So taking autonomy over yourself or saying you’re uncomfortable doing a certain thing might be seen as ‘difficult’ or ‘challenging’ and might prohibit you from getting work again,” she says. “There’s this idea that’s been created in our industry that performers are replaceable. An actress since 2011, she’d been in similar situations. (The first is Manisha Basu, who was hired for the film Seasons Greetings last year.) The goal of this line of work, she explains, is to make sure power dynamics on set aren’t skewed such that actors hesitate to say no to scenes they’re uncomfortable with. She’s the first from Hollywood to work on a Hindi production and only the second that the industry has ever hired. So someone might like a scene that is slow, drawn-out and sensual while another might like something quick, risky and brazen,” says the show’s intimacy director Amanda Cutting.Ĭutting’s been an intimacy coordinator for the past year - that’s how new the role is on sets - and has worked on shows such as The Good Doctor and an unaired Game of Thrones prequel. “We deliberately tried to make sure similar styles of intimacy were not depicted back to back – that there were different positions, different tones to appeal to a wide demographic. Other courses included conflict management, sensitivity training and mental health first aid - bringing an actor in a heightened emotional state back to normal. The technique, called ‘masking’, is one of many she learnt as part of a year-long certificate course conducted by Intimacy Directors International, USA. There are some scenes in which it looks like the performers are on top of each other, but they’re actually laying next to each other,” she adds. “The camera angles tell a different story than what’s actually happening on set. Nearly every sex scene in Mastram relies on some sort of visual trickery.
But then you see it on camera, and you buy it completely,” says the show’s intimacy coordinator Amanda Cutting. People on set were absolutely wowed by how what they were seeing in front of them was so different from what they were seeing on cameras. “For the scene in which the man is implied to be receiving oral intercourse, I showed the performers the frames, the angles and how the head motions had to go. There’s sex in public places, sex in an airplane bathroom and of course, a threesome the writer imagines himself having with his girlfriend’s two best friends. Each of the show’s 30-minute-long episodes has at least two sex scenes.īut here’s a behind-the-scenes secret - for most of them, the actors were nowhere near each other during filming.
The result is every porn cliché imaginable – the hot Mallu aunty next door who needs her ahem pipes fixed, the hot school teacher who invites a male student home for ‘extra classes’, the unscrupulous grocer willing to accept alternative methods of payment from a hot customer.
#Mastraam series
That scene is one of many in a series that’s risqué even by the the more relaxed standards of Indian streaming.īased on the works of popular ‘80s Hindi erotica writer Mastram, the show chronicles how he might have reimagined everyday encounters as torrid sexual fantasies for his books. She slips behind the table he’s sitting at and gets on her knees, head bobbing up and down as he shuts his eyes contentedly. In the new MX Player show Mastram, a politician and his female aide get aroused after a soft-porn novel is read to them over the phone.