Sharon Stone’s career is full of cult films that are still remembered in Hollywood today. The 66-year-old actress has been in the film industry for decades, with dozens of successful films. From ‘Casino’ to ‘Sliver’, via the iconic ‘Basic Instinct’, in which she experienced one of the most tense moments of her career.
The director of that film, Paul Verhoeven, got behind the camera in the early 1990s and was responsible for bringing to the screen the story of Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) and Nick Curran (Michael Douglas). No movie buff could forget one scene in particular, the interrogation of writer Tramell.
In this sequence, Stone starred in one of the most surprising moments of the time, with a leg crossing that is already part of film history. However, the filming of this was less than sensual, as the actress herself would later confess.
Stone admits in the documentary ‘Basic Instinct, Sex, Death & Stone’ that, at first, she shot the scene wearing white panties, but Verhoeven told her that they were reflected with the lighting and, therefore, it did not give the feeling that she was not wearing anything.
This is how the most famous scene of ‘Basic Instinct’ was developed
“I needed him to take it off, telling me that it would be veiled by a shadow, hidden, that we wouldn’t see anything. I did a test, looked at the monitor and we couldn’t see anything. I took my thong, put it in his shirt pocket and said: ‘I trust you,'” she recalls.
However, as anyone who has seen the film will know, in the scene that made it to the big screen, part of Stone’s pubic hair is visible, which she did not know until the Cannes Film Festival. “I realised that there was half a shot where you could start to see the pubic hair. You couldn’t see anything else, but there was the idea that you could see it, and this idea is very powerful, because we’d never seen anything like that in a studio film before,” she adds.
“When I saw the images I felt betrayed, I got up and slapped him. What surprised me was his betrayal. If I had been in the director’s place, I would surely have kept this scene, but Paul should have warned me that it was disrespectful,” Stone said in the documentary, where she insists that the disrespectful thing was not to warn her, while comparing her situation with her co-star: “If Michael Douglas had been in my place and we could have glimpsed his penis, I would have warned him… or Michael would have put his hand in his face!“