Sharon Stone recalls producer who told her to "fuck my costar" for "chemistry"
Sharon Stone has never been especially well-treated by the Hollywood apparatus. As the breakout star of Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, Stone was instantly accelerated from being a struggling performer with a string of near-misses into a sort of living symbol, embodying, in the part of serial killer Catherine Tramell a particularly vigorous blend of America’s never-ending obsessions with sex and violence. Stone lobbied aggressively for the part, and then—as noted in excerpts from her upcoming memoir, The Beauty Of Living Twice, released by Vanity Fair this week—had to live through the moment at the film’s debut screening, when she learned that Verhoeven had lied when he told her his camera hadn’t captured images of her genitals in the film’s infamous interrogation scene. Surrounded by movie executives and agents who had also just watched the scene in question, Stone did what anyone, understandably, might: “I went to the projection booth, slapped Paul across the face, left, went to my car, and called my lawyer.”
“Yes,” she notes a little earlier, “There have been many points of view on this topic, but since I’m the one with the vagina in question, let me say: The other points of view are bullshit.” Stone goes on to talk through the complicated calculus of the moment—one no male performer is likely to have been asked to make:
Then I thought some more. What if I were the director? What if I had gotten that shot? What if I had gotten it on purpose? Or by accident? What if it just existed? That was a lot to think about. I knew what film I was doing. For heaven’s sake, I fought for that part, and all that time, only this director had stood up for me. I had to find some way to become objective…So I thought and thought and I chose to allow this scene in the film. Why? Because it was correct for the film and for the character; and because, after all, I did it.