”I knew this film would be really hard to do and that it would either give me a new career or end it completely,” says Sharon Stone. ”Let`s face it, there`s not going to be a lot of gray area here. It`s pretty black and white.”
The blond actress, who appropriately enough is wearing all black and white-black leather pants, black jacket, white ruffled shirt-is lying languorously on a sofa in Hollywood`s chic St. James Club but talking passionately about her role in the highly publicized erotic thriller ”Basic Instinct.”
”I don`t think now that it will end my career, but I knew that was the chance I was taking,” she continues. ”But I believe in director Paul Verhoeven so much and I`ve worked with him before, in `Total Recall,` so I know what he`s capable of. Anyway, how often do parts like these come along for women? I knew it`d make a noise.”
Stone isn`t kidding. ”Basic Instinct” arrives at theaters (it opens in Chicago on Friday) accompanied by a virtual cacophony of controversy and notoriety. Stone stars as Catherine Tramell, a bisexual writer who may or may not be a serial killer with a fondness for using an ice pick on her male victims. Michael Douglas stars as Nick Curran, the unstable San Francisco detective who begins by investigating the case and who then quickly succumbs to Catherine`s questionable charms.
As written by Joe Esztarhas (”Jagged Edge,” ”Betrayed”) and directed by Verhoeven, ”Basic Instinct,” which also features George Dzundza as Nick`s doomed partner and Leilani Sarelle as Catherine`s lesbian lover, Roxy, seems guaranteed to shock with its explicit sexual scenes and graphic violence.
Indeed, the filmmakers have had to trim several sequences in order to qualify for an R rating, although such cuts appear unlikely to appease the gay and lesbian rights activists who disrupted filming on location in San Francisco last year. In fact, a group calling themselves ”. . . Did It”
(thus disclosing the killer`s identity) has now threatened to march on theaters when the film opens to discourage potential audiences.
If such tactics have upset Stone, she isn`t showing it. ”All this outrage is a bit ridiculous,” she says. ”I think it was an opportunity for them to use a very showy arena to be heard. I think it was at the same time innappropriate and very clever, because they certainly grabbed the headlines. ”Does my character give lesbians a bad name? Did `Roxanne` give firemen a bad name? It`s a movie . . . not brain surgery,” she snorts. ”I don`t think I`m that important. I don`t think the movie is that important. No, I don`t think it gives anyone a bad name.
”How can they protest something they haven`t seen?” Stone continues.
”Anyway, I think they`re all missing the point. First of all, my character is sociopathic, which means she has to have what she wants when she wants it, which is immediately. Things like sex and killing and manipulation are merely the tools she uses to get what she wants. Gender is really a secondary consideration for her.
”When I first read the script, I didn`t think of her as homosexual or bisexual,” she adds. ”I don`t even think of her as a clearly defined heterosexual. I think she`s not particularly in touch with her sexuality in the real way most people are, in the way that any bisexual or heterosexual or homosexual, is. And if I was playing someone who was honestly homosexual or bisexual and then implying that that was bad or negative, then I could agree with that. But I`m not doing that at all.”
Stone goes on to stress that her character`s lesbian relationship with Roxy ”is really the purest and most loving in the film. So what kind of bad or negative message does that send?”
Despite the controversy, the actress says she has no regrets about appearing in ”Basic Instinct.”
”The moment I read the script, I wanted the part,” she says. ”She`s such a multi-dimensional character who is finally not an appendage of some guy in the movie, which is very rare. But to be honest my first reaction was,
`they`ll never give it to me.` Why? Because they always give strong roles like this to the big stars. They don`t give it to peons like myself, and in terms of box office, `Total Recall` is the only movie I`ve been in that made a lot of money.”
But after getting hold of a pirated script, Stone employed some of Catherine`s own devious methods to land the role. ”I dressed up as Catherine, did my hair, put on a tight cocktail dress, the whole number, and went to a looping session for `Total Recall` completely in character,” she recalls.
”The truth is, I was afraid to just come out and ask Paul to test me for the role and I wanted in some way to covertly stimulate him to the idea of asking me to do it.”
It worked. Stone seems ideally cast as the icy beauty, although in person she exudes a lot more warmth and is quick to laugh.
”Of course I related to her completely. She`s loopy, but she`s very intensely loopy,” she explains with a smile. ”So I had to find a part of myself that had these thoughts and feelings. Now, obviously I`m not going to go out and kill somebody over it. My part of myself might eat too many candy bars or drive too fast, but I think that there are only so many issues that we have in the world and people react to them in diverse but not so different ways. It`s just that the way she acts out, there`s no wall, no boundary between what`s socially acceptable and not for her.”
Stone, who lately seems to have specialized in playing bad girls (she was Schwarzenegger`s wife in ”Total Recall”), adds gleefully that, ”it was so much fun to play a character that has no boundaries, no rules. There`s no choice that you couldn`t make.”
By contrast, she refers to the explicit sex scenes as ”anything but fun. People will think they`re these hot, spontaneous scenes we just caught on camera, but we talked them out and then storyboarded them out,” she reveals. ”It was like a dance sequence in that sense. Every single thing was choreographed and pre-arranged. They were the least spontaneous of all the scenes we shot, which made it to me the most boring. It was so boring to shoot them because we had to do them over and over again for days, from all these different angles. There was nothing going on with the characters. It was all technical. The fact is, sex scenes in movies have nothing to do with real sex. Real sex is an expression of intimacy and movie sex is an expression of technical achievement.”
Nevertheless, Stone has high praise for her co-star. ”Michael was very professional, very chivalrous and very stoic in the sex scenes,” she says.
”Guys have to be cool, particularly movie star guys. He`s under a lot of pressure to be cool, to be hip and happening and easygoing and no problems when this stuff happens. And I really wouldn`t want to be the guy. You`re really put in the position where you`re supposed to be really cool, and he certainly pulled it off.”
Stone happily admits that she threatened the film`s cinematographer with
”physical harm” if her lighting was unflattering during the nude sex scenes. ”I told him he could expect large gifts or a lot of trouble,” she laughs. But she says she ”never had any doubts” about shooting the explicit material.
”Before the movie started, I told Paul, `I love the script the way it`s written. If we`re doing it the way it`s written, it`s in. But if you spray me down with Evian and shoot me with a blue light I`m not doing this crap. It`s tacky and I`m not into it.`
”I know that`s what most actresses think is really sexy, to show body parts in slow motion, and then it`s not vulgar and everyone`s kept their dignity,” Stone continues. ”My feeling is that that`s not what this movie is about. It`s not about keeping your dignity. It`s about the rawness of this character`s need and desperation to get where she wanted to go. And the sex had to be raw, it had to be violent, it had to be harsh, and anything less than that would have made it cheap. And I just didn`t want to do that.”
Stone, an ex-model from rural Pennsylvania who made her film debut in Woody Allen`s ”Stardust Memories,” and whose subsequent credits include
”Irreconcilable Differences,” ”Above the Law” and ”two awful African films”-”King Solomon`s Mines” and ”Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold”-says she`s ”bewildered” by the fuss over the film`s nudity. ”The weird thing is how everyone`s up in arms about it and the sex, while the fact is that I`m nude maybe four minutes out of 115 minutes.
”Why are Americans so uptight about it?” she demands. ”It`s so strange to me, and that`s why I knew it was going to require a European director for me to ever be successful, because I have so much more comfort and ease with that mentality.
”The sick thing is, most Americans have no problem watching someone`s head being blown apart, but they get very upset about a naked breast,” she adds. ”What does that tell you?”
