380 - Sex Work and Pleasure in Film (with Director Sophie Hyde)

Full transcript available

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

Today we're joined by movie director Sophie Hyde to talk about their new sex-positive and sex-work affirming film, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.

Sophie Hyde is an award-winning filmmaker of both narrative and documentary films. She is a founding member of film collective Closer Productions. She lives and works on the lands of the Kaurna people in South Australia and makes provocative and intimate films and television.

During this episode, Sophie addresses some of the following topics:

• Sex work.

• Pleasure and shame.

• Consent.

• Imperfect characters: boundaries, honesty, and vulnerability.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande can be viewed on Hulu.

Transcript

This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're joined by director Sophie Hyde to talk about the new sex-positive and sex-work-affirming film, Good Luck, Leo Grande. The entire movie is about the relationship between a retired teacher played by Emma Thompson, who is amazing, and a sex worker played by Darrell McCormack.

To be honest, this came across to us through our podcast network. We were intrigued for two reasons. One, Emma Thompson's amazing. Two, we were curious, how are you going to deal with this subject matter? Are you going to do a good job with it? To our delight, it is a beautifully crafted film. It's funny, it's vulnerable, and surprising how nuanced, lovable, and then ultimately human these two characters are portrayed.

Unfortunately, Emily can't be with us this week, because she is on an airplane right now so she was unable to attend for this. Today, we are extremely excited to welcome the director of the film on our show to talk about it. Sophie Hyde is an award-winning filmmaker of both narrative and documentary films. She is a founding member of a film collective called Closer Productions and she lives and works in South Australia and makes provocative and intimate films and television. Sophie, thank you so much for joining us today.

Sophie: Thank you. It's my pleasure.

Jase: Are you in Australia, currently?

Sophie: I'm not. I'm in New York City sitting in a hotel room.

Jase: Nice. I see. Traveling all around for this.

Sophie: That's right. Yes.

Jase: There are a lot of interesting themes that I want us to talk about on this episode. I think to start out, let's just start with the biggest, most obvious one, which is talking about sex work. In the film, it centers around the relationship between a woman and Leo Grande, the sex worker that she's hired. Now, sex work is still hotly debated. People have a lot of strong feelings about it, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I was just curious if we could start out with what inspired you to take on this project? What excited you about it in that area?

Sophie: Firstly, I think it was just the initial concept of a woman who was trying to have good sex for the first time in her life and had hired a sex worker that was going to be played by Emma Thompson, of course. There was this combination. I'm really interested in intimacy and connection between people and that being physical as well as emotional. The idea of two people in a room going through that was one thing. I guess the layers of professional intimacy that start to happen when it's somebody who's a sex worker where it's their job, it's not a romantic situation.

It's somebody that's trying to achieve something, somebody that's trying to offer something. There's a transactional nature to it. There's also the desire to be present and real with another person that can all be contained at the same time. That was very interesting to me. I guess, I've always been quite fascinated by all kinds of professional intimacy. As a director, you deal with it a lot. It's part of what I do all the time, and what actors do all the time as well. Sex workers, that seemed like a very similar and very familiar thing.

It's like, how do you sit opposite somebody and see what it is that they want, even though they might not be saying exactly what they want? How do you navigate the weirdness that everyone brings into a room, particularly if it comes to their bodies and sex, as well as just the kind of dynamic of two individuals and what they bring into the room? Those things were fascinating to me. I of course then wanted to also work with and talk to people with lived experience of sex work.

We did loads of that and talked to people that came from really varied backgrounds and had had a very different experience from each other. Also found some similarities and we found some people that became very significant consultants for us. We read a lot of all of those things, of course. They were creatively important to us, in terms of freeing us up to tell a very specific story about Leo, one single sex worker, one single man in his experience.

Dedeker: Yes, that's hard, because you don't want to pigeonhole that story or ever try to make the claim of, oh, yes this particular story of sex work that we're showing represents all sex workers and how they all approach their job and how they all feel about their job. In that process of consulting with actual sex workers for this project, was there anything that you learned that surprised you?

Sophie: That's a really great question. It's funny, I think anytime that there is people that have been underrepresented or excluded from being on screen a lot, then there is always this fear or this desire to represent everybody, that kind of happens. There's a feeling I'm sure, from people that are sex workers of like, is this close to my story or is it far from my story? I can imagine how that would feel. At the moment we're seeing so many stories about lawyers and doctors, and it's fine.

You can have the good ones, the bad ones, the boring job, the thrilling, exciting and the best at this job. When you just have one and there's hardly been any on screen, it does feel like an added pressure. We tried to free ourselves from that pressure a little bit. What surprised me, I think there's these sex workers, say sex work is work is a really important thing to talk about, that it's a job. That means that you do it for money. That doesn't mean it's the only reason you do it.

