Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman Prepared for "I Want Your Sex" Scenes With a "Pain Scale"

Cooper Hoffman had never shot a sex scene before joining Gregg Araki's erotic thriller 'I Want Your Sex.' So it's understandable that he felt uneasy the first time he stepped onto set and found himself surrounded by handcuffs, high heels, whips, and chains.

"Even if you're scared to do something, you do it anyway," Hoffman told Variety at the film's Los Angeles premiere. "Because there's no reason not to do something in life just because you're afraid of it."

While preparing for difficult scenes with an intimacy coordinator, Hoffman and Olivia Wilde used a "pain scale" running from 1 to 10: the intensity of physical contact was discussed on this scale before every rehearsal, and boundaries were clarified before a scene was ever shot. It turned out that a moment in which Wilde "really hit" her co-star hard registered as only "a seven or eight" on the scale.

Araki's film is being seen as a return to the daring filmmaking that defined the director's work for the '90s generation; the team emphasizes that the shared language established in rehearsals created an atmosphere of trust on set.