That scene.
Looking back on her infamous “Basic Instinct” leg-crossing scene, Sharon Stone says she wouldn’t take it out, despite having had the legal right to do so at the time.
“It made me an icon, but it didn’t bring me respect,” Stone told Business Insider of the controversial moment.
She added, “I very much believe that none of us knew at the time what we were getting in regard to that shot, and when [director] Paul [Verhoeven] got it, he didn’t want to lose it, and he was scared to show me. And I get that.”
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She said once she calmed down, “I didn’t make him take it out of the movie when I had the legal right to. So I did have the chance to do it differently, and I didn’t because once I had the chance to step back, I understood, as the director, not the girl in the film, that that made the movie better.”
Stone went into more detail about her reaction in her memoir “The Beauty of Living Twice.”
“First, at that time, this would give the film an X rating,” Stone explained. “Remember, this was 1992, not now, when we see erect penises on Netflix. And, Marty said, per the Screen Actors Guild, my union, it wasn’t legal to shoot up my dress in this fashion. Whew, I thought. After the screening, I let Paul know of the options Marty had laid out for me. Of course, he vehemently denied that I had any choices at all. I was just an actress, just a woman; what choices could I have?”
She wrote that before she had been called in to see the shot, she had been told “‘We can’t see anything – I just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on.'”
Stone wrote that she eventually decided to let it stay in because “it was correct for the film and for the character; and because, after all, I did it.”
In fact, Stone told Insider that she almost didn’t get the part of villainess Catherine Tramell because Michael Douglas, who played the detective investigating her for murder, didn’t want to work with an unknown.
“Everyone they went out to would turn it down,” she explained. “But the thing was, Michael Douglas did not want to put his bare a– out on the screen with an unknown — and I understood that. He wouldn’t even test with me, but that was also for a different reason: We had an argument prior to that.”
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Stone said at the Cannes Film Festival before she was cast in “Basic Instinct” she called him out for talking about someone she knew.
“So I said something and he responded to me, saying, ‘What the f— do you know?’” she said. “So he screams this at me across a whole group of people. And I’m not the person who goes, ‘Oh, excuse me, superstar.’ I pushed back my chair and said to him, ‘Let’s step outside.’ That’s how we first met.”
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The pair did indeed go outside, Stone claimed, and she said she explained to him what she knew of the person he was talking about.
“And then we parted,” she said. “I wouldn’t say as best friends, but amicably. So, fast forward to casting ‘Basic Instinct,’ I don’t think he wanted me to be his costar.”
Reps for Douglas told Insider that he didn’t remember seeing Stone at Cannes until they were promoting the film together.
Allen Burry, a rep for Douglas, told Fox News Digital, “Michael Douglas has nothing to say beyond what was reported yesterday by People magazine online.”
Burry told People on Monday that Douglas was “very surprised [by Sharon’s quotes],” as “he doesn’t remember any argument in that timeframe” between them.
“He actually only remembers seeing and meeting Sharon for the first time when he saw [director] Paul Verhoeven’s screen test of her for ‘Basic Instinct’ and [Michael] said, ‘Absolutely, she’s the one,'” he continued.
While Douglas “definitely spent time with” Stone at Cannes, “that was later, when they were promoting ‘Basic Instinct’ in 1992,” Burry said. “And by the time they’d done the movie, they were friends.”
Stone said the tension helped their onscreen chemistry.
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“It worked great because I was not rattled if he yelled at me,” she said. “That was interesting for the character because Michael has a temper, and I didn’t care. That worked very well in our dynamic. Eventually, we became the greatest of friends, to this day. I admire him tremendously.”
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