It might be. You might go and you just really need the money and you do this. It might be that you also take pleasure in it and/or get other things back from it or it might be that it's threatening or dangerous or whatever, if it's not-- if people aren't being looked after. I think that really sunk in for me the more I spoke to people where I was like, it's just not an intellectual idea. It's really important.

Actually, it made the film better, I think. I love that it's his job. He's trying to be really good at it and he is really good at it. He enjoys his job. He's well-suited to it. Also, at the end, he can have a transformational experience. He walks away on to another job. I loved that it wasn't a romantic story. That it could have significance between the two of them, but it wasn't like, they're going to fall in love or he needs to be rescued or all these ideas. That came a bit from those conversations.

Jase: That's fantastic. That's something that I really appreciated about the film was that we got to see the humanity of that and that it didn't fall into those tropes like you were saying. That it wasn't just, oh, and they have to fall in love or he has to be like, "Oh, actually, now I don't need to do this anymore," or whatever it is.

Sophie: Exactly. It was fun to play with the expectations of those tropes, I think. The tropes of romantic comedy even or any sex worker stuff we've ever seen.

Dedeker: Yes, definitely.

Jase: Yes. When you make that comparison to all the shows we have about lawyers and doctors or police officers, or whatever it is that he knows, you also have that mix of this person's just in it for the money and this person's really passionate. Most of our main characters in those shows are so passionate about their job as a lawyer or a doctor or whatever.

That mixing of passion with but also I get paid a lot of money for this is just normal to us, but when it comes to sex work, I think it's hard for people to accept that. It's like, no, they must only be doing it for the money or they're only doing it because they're a sex addict or something like that.

Sophie: We have such weirdness around sex, don't we? Where you couldn't possibly just be using your body in this way. You must either have some sort of trauma, or you must hate it or whatever. Of course, like any job, it's boring some days. It's thrilling other days. It's a full gamut.

Dedeker: Yes. We see that reflected in the film. Right from the beginning, we start to see that even though Emma Thompson's character, she proactively went out to hire a sex worker, but she comes in with a lot of these negative preconceived ideas about what it means to do sex work, why someone would do it. What do you feel like your perception of sex work was going into this before diving into this research process?

Sophie: I think I've always been aware that there must be different layers and parts of sex work, somewhere people feel like-- a lot where people have great autonomy over what they do and decision making. That's what it is to be a job. You need it. You also choose it. There are, of course, people that feel like they are really badly treated in sex work and that exists for a reason. It's like, okay, you have a building site. It's a dangerous place to be, but that's why we have regulations. When you make something illegal or criminal, it's very hard to look after the people who are in it. Therefore there becomes

this other world, which is where people are really mistreated. I think it's important to recognize that we put regulations in place for other things and anything where you interact with the public. As a barista, you can have a really terrible experience with somebody or you can have a pretty boring experience, or you can have a really good one.

I feel like I repeat myself, but it is true. I don't know what my impression was before except to say that I find it really interesting thinking about someone creating a character, trying to be good at their job, at the same time, trying to find real intimacy, and where they kind of own sexual interests cross into that as well. These things are all fascinating to me, more per se than their industry as such.

Jase: To speak about the legality of it a little bit. This is absolutely something that we talked about a couple of years ago, we had Alice Liddell on the show and talked about how protections and legalization is what matters not, oh, we need programs to help get people out of this. That's not actually as helpful as the people doing it I think it is but on that subject of legality, though, that does, I think, influence how we see these activities and these characters.

For example, if you think about smoking weed, marijuana, in movies, I feel when I viewed movies in the early 2000s, or late '90s, where people are smoking pot, there's this, "Oh, they're doing something illegal," and there's this little bit of a, "Oh, they've also got to watch their back, they've got to be a little careful," whatever and now, at least in a lot of states in the US, it's just this "Yes, whatever. Everyone does that."

It's no big thing but that's really changed the relationship that viewers have to watching that. I guess I was curious about one, in the context of the film that never gets addressed but what is the legality of Leo Grande's position? Was that a concern? Was that something that you had to navigate in doing this? Then also just kind of how you think that changes based on where your viewers are watching from if it's legal or not legal in their country?

Sophie: I'm no expert on this and what I would say about that is there are great sex workers who speak about this stuff and I would just be listening to them about this because truly, there are some excellent advocates, and they're the ones that really kind of follow this. There are excellent sex work-led organizations in every country because it is actually quite complex, likewhat's needed and what's helpful in terms of legalization or decriminalization. It's not as straightforward is all of that.

Yet, you can find that. You can find those people in every place, and they speak better than I ever will, except to say that sex workers have always existed. They've always existed in the shadows, of course, but also out loud and there's always ways that you can get by with making something okay. Like Leo in our film, he's like, "I sell my time with you. I sell my time, and we can choose what to do."

