37-year old actress-filmmaker-performance artist Josephine Decker [1] (Full Frontal) in Room 104 [S2E7]
Q: It seems like you’re comfortable with nudity, and you’re comfortable using your body to express yourself in your art. What’s it like to direct yourself in a scene involving nudity and sex?
Josephine Decker: “I’ve done sex scenes before and scenes where I’ve been naked, and I think that’s almost always been with a male director. I think I look more comfortable than I really am in all those projects. But this episode was fascinating to do because I had total control. This whole episode is basically my concept, and it felt very personal to me. When we got in the room and started filming, between a couple of takes I went in the bathroom with the assistant director and just had to cry because it was so vulnerable.
“If I was able to divorce my personal experience from my ideology, I think that we as Americans have a very distorted concept around the nude form, and that’s probably because we don’t have images of naked women outside of either pornography or really fancy sex scenes. Thank god Lena Dunham made Girls and introduced us to the female body in a different way. I think that did so much. I feel that, to some degree, nudity is a huge part of our lives, and a huge part of our relationships with our partners, and when we perceive it in a certain way, which is like a very sexual way, it inhibits our ability to embrace ourselves in all forms. I think it’s important that we share nude bodies, and that we not be ashamed. Most of the time in this episode when I’m naked, I’m yelling. [laughs]”
