Paul Verhoeven’s erotic thriller has become cult since its release in 1992. However, Sharon Stone suffered when she discovered the final cut.
Arte
Sunday January 12 at 9:00 p.m.
16/9 | Prohibited for children under 12
Basic Instinct is an erotic thriller by Paul Verhoeven released in 1992. It stars Michael Douglas in the role of a police officer with a conflicted past, who investigates a series of violent murders. He then suspects a provocative and attractive novelist, played by Sharon Stone. Having achieved cult status by becoming one of the most profitable films of the 1990s (with $352 million in revenue collected worldwide), Basic Instinct has sparked controversy, particularly over the way LGBT+ characters and their relationships are depicted.
This film also revealed Sharon Stone as one of Hollywood’s sex symbols. All spectators probably keep in mind the scene where the actress, without underwear, slowly crosses and uncrosses her legs in the middle of an interrogation, revealing her private life to the inspectors…but also to the public who understand that she is undressed! However, the actress retains a bitter taste of this sequence, as she was able to reveal to Télé Cable Sat: “Verhoeven asked me to remove my little white panties because we saw them on camera but he promised me that we would see nothing in the end,” she assures.
It was once the film was finished, several weeks later, that Sharon Stone discovered that the sequence was not as it had been described to her. “I felt betrayed. I stood up and slapped her. What shocked me was her betrayal. If I had been in the director’s place, I would have definitely kept that scene. But Paul should have warned me, it was a lack of respect,” she assures, even if she admits that this film “changed the course of. [sa]career” and that she absolutely does not regret having turned Basic Instinct.
Synopsis – Inspector Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) is a police officer with a conflicted past who is undergoing therapy with Doctor Elisabeth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn) with whom he has violent sexual relations. When Curran is put in charge of investigating a series of murders, he finds himself confronted with an unusual suspect in the person of Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), a provocative and very attractive novelist. The victims were killed with an ice pick, like in Catherine’s novels. But the truth is not so simple and Curran will have to overcome his own demons to discover it.