Actually, there's no legal issues with it. Anyone can choose to do that, as long as they're not soliciting in the UK. It's funny because it leads to all sorts of things like all these terminology like a high-class escort. I'm like, "What a weird term." That's one thing that you start to notice when you do a movie like this. "Why is it called a high-class escort," trying so hard to separate it from some other thing that's debased.

Actually, why do we think that our bodies in sex is so shameful, and something that we should hide? I find that very interesting, and that kind of terminology around it, which language is always changing and anyone can use any word they want for themselves. I'm all up for that but I do like the use of the word sex worker because it is the words sex worker because it's an industry of people that are doing all kinds of things that interact with sex, and oftentimes don’t as well.

Dedeker: That actually is a perfect segue into talking about another huge theme in the film, which to me came across as sort of we have the one coin and on opposite sides of the coin is pleasure and shame, really around sex. They're so intrinsically linked. Emma Thompson's character has a hard time, even accepting that she might feel pleasure and it's wrapped up in it could be because possibly she doesn't feel like she deserves to feel pleasure.

Some of it is wrapped up in she thinks that she's incapable of feeling pleasure in certain regards. Even for people who don't feel that as extremely as she does in the film, this is something a lot of people wrestle with, and a lot of people struggle with. Based on my experience working with clients I would even go so far to say is sometimes this area of sex is more controversial than even the sex worker topic. I just want to open up this topic. Can you tell us more about your thoughts and your approach in exploring the topic of pleasure in this film.

Sophie: I really believe in pleasure and alongside the sex worker research, I looked at pleasure and pleasure activism as well and I think it's really fascinating that there's so many people who've been denied the idea that they can have pleasure for so many different reasons. One thing that I'll come at this in an unusual way, which is that, as a filmmaker, I spend a long time trying to work out how to write characters, and particularly female characters.

When I say that, I mean people raised as women where there was this kind of idea of the hero's story, which was they have a-- character has a really strong want and then there's a story about whether they get their wants or their needs, and there's obstacles to it. I would always be like, "Oh, this feels really difficult because this character, I feel like they're not exactly sure what they want, or they really have competing wants.

Wants that conflict with each other, and I felt as somebody that was raised as a woman, I found it very hard to work out whether my wants were true, or they were what someone else wanted, or whether they were what I was supposed to want. All these layers of bullshit.

Sophie: For Nancy, the idea that A goes after something like this is really amazing, but B, she goes in with this list, "These are the things I want to try." One thing that she gets to do is uncover like you can just take time trying things and even seeing what you want and even the discovery of what you want is not a given. It's not just like, "You know what I've always wanted? A blow job. Let's go get it."

No. Actually wants her we have to work them out, we have to get there. For me, she's kind of amazing, because she's abrasive, she's unsatisfied, but she goes after something but one thing that happens to her is there's a goal of the orgasm that she doesn't even know that she can get. When she finally gets it-- spoilers.

When she finally gets it, it's not a goal that she's had to achieve. It's not like the pinnacle, the top of the mountain, it's something that she can access that she knows she can access again. That's interesting to me, the idea that our bodies can do all sorts of things. It's not we kicked the goal we won.

Jase: Yes, that was something that I really appreciated in the film was kind of her journey, just like you said, learning that pleasure isn't just, "Oh, check that box now I've done it, never going to do it again." Versus finding out, "What are the things that I'd to do and that I want to keep doing and that I now have access to, or I've given myself permission to have access to these things in a way that I didn't before." That was something I really appreciated in watching this film.

Sophie: Isn't it funny how we have an idea about sex now is how it's supposed to look is really clear to us. We've been raised and even more so now maybe of this idea of this is what sex looks like, this is how it should look. When we're doing it. We see ourselves doing it. That's fine. You can get off on that, no shame but also what about the thing where you just work out what feels good? I wish any gift you would want to give to a young person would be I wish that you could just experience what what this all feels like before you knew what it looked like.

Dedeker: Oh, gosh, you put that so well. You put that so well because my personal opinion is that there's always an aspect of performance to sex, but it's sort of what the percentage balance is, I suppose. I do think we do end up with a weirdly skewed sexual education that puts so much of the emphasis on our performance of it as opposed to maybe our experience of it.

Speaking of that, again, to dive into this nuance, there is in the film there's struggle with even giving pleasure really. Especially for Emma Thompson's character, she struggles with her feeling that, "I shouldn't be focusing on giving pleasure, even though I'm afraid that maybe I won't be able to give that to someone who's much younger and much more attractive than me."

I think even without this layer of the transactional relationship there, this is still a challenge for a lot of us. I hear so many people who again, I think in the absence of even knowing what it is that they want, or what it is that they enjoy, often default to the sense of, "Well, what turns me on is what turns you on," or "What turns me on is turning you on or pleasing you."

