Debut director Muriel d’Ansembourg on portraying the adult film world in NL Wave title ‘Truly Naked’

Boasting the tagline “when porn has become the norm, intimacy is the new taboo”, Muriel d’Ansembourg is under no illusions that her debut feature Truly Naked, with its dark themes and explicit sexual content, will require deft and sensitive handling.

“Sexuality is something that people, on the one hand, are interested in, but on the other, are quite afraid of,” she says. “It’s something very private but, at the same time, something everybody seems to be looking at…[but this] is really a film with heart about people longing for real connection and the adult film world is just the backdrop to explore this theme.”

Set in the UK with a British cast, the film tells of an introverted teenager (played by newcomer Caolán O’Gorman) whose father Dylan (Andrew Howard) runs a small-time porn business. With the business struggling, father and son relocate to a small seaside town. 

A Dutch-Belgian-French co-production by Isabella Films (Neth), Prime Time (Belgium), and Cinéma Defacto and Ici et Là Productions (France), the film has secured Dutch distribution with Paradiso and is now looking for a sales agent. It is screening at NLWave this week.

Truly Naked had a very lengthy gestation, with the idea germinating in 2011. D’Ansembourg developed the script by herself before meeting Isabella Films’ Els Vandevorst whose producing credits include Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone and Brian DePalma’s Domino. Gamila Ylstra, then director of Amsterdam-based talent development hub the Binger Filmlab, introduced them because, says d’Ansembourg, “she thought we could be an interesting team. We were both strong, spirited females, interested in films [about] intimacy”.

Casting

Working with casting director Mark Lee, d’Ansembourg cast adult movie star Savage in the film. “She hadn’t done narrative work like this before. I started watching a lot of the improv stuff she had done in pornography and I could already see she had something very raw and unique.”

All the actors, including the young lead, were 18 or over, and an intimacy coordinator was employed during the shoot, something d’Ansembourg had already decided when she was writing the script.

“If you make a film about a teenager growing up in a family that produces porn, I didn’t want to shy away from it,“ she says. “I want to make films that are as truthful as possible. If I was to sugarcoat it, or shy away from it, I wouldn’t be able to show the audience what this boy experiences. So there are explicit elements in the film [but it] is about showing something very real, very raw, with tenderness.”

The director is expecting some audiences to draw comparisons between her feature and Swedish director Ninja Thyberg’s controversial 2021 feature Pleasure about a young Swedish woman working within the LA porn industry.

“Only the backdrop is the same,” she says. “Truly Naked is about an unusual father-son relationship and people looking for connections, flawed people going through messy situations, but very much longing to find something true and real with another person.”

Rabbit hole

D’Ansembourg, whose London Film School graduation short was nominated for a BAFTA in 2013, sees herself as one of a growing group of female filmmakers who are attracted by films with strong, sensual elements to them.

D’Ansembourg’s most recent short film, which screened at Tribeca last year and will be playing this week at the Netherland Film Festival, also took her into the world of adult entertainment. Shot in Amsterdam and London last year and also produced by Isabella, Fuck-a-Fan also stars Savage in the tale of a viral porn star and the shy fan (Joes Brauer) who wins a competition to make out with her in front of the camera.

Despite the common setting, d’Ansembourg wasn’t an expert in the adult film industry before starting work on these projects. “I had to do quite a bit of research for Truly Naked,” she says. “After a while, I realised I had really gone down the rabbit hole and some of it is not easy to watch.”

The writer-director calls out the double standards over sex and violence. When Fuck-a-Fan was shown recently at a festival in Asia, the title had to be blanked out and replaced with asterisks.

“I wrote on my social media that if it was called Kill-a-Fan, there would have been no problem. Honestly, I’d rather see two people making out than someone being killed!”

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