The first mainstream English language film with an unsimulated sex scene to be passed uncut in Great Britain.
In reference to her male co-star, Kerry Fox says: "My biggest fear was that the other actor might be a horrible person," she says. "Patrice had asked him to do the job, and he had asked to meet. I am sure he wanted to figure me out, too. But we were able to make a judgment within the first couple of minutes that we were thinking along the same lines." There then followed the sort of meeting that could inspire a script for a film of its own: Fox and Linklater dining with Rylance and his wife, to discuss the project. "We talked about it a lot, the four of us," she recalls. It must have been a remarkably mature discussion? "Yes - and drunken."
Did she ever feel, at any time, that they were planning pornography? "No, because I really don't see myself as a porn star. Any porn I have seen bears no resemblance to what we were doing. The scenes were very clearly and precisely written. What is common in erotic scenes is that actors are often left to it by the director. In this case, we knew exactly what we were doing at all times. We admitted to each other that we did not know how we were going to work on it, so we started at the beginning and filmed all those intimate scenes in one week. I see film-making as a process of solving problems, one at a time."
One problem could have been that Rylance clearly had to become aroused. To be blunt: did Fox? "I don't know," she says. "As in all acting, you are using different parts of yourself. If I do scenes where I feel, 'I really felt that and all the emotions,' then it is usually crap. It's indulgent, it's slow and it's wishy-washy. So if I want an audience to respond, I store up the emotions, and it is almost as if I have gone beyond feeling it myself."
So, did she enjoy the sex scenes, and was she attracted to her co-star? "That is a very complicated question," she responds. "I think as a piece of work, the film gave me a huge sense of satisfaction, because I felt I was pushed and able to perform well. So on that level, absolutely. I was working at such an extreme pitch, and what I enjoy most in my life is acting." Did Rylance have an orgasm at any point? "That's a question you'd have to ask Mark."
Patrice Chéreau originally wanted Gary Oldman for the lead role, but he turned it down because of the sex scenes. The actor helped him with showing different locations in London.
Mark Rylance told the Times shortly after the release: "There is no real sex any more than when someone is killed in a movie they really die. It must appear that we're both exhibitionists, but we were cast for our acting. The whole thing is a story. Pretend." However, in one scene Fox is unmistakably shown fondling Rylance's erect penis and then taking it into her mouth and the other sex scenes look very real too. Fourteen years later, Rylance gave The Wall Street Journal a more nuanced account of what happened: [Rylance] felt that he'd given his all to the performance, only to be taken advantage of by the director, the late Patrice Chéreau. "It soured me on my life for two months," he says. "It's my mistake, but I felt Patrice put undue pressure on me on set to do that. And at that point I didn't have the confidence as a film actor to say no. Now I think a lot of actors that people say are difficult are actually just being sensible."
In a 2001 lengthy column for The Guardian, Alexander Linklater described the jealousy he experienced when his partner Kerry Fox took the real-sex role in Intimité (2001). Linklater concludes that he accepted the unsimulated oral scene, but he insists that the sexual intercourse is an illusion. Nevertheless, critics have declared its realist tendencies. Linda Williams, for instance, writes that "Intimité (2001) opens with urgent, hurried and explicit penetrative sex", and Tanya Krzywinska writes that in this first scene "the spectator is left in little doubt that penetration has occurred".