While that's not necessarily a lie for a lot of people, I do think that we're sometimes socialized to think that it's really, really selfish to have pleasure that's separate from giving our partner pleasure. I guess in touching in on that, is there anything that you're hoping that people would take away from looking at that particular relationship in this film where the directions of who's actually giving pleasure or maybe a little bit, shall we say, sometimes not always clear.

Sophie: There's so many layers in that.

Sophie: Isn't it interesting that Nancy is paying for this experience and yet she still has the moment where she said--

She's like, "Am I okay?" I'm not a disappointment basically, and she can't believe it. Even though it's transactional, we're so indoctrinated with some ideas there. Of course, giving pleasure can be a sexual preference, and some people really love it. In fact, in our film, I think Leo genuinely has a sexual preference towards the giving of pleasure, the watching of somebody have pleasure.

One thing I love about queer community, as opposed to heterosexual community, is that there's sometimes an embracing and enjoyment of those different positions, those different preferences, and really going and leaning into them a little bit rather than an expectation that it should always work the same way for everybody. Now, I've forgotten what your question actually was. Can you ask me again? I got so taken off in some of your ideas.

Dedeker: It's actually a little bit more of a general question that speaks to this pleasure topic in general. We were just curious about, is there any particular message about pleasure that you're hoping that people take away from watching this relationship in the film?

Sophie: Yes, pleasure is an interesting thing. I think it's okay for us to go after pleasure to find it, to seek it in every day. I think there's no reason that we shouldn't have it. There's nothing wrong with pleasure. It's a great thing. I also think it shifts and changes, like any dynamic between two people in terms of giving or receiving or accepting something yourself. It doesn't have to be one way forever. That's the beauty of relationships. They should change and shift and move inside a conversation or whatever.

This woman who's a sex and well-being educator said to me once, and I think it's probably quite a famous idea. She was like, "After you have a sexual encounter or any encounter between two people or more, if you thought of it as the campsite rule, we'd all be much better off, which is like, let's leave it better than we found it." I'm like, "Man, I wish that I was told that as a young person." I'm like, "Wouldn't that be a great goal?" It can be anything as long as we leave it better. It's so nice.

Jase: We've got this clear theme of Nancy, of Emma Thompson's character, struggling with her own feelings of shame and resistance to experiencing pleasure, things like that. I'm going to try not to spoil too much. We also learn little bits about Leo's past, and some struggles that he's maybe mostly recovered from or has more proactively worked through, but also getting taught to have a lot of shame around his own sexuality and things like that.

I guess appreciated that we got that too, that we were able to walk that line between our sex worker character is-- seems very emotionally mature and very put together, but we also see that he's had pain too. It's not like, "Oh, it's just always been easy for him." I was just curious if you could speak a little bit to the process of developing that character and trying to walk that line.

Sophie: It was really important to me that we presented Leo as one of the leads, as the leading man, let's call him, and also really important that he was-- Well, this is funny, he's not just there to service Nancy's story, although he's there to service Nancy. In terms of narratively, he's more than that. You know the opening where we meet Leo first, and we're with him and it's really an attempt to point outside the frame.

It's about that there is more going on for a character like this than what we're going to do in this very formally restrained movie. It was also really important to me like you said that, even though he's become very good at what he does, he's really embraced something about what his talents are and he's worked hard at it. That doesn't mean that it's all been gorgeous and smooth sailing, and everything's been great for him. It also doesn't mean that he's just had some big huge, like, terrible life to be there as a sex worker.

There's a line of finding a past where shame had been put on him, where his desire for pleasure was squashed in some way, and yet, where he rose out of that, and still continued to find something that he was very good at, was important. It was one of the things that kept shifting and changing until it landed. I think it only really landed once Daryl was cast and we had been talking to sex workers for a while.

Suddenly it was like, "Okay, here's where we think the story is now that we know who Leo is," because an actor like Daryl just bring a certain quality to something and he needs to be able to access that story too. It was right until then. I didn't want it to be a big reveal, like boom, boom, but it needed to feel real and present and connected to who he was as a character like why he is who he is now. His mom and his-- Well, let's not talk about her that–too much away.

Jase: Don't give it too much away.

Dedeker: Well, I do think it was important that it's not like this huge big reveal. It doesn't take on this tone of like, "Oh, he's been a broken doll the whole time." At least the sense that I got was very much when he's talking about the difficult things from his past it's like, yes, it's still painful, but he's not broken. He's not completely unhealed or unrecovered. Clearly, there's some growth and resilience here instead of just being broken.

Sophie: I think of him as a character who's done a lot of work on himself. It's a weird thing to say, but he's someone who's really thought about how he is with people and what his own baggage is, he's done that. I think there still is a lot of hurt inside that when something's happened to you at a young age, you know that it sits with you, but doesn't mean that he hasn't yet been able to move forward from that.

