Penelope Cruz's naked scene with Ben Kingsley

Washington (ANI): Doing a naked scene with less people around helped Spanish actress Penelope Cruz relax in her new film Elegy with actor Sir Ben Kingsley.

Cruz had to strip for the intimate moment she shares with Kingsley onscreen, and director Isabel Coixet insisted everyone left the set for the awkward part of the shoot.

"Nobody else but the director was in the room. She was operating the camera and we could hear her breathing. There was nobody else on the set ever," Contactmusic quoted Cruz as saying. "The set was lit by the director of photography and Isabel operated the camera. Then it was just the sound person, myself and Ben," she said.

The scene she had to go through was one of the toughest she had ever had in a movie, and she was only able to do it because of the intimate setting.

"Telling Kepesh (Kingsley's character) that my character (Consuela) had cancer was the most terrifying scene for me in that movie," she explained. "It helped for such an emotionally exhausting scene that there were only four people there on the set," she added.