dancing to that song was funny to me and amazing and touching because he’s obviously younger, so he’s not her father, he’s not the father, she is the father, yet he carries her around. And to me, why it’s so important is that we all, men, women, any human, any person, have a little child inside of them must be taken care of. Whether we are 80 year or 6 years, it’s still there. And that’s what it connects to for me.”
While you’re at it podcastReijn said she thought of the scene as therapy for the characters, as lovers help heal each other’s wounds. When working with Dickinson and Kidman, she had extensive conversations about what the characters were experiencing emotionally so that they felt a sense of freedom on set, but within the carefully planned blocking of the scenes – Reijn played the scene herself (including Dickinson’s dance) as she wrote and then with cinematographer Jasper Wolf.
“(When Harris) dances, I just told him, ‘Nicole is going to be in a chair just like Mickey Rourke in ‘9 1/2 Weeks’ and you don’t have to take off your clothes, you’re not Kim Basinger in ‘9 1/ 2 weeks, but I want you to dance and it’s sensual, but I also really want it to be vulnerable. And so whatever you feel, if you feel real nerves, like Harris, just use them okay. That’s okay,” says Reijn. The director’s decades of acting experience meant she knew what Kidman and Dickinson needed in those intimate scenes, but it was also, in part, an inspiration for the scene itself. “How many times have I done striptease in so many movies that I acted in? On stage it’s been almost 99 percent of the time I take off my clothes in all the plays I’ve done, so of course I also play with gender roles, switch them in a light way and hope that people, while they’re watching, think about all these things and have fun with it.”
Reijn also talked about how the film was as much about two different generations as it was about gender, and she’s been pleasantly surprised by how the scene has taken on a life of its own on social media.
“This whole ‘father figure’ that’s now becoming this viral thing and everybody’s dancing on TikTok, and wives are forcing their husbands to dance to it, I love it,” says Reijn. “I think it’s just a great way to be in connecting with these kinds of subjects, talking about them and talking about it, our honest vulnerability, and that’s something that I think is very important in life.”
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