Jase: Before we go on to a couple more topics like consent and talking about how human these characters are, we want to take a quick break to talk about our sponsors for this show, and some ways that you can support this show so that we can continue to keep this information coming to everyone out there for free. Please take a moment, check those out and if any seem interesting to you go follow the links, because that directly helps us.

Dedeker: I want to talk about consent. I actually want to cut to so this gets explored in the story quite a bit. I want to start with talking about on-set and managing consent of the actors and the crew and everyone themselves. I know that this is something that in the entertainment industry is relatively new like past five years. I know for myself in the past five years, I suddenly know six intimacy coordinators, for friends who weren't intimacy coordinators before.

There's been an acknowledgment that there is a real need to be very mindful and very intentional and very careful when we're throwing real human people into situations where they're performing sex or getting very, very intimate with each other. I suppose when you read a script like this, and you're starting to get into pre-production for this process, it's like, where do you even begin knowing the content of what the story is going to be like and what kind of situations you're throwing your actors into?

Sophie: A great question. I love the rise of the intimacy coordinator. I think it's brilliant. I think there's been such an abuse of power so often in our industry. I think that actors can feel like they can be really clear about their boundaries now is just going to make better and better work. We've already seen it. The shows that are using great intimacy coordinators and the films are just making the most beautiful work. I think that's because, as a director, you get to say, "Truly, this is what I want."

The actors get to say, "This is what my boundaries are for real," and no one's upset about it, but you work out where the to marry and meet, and suddenly, it's like, fantastic. There's none of that weird tiptoeing around everything that happens. I guess, there were some directors who would just take your shop off, do this, or whatever. There are some who were like, afraid to ask for that, the whole gamut of that.We didn't actually use an intimacy coordinator for this project. We talked to an amazing one.

I think we embody a lot of the ideas of intimacy coordinators, actually, in our process, too. I knew that Emma whatever she wanted to do, which she was going to be strong about and sure about, and she's at a point where she can be really clear about that. I didn't have any concerns about that. At first, was really keen to make sure that when Daryl was consenting to whatever we were doing. It wasn't just the consent of, "I'm in the room with Dame Emma Thompson, and she wants me to do it."

Dedeker: I feel like that makes it more complicated.

Sophie: It is.

Dedeker: I know, having been on the actor side, you do those mental gymnastics right of, "Well, I'm not really comfortable with taking my top off in this situation or having this person touch me in this situation but this is the job. They could replace me at any moment. If things go awry, I could just be out on the street and especially if Emma Thompson's in the room staring at me." It really changes the way that you calculate those things.

Sophie: Exactly. Sometimes it's just like that to please a director you're acutely aware of the director to like, are they just saying yes to me, because they want to please me. That conversation about consent was constant. It wasn't just the like, here's the question. There's the answer. It was like, "Is this for sure what we want to do?" I had to trust that Daryl was an adult as well and professional adult who could make these decisions as long as I was asking enough and asking in the right way.

He felt like he was in control just as much as we did. I don't like it as well when people treat actors not like they're grownups. You know where it's like, "He won't want to do this in a few weeks," oftentimes it would be with women. Actually, sometimes actors do want to do these things like show a story the way it should be shown and are willing to use their bodies in this way, and making the choice for them is not right either. We were just very frank with each other and we had a deal. We were very frank with what we felt. I was very clear with them like you never have to do anything. A, do you want to do nudity? Yes. B, today do you want to do nudity? Yes. Is there anything that you are not feeling good about today or you don't want to do? That was always on the table. The final bit of the pact was once we're in the edit suite, we've got other material. If you don't want nudity in it, we will take it out.

That was always there because to me, that just ensures that they're doing it in a way that they are the most free and comfortable because they know they've got the power to take it out at the end. I love the film with the nudity. I really love the way that it feels ordinary in the film at times, but yes, I could have told it without that too if that was what it took.

Dedeker: Right. Yes, definitely.

Jase: Now on the subject of consent, not just in real life with the actors, but how it's portrayed in the film, something that really struck me right in our first scene with the two of them was how smoothly Daryl's character, Leo, navigates consent with Nancy, especially in that first interaction we see him check in with her a lot. He keeps checking in throughout the process, but he does it in a way that feels sexy and confident, and natural.

First, I just want to say bravo. Well done. I love that we have some examples of look, here's actual consent happening, instead of the movie thing of like, oh, as soon as these two characters realize they're into each other, nothing, it's said, and it's all just music and they're moving around and we see all these close-up shots of legs and toes and whatever and we don't see any of that negotiation.

First of all, I love that. I love that we're getting some more examples of realistic, sexy, confident consent conversations happening. Then part of that though, is that the backbone of consent is in explicit communication, but in reality, a lot of it also comes down to the nonverbal cues. Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack do that so well in the scene. I was curious for you, how did that process go?

