'Gehraiyaan' intimacy director on Deepika, Siddhant & Ananya's scenes in the film

Bollywood has had its share of controversies attached to intimate scenes in movies and while we have evolved with the portrayal of intimacy on-screen, the approach and mentality towards the same has been rather different. But with the film, Gehraiyaan, an entirely new thing is being tried as director Shakun Batra roped in a special intimacy director to supervise, guide and help the actors with the scenes and the storyline.

India-based Ukrainian filmmaker Dar Gai who was the intimacy director in the film recently opened up about how she ensured the actors felt safe while shooting the intimate scenes that feel so real onscreen.

Talking about it with ETimes. Gai first talked about how her experience was, "The experience was extremely collaborative and very inspiring because everyone I've worked with, starting from actors to the crew and Shakun (Batra), they understood the role of an intimacy director and why Shakun wanted to have an intimacy director on the set and how it can make everyone's life more easy in a way, and that understanding brought me to the part of the project where I was conducting different workshops, where I was directing and choreographing certain scenes. I think our main task for Shakun was to create a space where actors feel safe, inspired and excited to experiment and to try something new and at the same time, their boundaries are not being crossed."

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Then talking about working with Padukone, Panday and Chaturvedi, she said, "They're extremely collaborative, extremely polite and very professional. When I was conducting the workshops, I didn't know how they would react to me, I didn't know whether they will accept all the terms of the new world that we'll be creating together. But they were so curious and so eager to try something new that it was extremely inspiring for me. It just proved to me that all actors involved in it were extremely professional and at the same time they had this childish naivety that always helps us and pushes us to be better than nobody yesterday."

Talking about how it is a first that a film has an intimacy director, to which she said, "Yeah, I think it's great. I think Shakun understands the importance of intimacy directors, intimacy coaches, intimacy coordinators for the industry and it was absolutely his call. We never discussed that, we never discussed the credits. I think subconsciously he knew that this is something that can maybe push the industry to have a bit more of that or change the industry. So the whole credit just goes to him. I feel that even I didn't know the importance before we had a long discussion with Shakun and this is extremely beautiful that he's able to create a vision for something that can impact so many different people."

Gehraiyaan is all set to release on Amazon Prime Video on 11th February 2022.

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