There are so many lovely moments scattered throughout the film, without even taking into consideration the sex. My favorite, I think, is when Leo invites Nancy to dance, and the dance he does is not a particularly sexy dance, but you can’t help but just be so drawn in by him. I’m curious what the process was like in directing those intimate moments that were not sexual.
It’s one of my favorite moments, actually. We wanted a dance scene in there, because Leo’s doing so many things to try and get Nancy where she needs to be. He’s offering so many things by that point, and one of them is, “Let’s dance.” We didn’t want to just be like, “Put on the music and we’re busting out free.” Do you know? It needed to be more than that. For me, Daryl’s such a surprising kind of actor, and in that moment, I just loved the kind of movement that he came to. I agree it’s not trying to be sexual. It’s not trying to say “I’m sexy.” It’s trying to relax her, but it is gorgeous. There’s a joy in it that I’m very drawn to. We had a great movement director who came in who’s an amazing dance maker, Theo Clinkard. He came in, and usually you have to get actors to relax, so he is doing some relaxation things, but those two were just like, “Yeah, whatever.” They both love dancing.
In fact, it was just making sure that we pulled it back and made it feel like it wasn’t choreographed, and that it came out of the experience of the actors. So they did this gorgeous process where I got to watch them exploring some ideas and testing some styles, and it was a very basic kind of sequence that grew, and it just felt excellent straight away. We hadn’t shown anybody, and we went onto the set, and we showed the crew, which we would do each morning of a shoot — we would show the crew what we were going to do that day. The crew just were like, “Oh my gosh.” They just had the real moment of loving it. We sent it back to the edit team in Australia and they had the same thing. They just said to us, “Oh, what’s this?” It’s not what you expected. Nancy’s gorgeous inner world starts to be there. You start to see something about her, but Leo’s the surprise where it’s like, “Oh, this is not what I thought you were going to be like,” and that excites me.