I imagine seeing the actors do it is going to change some of, "Oh, you know what, this one doesn't need to be a line," or, "Hey, let's add in a line here." How did you approach that to try to craft a scene that's realistic that doesn't feel like an infomercial for consent or something like that?

Sophie: Totally. Yes, I know we have this really funny version of consent, don't we, where it's like we're going to sit down and have a very thorough conversation with our notebooks and so there's like, "What do you like? Well, actually that could be cool. I'm not adverse to that either." The truth is consent is all about finding and making sure that there's a continued enthusiastic yes about things.

I think that enthusiastic yes can be nonverbal as well as verbal. I think we do know, we mostly know if we're paying attention. I think there's lots of instances where people don't care about that and have proven to not care, but we do know. I think there's something about showing consent on screen in action, where it can be very charged. There's an electricity in it when they start to speak about it. What I love about this story in the end is that it's not just Leo who leads Nancy through a consent process and also just that's because he's good at it.

He's good at what he does. He shows how to do that and she takes it up and she does it as well. Later she's like, "Can you take your top off?" She's paid him, remember, so some people will be like, "I can have whatever I want," but she even does it. Yes, he's shown her in action something that she responds to and I guess it's just empathy as well. It's like just making sure that the other person is feeling good or wants what's on offer or is comfortable with what you want.

We didn't actually talk a humongous amount consent. It's really important to me. I've made a couple of things that were deeply about consent. One in particular was a TV show in Australia called The Hunting, which is about teenagers who shared explicit images of their friends online. That is about consent on a whole other level. The deep dive that I went into for that was still really on my mind.

One thing I love being around people that are younger than me is consent is an idea for me that's always been there, but has always been tainted by a little bit of the way I grew up, which was that makes it a bit unsexy. Surely you just want to do it and you just want someone to know what you want without talking about it and all of that.

Even the kind of it's good to not always show how much you want something, all these weird things that we did. Being around younger people, I'm like, "Oh my God, I actually see you doing this and actively participating in a really cool, sexy way." You feel good in it. I'm so thrilled. I'm like, "Yes, guys, go do it." I think just for some people, it's really natural. If they're thinking about the person they're opposite, it's very natural.

Yes, we didn't intellectualize it very much. It just was very comfortable. Also, I think it's words and gesture, touch. They're not separate in the film and they're not separate for Leo. One of the great things about Leo is one of the expectations that he shatters for Nancy is the idea that conversation and sex are two separate things. For Leo, the continuum crosses over and that's blissful to watch.

Dedeker: I love that you bring up the generational part of it because that was something that also really struck me in the film is this isn't necessarily the main focus of the story, but that there is almost a little bit of the generational clash of values around sex, around pleasure, around consent. Emma Thompson has that great line about, now she knows people whose hobby is pole dancing. When she was growing up, it's like, who would do that? Right? I thought it was really interesting that that was in there of just almost just showing just how things have changed generationally.

Sophie: Yes, it's a funny thing, isn't it? Obviously, there are people in every generation of all of these kinds. I think for Nancy, in particular, her feeling is that she is the way she is because of the age she grew up in. In many ways, she's kind of accepted something that was common in that age group and she's never really questioned it. Some people, for whatever reason, like Leo, have to challenge. They have things happen to them that makes them challenge those things.

I always feel it is a changing generational thing. Then I feel nervous about talking about it like that, because I'm like, "Well, obviously there's all these incredible people across all ages and not everyone was a Nancy." Emma Thompson herself is nothing like Nancy. Same age, same country. I guess not everybody of Daryl's age quite did all of this.

I do think it's great to-- I think we forget that we have an idea that we don't cross over. We have an idea that two people that don't seem alike can't find something. Then when you see opposite another human, there's all this stuff where you do connect and you are the same, even if your experiences are different.

Dedeker: Again, to focus back on Leo Grande, this character he has, he's just so confident and so cool, but in this really gentle, not very threatening way, he's very charming, especially when we first meet him. It is interesting he could have stayed that way the whole time. It probably would've been easy to set up Nancy as our character on a journey and Leo is just sort of the guardian angel, fairy godmother who shows up to teach her all these lessons about sex and pleasure and then just flip off into the night and then now Nancy's fixed.

We do get glimpses sometimes of his own self-consciousness or of his own nervousness. We have this interesting journey of slowly getting to learn more about his inner world, even though he's very actively trying to stay away from talking about his personal life. I suppose the question is how did you work to strike the balance within this character of someone who can be there to address these issues we've been talking about, consent, pleasure, sex work, while also allowing them to be human and flawed?

Sophie: Because he's a sex worker, Leo comes into the room going, "Okay, what is it this person wants in front of me?" Oftentimes, he's probably come across an idea of a fantasy that somebody wants. Okay, they want me to be hot, in control, a little bit romantic. He's looking at Nancy, he's going, "This is probably what she is after." He's trying to create that character.

