Nicole Kidman might still be blushing over some of the scenes she filmed in her new erotic thriller Babygirl, but the film’s director said the actress never wavered about the sexual material.

“[Nicole] asked to read it, and she immediately said, ‘I will do everything that is in that script.’ She really wanted to support it in the way that it was,” Halina Reijn, who also wrote the film, recalled to Yahoo Entertainment. “That was like a dream.”

Kidman stars as Romy, a high-powered CEO who begins an affair with a much younger intern, putting both her career and her family at risk. Harris Dickinson plays Kidman’s paramour Samuel, and as the film’s trailer shows, yes, there are a lot of risqué scenes. However, Kidman was never scared off by the sex acts.

“We had a lot of conversations, like Harris and I had a lot of conversations, about [the scenes] because it is vulnerable material. It’s scary material in a way. So we did have to talk a lot to each other, but it was never like [Nicole] wanted to change things in the way that I envisioned them ever. She really surrendered to the project,” Reijn said.

Dickinson, whose character takes on a dominant role in their relationship, didn’t feel like he had to do anything too “exposing or vulnerable.”

“I think the hardest stuff was finding the truth of the scenes and getting the nuance of them that was there in the script. Then you have to execute it. So I think the sexual stuff was OK. I mean, we had a really good intimacy coordinator that facilitated it really well,” he told Yahoo. “And Halina knew exactly how things needed to go and what the emotion was and what the feeling was. So I think when you have that, it all feels very easy in a way.”

Reijn emphasized the importance of having an intimacy coordinator on set, crediting Lizzy Talbot, who has worked on TV shows like Bridgerton, for her “amazing” work on the film.

“It’s crucial,” she said, “and for people who don’t really understand what it is, it’s the same as a stunt coordinator. Like when you’re choreographing a fight for a movie. … They often have these kinds of tricks that make it easier and make it less embarrassing. And everybody just knows what’s going on.”

Reijn continued: “But if you look at our movie, I understand that our movie is meant to be very sensual, and hopefully it is to people. But there’s not that much actual sex acts in it at all. To me, one of the most sexy scenes is when [Samuel] orders a glass of milk for her and she drinks it and they are not even touching.”

Reijn wanted to show a “kind of elegant, graceful erotica” with Babygirl.

“I think a lot of it is in the mind, but of course, it is kind of maybe a little taboo, and that’s why it’s spicy to people and they want to talk about it,” Reijn added.

“I do think that in a lot of these sexual thrillers, the old ones that were directed and written often by men, at the end of the movie, it was always like somebody had to get punished. If someone had had an affair or something, we had to kill them or punish them in some way. And I think in our movie, we want to really stress the humanity of it all and just show that everybody is ambiguous,” she said. “We’re all angels and devils.”

Babygirl is in theaters Dec. 25.