Sharon Stone recalls when she was tricked into filming without underwear in "Low Instincts"
The movie she starred in with Michael Douglas turned Sharon Stone into a s-*-x symbol
In a preview of her autobiography published in Vanity Fair, Sharon Stone spoke behind the scenes of the film she starred in with Michael Douglas and established her as a star, "Low Instincts" (1992), and gave her version of how she was persuaded to film without underwear the remembered scene of the interrogation. According to the 63-year-old actress - 34 at the time of filming - director Paul Verhoeven asked her to remove her garment for technical reasons and assured her that the inside of her dress would not enter the frame.
"We can't see anything, I just need you to take off your underwear because the white is reflecting the light," Verhoeven reportedly told Stone, adding that he first saw the shot in a "room full of agents and lawyers" during the projection of the final version and realized how exposed it left her. At the end, she had an altercation with the filmmaker. "I slapped Paul, left, got in the car and called my lawyer," she recalled.
The legal representative of her was categorical: there was no way they could include the scene in the film. The grade “X” (adults only) would not be convenient for the study and otherwise it could prevent it from coming to light through a court order. In addition, the union to which the actress belonged would not endorse the taking. Stone sighed in relief.
However, soon after she began to change her mind. She stepped into the director's shoes and reflected, “What if I had gotten that take? What if I got it on purpose? Or by accident? What if it just existed?
She understood the nature of the project she had embarked on, whose director was the only person who had backed her; she knew even more about the character she had struggled to play, a role that twelve other actresses had rejected.
Before acting in "Low Instincts," she Stone could not get roles that interested her. As she points out in her autobiography, everything changed after she enrolled in a course with drama instructor Roy London.
When she told the latter that her manager had told her that no one in Hollywood wanted to hire her because they said she was not sexy, she received a revealing response: “If you keep leaving your sexuality at the door, how do you expect to act? ”.
“It had taken me so long to get into the project that I had thoroughly examined the character and the dangerousness of the role. I went to work ready to play Catherine Tramell. She was now being challenged again ”, she recalled as she reconstructs the reasons that led her to finally accept the decision of the Dutch filmmaker.
The director's explanation
"Low Instincts" director Paul Verhoeven has also made statements in the past about the iconic interrogation scene. “The text was clear: she changed her clothes before leaving for questioning. The dynamic of that passage was that she impressed these people a lot by exuding a lot of sexuality. She was so free that she was always in control of the situation no matter what they asked her. I responded defiantly to everything, "she explained on one occasion before going to the point:" It's true, the moment of crossing my legs was not in the script, it was an idea that I thought of from a situation that I experienced as a university student. In our group there was a girl who came to parties and never wore underwear. One day a friend of hers told her: "Don't you realize that when you cross your legs you can see everything?" And she replied: "Of course, that's why I do it."
That couple of seconds of celluloid was enough for Stone to go from trench actress to sex symbol, a change so sudden that she was surprised. This is how she remembered it in 1995:
"The film did not revolve around me being a sex symbol because in the whole film there are only five minutes of sex. What happens is that that image was very strong and people have not been able to forget about it. Anyway I have to admit that when everything happened, I was already entering that stage where actresses are no longer objects of desire, therefore I think it has served to give me a little more longevity in this industry because my adolescent admirers continue to think that I am attractive " .