That was really exciting for Daryl and I to do that, to be like he's put on a performance. I love the moment when she first goes into the bathroom and he's like, "Do I take my towel off? How do I get good? How am I going to show her how I am?"

Jase: Yes, I love that.

Sophie: We played up to that a lot because it was like, yes, in that moment, you could send him off to show something else about him from outside, a message from somebody or, I don't know, something dark or whatever. To have him be so relatable, it's like, "Is this sexy? Would she want me in my knickers?" That just-- I start to see, oh, there's a guy under here who's trying to be good at this. That's very pleasurable for me. Then I suppose there are times where Leo as a character can't help, but step in when he believes something as well. There are moments in the film where Nancy's saying something that

Leo doesn't agree with, and instead of just sticking to the fantasy, he just can't help but challenge her. That's an enjoyable thing to watch as well I think. There's this some documentary theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, who says, "You can't put everything in the frame, you have to point to outside the frame."

In a story like this with a character like Leo, where you're not going to go to his house. You're not going to go out and find out all these things about him. You have to suggest that there's more. Daryl and I talked a lot about what's going on inside Leo's head when he comes in, what does he expect that she wants. When she says to him, "I've never touched someone like you before."

He's like, "Mmm, someone like me? What does she mean?" He's always trying to work that stuff out. He would've been in so many different situations I think in that moment, where he's been chosen for a particular reason, whatever reason that is, and trying to work out where that comes from. I found that exciting, and we do reveal a little bit about his past but we don't reveal much about his current life.

I think a lot of people who have different thoughts going on in their heads and different versions of him, but we do a little weird costuming thing. Where he begins and he's got this yellow beanie on the first shot he's wearing the yellow beanie and he's got his work uniform on, his gorgeous outfit, Leo Grande outfit. He takes a beanie off in the very first shot.

That was in some ways just an attempt by me to rather than have him have a skateboard or like have him have a paintbrush or something. He was like, there is another person here that-- he's coming into the room as a character. Remember that he's coming in as a character. When he comes back later where he comes back on his own terms and for the fourth meeting, spoilers, he's in his own clothes. He's not in his kind of Leo Grande clothes,

Jase: All right. Yes, that that changes throughout the film, in those different scenes. That idea of that you just mentioned of him pushing back sometimes on certain things that she says. That was also really interesting, going back to the consent thing, but there's that idea of like, "Oh, the mood's ruined now."

That we tend to have this thing of like, "Oh, I don't want to say anything that's going to ruin the mood." That both of them throughout the film do things that ruin the mood, but then they're able to get it back. It's like we're staying present enough with each other that we can have a more authentic connection because we're willing to push each other a little bit.

Sophie: Yes. It actually gets better, right? Every time Leo doesn't just play the fantasy, every time he says something that's true that he's like, "Oh, I killed the mood." She's like, "I don't think there was one." It actually goes further. It gets deeper, and it works. It's true that the more authentic we are with each other, the better those connections are. That's not in conflict with, "I've got my boundaries. I'm not going to tell you about my whole life." Being authentic is different from revealing everything. I think every time he makes a mistake, I think it works better what they're going through.

Dedeker: From a filmmaking perspective, it also strikes me because I think at the beginning of the film, you don't necessarily realize, "Oh, we're mostly going to be in this hotel room for most of the film." It's like, I think as a viewer, we're trained, "Oh, I'm watching this sexy scene. It's interesting and arousing, but then someone makes a mistake and the rood is muined, and then we're going to cut to something else." That's the end of the scene.

That was the end of the interaction that we're moving on but no we're staying and riding that wave, of even when the conversation gets awkward and uncomfortable, we work through it and then we come back to the mood and come back to the sexiness and come back to the pleasure and then something else happens.

I think that really struck me as to be quite honest, maybe even a more realistic depiction of what happens with sex and with negotiating sex is that it's not always, like Jay said, "We're into each other, the clothes come off, the music swells and then we're done in the weird L-shaped sheep thing." I guess, I do want to touch on that for you as a filmmaker. I don't know in your personal history, if you have a lot of experience of being limited to like, we're only staying in this one space. We're not cutting to a bunch of different places. We're really sticking with this one conversation and this one energy.

Sophie: Yes. I like things to be a bit uncomfortable I think. It's just how naturally in me that that discomfort is interesting. I really enjoy restriction. When I in-- that sounds really sexual, that wasn't sexual at all. In filmmaking I really enjoy restriction. When I first heard this and I knew it was going to be in one room, I found that really exciting. I was like, "Yes, all I want to do is be with these two people and go further and further and further, thrilling.

My first drama film is a film called 52 Tuesdays and that was set every Tuesday for a year and we shot it every Tuesday for a year within a set of rules and it was every Tuesday had to be in the movie. We could only film on that day, had to be in consecutive order. We wrote it as we went. It was a real learning process, but I really enjoy something about the limitations that can we place on ourselves creatively.

