The director of the film, Paul Verhoeven, and Sharon Stone are accused of lying about the ins and outs of the mythical scene
Twenty-seven years, and some still haven't recovered. The crossing (or technically, uncrossing) of legs that took the world's breath away has not aged at all. Murder suspect Catherine Trammell (played by a 34-year-old Sharon Stone) submits to an interrogation, but it is she who ends up subduing the police. The mouse and the cat have never been so in heat. Catherine is the only one who enjoys the situation.
Her, and millions of viewers: Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) was the fourth highest-grossing film of the year (it was released in March 1992 in the US), and the most successful in history in Spain at the time (it was released in August 1992). S-x (and the desire for it) corrupts each shot until it almost melts the celluloid of a film that has become an instant classic. And all because many teenagers (and some parents) burned the video by rewinding and pausing the scene in question.
He [the director, Verhoeven] assured me that nothing would be seen. So I took off my underwear and put it in his shirt pocket," says Sharon Stone.
Twenty-seven years later, a juicier and less deadly mystery remains unsolved. Did the director have the consent of the actress to portray her crotch for posterity?
Risk-addicted (and everything else) detective Nick Curran, played by Michael Douglas, knows that Catherine Trammell doesn't wear underwear. He has spied on her while she was getting dressed in the previous scene and has verified that for Trammell lingerie is a thing for losers. The public knows it too, and he attends this interrogation with his mouth open. Will he dare to uncross those legs to stun the males of the pack? Of course yes. Catherine Trammell hasn't gotten there by being shy.
There are two versions of how the famous scene occurred. According to the director of the film, Paul Verhoeven, Stone knew exactly what she was doing and was delighted with the perverse situation. According to the actress, the director used it. "When we shot it, it was going to be a come-on," says Sharon Stone, "but [Verhoeven] told me, 'You can see the white of your underwear, I need you to take it off.' He assured me nothing would show. So I took off my underwear and put it in his shirt pocket."
So far, both versions of the story agree. The conflict arises when at the end of the filming both analyzed the shot in question. "At that time there was no high definition," continues the actress, "so when I looked at the monitor there was really nothing to see." Everything changed when Stone, her team and the entire world saw the film on a multi-square-meter movie screen.
"I was in a state of 'shock,'" says Stone. "At the end of the film, I got up, went over to Verhoeven and slapped him"
"I was in shock," says Stone. "At the end of the film, I got up and went over to Paul Verhoeven and slapped him in the face." The actress acknowledges that the shot is suitable for the film and for the character, and that if she had been the director she would have kept it in the final cut. "But I would have had the courtesy to show it to the actress," she concludes.
Someone is lying, and according to Paul Verhoeven it is not him. The Dutch director tells that Stone tried by all means to eliminate the shot of her crotch in freedom. Verhoeven replied that it was too late. "Sharon is lying," Verhoeven clarifies to ICON. "Any actress knows what it's going to look like if you ask her to take off her underwear and point the camera at it. She even gave me hers as a gift. When Sharon looked at the resulting scene on the monitor, she had no clue. I think it had to do with the fact that the cinematographer [Jan De Bont, who would go on to direct Speed and Twister] and I are Dutch, so we were completely normal about the n-de, and Sharon got carried away with this relaxed attitude. But when she saw the scene surrounded by other [American] people, including her agent and publicist, she freaked out. They all told her that scene would ruin her career, so Sharon came and asked me to take it down. I said no. 'You accepted, and I showed you the result,' I told her, and she said, 'Fuck you.' But Sharon isn't going to tell you that, she sure isn't."
The legend that surrounds the filming of Basic Instinct would give for another thriller, and with quite a few erotic scenes too, because the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas said that he had slept with Sharon Stone to celebrate the success of the film. Several LGTB associations tried to boycott the filming due to the negative image that the film gave of bis-xual women, and Michael Douglas refused for months to hire Stone, considering her "a second rate actress".
But the director always believed in her. When the leading actresses (Julia Roberts, Michelle Pfeiffer) read the script, they asked him if he would shoot the scenes of s-x and violence as they were described in the text. "No," Verhoeven clarified, "they will be even stronger." Sharon had no such inhibitions, and she had just posed n-de for Playboy to try and jump-start her career. And boy did she reactivate it. Twenty-seven years later, Basic Instinct is still the only movie that makes you want to smoke a cigarette at the end.
Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who didn't write the interrogation scene because it was Verhoeven's idea, resents this legacy. "When you have [on your resume] one of the most famous erotic shots in the world of cinema, it outshines the movie, which is a tense, psychological modern film noir," Eszterhas laments. The sequence was the object of a cult both in clandestine meetings when the parents were away from home and in parodies. In the latter, comedian James Corden attempts to seduce an older Michael Douglas, to a different effect than Catherine Trammell.
An open mystery remains, perhaps the most complex of all. Who is Sharon Stone? A s-xual predator willing to do anything or the naive victim of a dirty old man? Probably both, and neither at the same time. Sharon Stone is whoever she needs to be. Catherine Trammell turned the actress who gave her a face, body and pubis into a myth, but she ended up condemning her. Rita Hayworth lamented that men went to bed with Gilda (her most iconic character of hers), but woke up disappointed in her.
"Sharon Stone is lying," Paul Verhoeven tells ICON. "When she saw the result of the scene on the monitor, she had no problem"
Stone suffered a similar sentence: to go down in history, but at the cost of no one remembering her as an actress, but Catherine Trammell. A cornered woman who made perverse female characters fashionable who did not apologize for enjoying s-x. Demi Moore built an entire career thanks to this trend. In the roaring '90s, the cultural revolution was made without underwear, and Sharon Stone had the audacity to be the first to take it off.
"Nobody else could have done that job," Verhoeven acknowledges. And he adds: "She can be very cruel and very charming, and she can change her gaze from one state to another in a second. Sharon Stone is like that. She is Catherine Trammell, but without the ice pick."
Everything indicates that this mystery, turned into a myth of pop culture, will never be solved. In that room there were only Stone, Verhoeven and De Bont, because the actress asked to shoot the scene at the end of the day and with no one else in front. The relaxation that she achieved thanks to that intim-cy turned against her, but it also made her the official erotic myth of the 90s: a whole generation of teenagers suddenly became men after seeing Basic Instinct.
