She described storming into the projection booth and slapped Verhoeven across the face. Stone saw the scene properly at a preview screening. She saw playback of the footage and – in the pre-digital age – it looked fine. He assured her that all the audiences would see is a shadow. In her memoir, Stone claimed Verhoeven had asked her to remove her underwear for the scene, because he could see a flash of white in the shot. “But the interrogation scene and other things that are the real trademarks of it now – the crossing of the legs – that was Paul.” “Sex was always a big part of it,” says Goldman about the original screenplay. Her biggest power play comes during the film’s most notorious scene: uncrossing her legs – revealing no underwear – while under police interrogation. While Douglas’s cop has his gun confiscated, Tramell is on the loose, thrusting her penetrating ice pick – or threatening to – into every man she can get her hands on. In true noir style, Basic Instinct is a phallic, Freudian nightmare.
Leading man Michael Douglas, meanwhile, was on a sensational run: Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, and a year later Falling Down. “I think sex is one of the most important things in life, isn’t it?” he said in a promotional interview. “More lesbianism or something!”īasic Instinct, which was released in the UK 30 years ago on 8 May, was perfect fodder for Verhoeven, whose films – including RoboCop, Total Recall, and Showgirls – deal in extremes: profanity, violence, sex. “I don’t know what,” laughs screenwriter Gary Goldman, who worked on later drafts. The cause of the friction? Apparent script changes. At one point, Eszterhas later claimed, he threatened to punch Verhoeven out. