Olivia’s Wilde Ride: Directing ‘Don’t Worry Darling,’ Making Harry Styles a Movie Star and Being ‘Blown the F— Away’ by Florence Pugh

variety.com:

Olivia Wilde is talking about the O-word. No, not the Oscars, but her approach to sex scenes in her new movie, “Don’t Worry Darling.” “Men don’t come in this film,” she declares over cucumber sandwiches and scones at Claridge’s, just blocks away from Buckingham Palace. “Only women here!” In Wilde’s second directorial outing after 2019’s indie high school coming-of-age story “Booksmart,” Florence Pugh and Harry Styles star as a married couple living in a quaint, experimental utopia called Victory.

Pugh plays Alice, a “Mad Men”-type housewife whose reality begins to crack, revealing disturbing truths underneath her seemingly perfect world.

When the trailer for the sci-fi thriller dropped in May, social media was buzzing about Styles’ character, Jack, going down on Alice on top of a dining room table. “Female pleasure, the best versions of it that you see nowadays, are in queer films,” Wilde says. “Why are we more comfortable with female pleasure when it’s two women on film?

In hetero sex scenes in film, the focus on men as the recipients of pleasure is almost ubiquitous.” Wilde, 38, sees the world through a post-feminist prism, and the women in her films drive action on their own, without the help of men. “It’s all about immediacy and extreme passion for one another,” Wilde says of the film’s complicated central relationship. “The impractical nature of their sex speaks to their ferocious desire for one another.