BREAKING NEWS: Babygirl Director Defends Age Gap Depicted in Nicole Kidman Movie: ‘It Should Completely Be Normalized’ .giang

Nicole Kidman‘s Babygirl writer-director Halina Reijn is weighing in on the age difference explored in the new erotic thriller.

In an interview with W Magazine published Wednesday, Dec. 25, Reijn was asked a question about Babygirl adding to a recent trend in movies featuring May-December romances, from Gabrielle Union’s The Perfect Find and Laura Dern’s Lonely Planet, to Anne Hathaway’s The Idea of You and Kidman’s other project, A Family Affair.

“If we see a movie where the male actor is the same age as the female actor, we find that odd. Which is insane,” Reijn, 49, said. “It should completely be normalized that the age gaps switch and that women have different relationships.”

“We’re not trapped in a box anymore,” Reijn added. “We internalize the male gaze, we internalize patriarchy, and we need to free ourselves from it. It’s really hard.”

Babygirl stars Kidman, 57, as a married tech company CEO named Romy who engages in a risky affair with an intern at her company named Samuel (played by Harris Dickinson, 28).

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Reijn, also known for 2022’s Bodies Bodies Bodies, has said she made Babygirl as a response to the erotic films popularized in the 1990s. While speaking with W Magazine, she noted that she wanted the sex scenes to “feel incredibly hot and steamy and fun, but I also wanted them to be real.”

“Sexuality is stop-and-go. It’s never like a glamour scene from a Hollywood movie in the ’90s. That’s just not how it works,” she added.

When the director sat down for a conversation with filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko for Interview magazine published Thursday, Dec. 26, she noted that Babygirl is influenced by movies like Elle, Basic Instinct, 9½ Weeks, Secretary, The Piano Teacher and “all the thrillers of the ’90s.”

“I found so much fun in the fact that America to me has a kind of suppressed relationship towards sex, and I do too,” Reijn said. “I really relate to it. So America serves as a metaphor of my own struggles with this theme.”

Kidman told The Hollywood Reporter earlier in December that “a lot of times women are discarded at a certain period of their career as a sexual being,” so “it was really beautiful to be seen in this way” in Babygirl.

“From the minute I read it, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is a voice I haven’t seen, this is a place that I haven’t been, I don’t think audiences have been,’ ” Kidman added. “My character has reached a stage where she’s got all this power, but she’s not sure who she is, what she wants, what she desires, even though she seems to have it all. And I think that’s really relatable.”

Babygirl, which also stars Antonio Banderas, is in theaters now.