MARIA SCHNEIDER WAS DECEIVED IN THE MYTHICAL BUTTER SCENE
Director Bernardo Bertolucci admits that the actress did not know that Marlon Brando would sodomize her in the most remembered sequence of 'Last Tango in Paris'.
41 years after the premiere of the film in 1972, and two after the death of Maria Schneider, a victim of lung cancer, Bernardo Bertolucci acknowledged this week at a conference at the French Cinematheque that his behavior during the filming of 'The Last Tango in Paris' was despicable, especially for failing to explain to the young actress, then only 19, that she had decided to add a delicate scene to the script: the sodomizing r@pe of Marlon Brando thanks to a stick of butter as a of lubricant. A sequence that, in the end, has become the most remembered of the film.
“These are serious things, but movies are made like that. The provocations are sometimes more important than the explanations”, said Bertolucci, who devised the scene with Marlon Brando during a lunch, when the actor spread a piece of bread with butter and both looked at each other with complicity.
They decided not to explain anything to the actress so that her reaction during the filming would be more authentic and truthful. In an interview in 2007, published in the Daily Mail, Schneider already denounced these facts: “I was angry, but I couldn't refuse. I should have called my lawyer or my agent, because you can't force an actor to do something that isn't specified in the script. But I was young then and didn't know it." After that experience, she did not appear n@ked in any movies again, she had a difficult life, became addicted to drugs and even tried to commit suicide on at least one occasion.