In some ways this had that too. It's inside the formal constraint. Yes. We can't go out and see Leo. We can't see his life. We can't see her house and the char-- find her character through that so how do we do it? How do we understand who she is? How do we understand what's important between them? To me, that's creative freedom.

That's where it gets really gritty and good. We are all of the creative team, who are brilliant artists on this, like who are doing very delicate work that is not very noticeable, I think on a film like this, but where they're all working very hard and very precisely to tell that story as I would do this sort of thing all the time. I would be like, "Yes, give me another set of rules. Let's try and make this one good." Oh, that's so interesting.

Jase: Yes. Working around limitations. I was a music composition major in college, and so much of it's about, you're just trying to construct limitations for yourself to then try to work around them. Because that's where the creativity comes. That's where the interest and fun comes from. That's--

Sophie: Totally because if you're like, you can do anything at all. I'm like, "Oh." It's like when you're shopping. You can have anything you want. Oh, it's just a lot of choice. Like--

.

Jase: Exactly.

Dedeker: Before we wrap up, I just wanted to give you the opportunity. Is there anything that you want to talk about that you don't normally get asked about in interviews or that you would love people to ask you and they don't? If there's nothing there, that's fine too, but just wanted to give the opportunity.

Sophie: Yes. I would've talked about those people on the creative team, like Brian, who's the cinematographer and editor, mirror and the production designer, and the composer and sound designer. They were all just so exceptional on this. Also Becky, the actress who plays Becky, who I really love Izy Laughland. T

hat's a really hard, to come in at the end of that big process with two actors who you've spent so much time with on screen. She's just so dry and excellent and that would've been a real challenge, but I love her in that role. Always want to-- no one ever asked me about her. I mean, at Q&As afterward, people do because she's well loved. Yes.

Jase: Yes. Oh no. I was like giddy when we finally had that scene with her, I was clapping my hands. I was like, "Oh my God, I love her so much." Because yes, she just-- it's also, we're in a pretty tense place in the movie and she just comes along and in a very deadpan way, brings a ton of humor to the situation. It really-- oh man. I love that. Yes.

Sophie: I know when she's like she's out of school but you can just imagine her in a school uniform, just being as dry as that.

Jase: Yes, it's so good.

Dedeker: Also again, a fantastic piece of Nancy's past as well that we get little snippets of throughout Nancy telling her story, but to have her story told by somebody else is also really interesting right at the end there.

Sophie: Yes. One thing that was really important to me, as well as the film being about Nancy discovering something about herself, not just about, Leo, but it was important that she didn't just change the way that she interacted with him, like, "Oh, she's so nice to him now." It was important that we saw that maybe she wanted to think differently about some of the ways that she'd behaved in the world.

Becky and her past as a student really helped to do that to see that maybe what she has gone through with Leo and understanding his past and that shame that was laid on him is something that can really shift her way of thinking about other people.

Jase: Yes. That's a great point and I love that. I guess, I would hope that not only Nancy, but everyone who watches this movie also comes away thinking, "Hey, maybe I could do a little better too." We're always trying to improve ourselves.

Sophie: Yes. Maybe a little better to myself. Maybe a little nicer to me.

Jase: Absolutely. I love that.

Dedeker: Yes, that's a great note, I think to wrap things up on. Thank you so much, Sophie for joining us today. Can you tell our listeners where and when they can watch this fantastic film and also where they can learn more about you and follow your work?

Sophie: Sure. Yes. Good luck to you. Leo Grande is out already on Hulu, so you can go and watch it at your own pleasure. If you want to find out anymore about me, I have a collective of filmmakers in Australia called Closer Production.

We make lots of films and find out more about me and to the other people in it by looking us up.

Dedeker: Excellent. Thank you, Sophie.

Sophie: Thanks, guys. That was really fun. That was a good, deep conversation.

Dedeker: Oh, good. I'm glad.

Jase: In our social media the week that this episode will come out, we put up posts with quotes or little things mentioning the show. Two of those I pulled from the press document that your team sent over with a quote from you that says, "Do you allow yourself to experience pleasure? If you don't, then why not?" I thought this was a cool, intriguing question to get people to come check out this conversation. Another one is, "A truly impassioned and emotionally healthy sex worker is a character we don't see a lot of on screen."

That's another you quote. During this episode, you were talking to young people teaching them first about what pleasure feels like before what it should look like. I modified that just slightly and I wanted to run this by you and tell me if this is a good quote to attribute to you. It just says, "I wish we could first learn what pleasure feels like before we're taught what it should look like."

Sophie: Yes, I think that's great.

Jase: Is that cool?

Sophie: Yes.

Jase: Okay. I just want to make sure that you're cool with that.

Sophie: That sounds so interesting and smart. Thanks.

Jase: Awesome. Okay, great.