In a fragment of her autobiography, the actress talks about how the remembered crossing of her legs was recorded and she tells why she finally agreed to be part of the film
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, Basic Instincts (1992), and gave her version of how she was persuaded to film without clothes inside 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 under-wear 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 screening of the final version and realized how exposed it left her. At the end, she had an altercation with the filmmaker. "I slapped Paul, I left, I got in the car and I called my lawyer," she recalled. Her legal representative was adamant: there was no way they could include the scene in the movie. The "X" rating (for adults only) would not be convenient for the study and otherwise she 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 with relief.
However, she soon began to change her mind. She put herself in the director's shoes and pondered, “What if I had gotten that shot? 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 supported her; she knew even more of the character she had struggled to play, a role that twelve other actresses had rejected.
Before acting in Low Instincts, Ella Stone was unable to find 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 representative had told her that no one in Hollywood wanted to hire her because they said she wasn't s-xy, she received a revealing response: “If you keep leaving your s-xuality at the door, how do you expect to act? ” “It had taken me so long to get into the project that I had fully examined the character and the dangerousness of the role. I went to work ready to play Catherine Tramell. Now she was being challenged again, ”she recalled when reconstructing the reasons that led her to finally accept the decision of the Dutch filmmaker.
Verhoeven's explanation
The director of Bass Instinct has also spoken in the past about the iconic interrogation scene. “The text was clear: she changed her clothes before leaving for the interrogation. The dynamic of that passage was that she was very impressive to these people by emanating a lot of s-xuality. She was so free that all the time she was in control of the situation no matter what they asked her. She responded defiantly to everything, "she explained on one occasion before going to the point:" It is true, the moment of the crossing of 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' ".
Those couple of seconds of celluloid were enough for Stone to go from trench actress to s-x symbol, a change so sudden that she herself was surprised. This is how she remembered it in 1995: “The film was not about me being a s-x symbol because in the entire film there are only five minutes of s-x. What happens is that this image was very strong and people have not been able to forget about it. Anyway, I have to admit that when it all happened, I was already entering that stage where actresses are no longer objects of desire, so I think it has served to give me a little more longevity in this industry because my teenage fans They still think I'm attractive."
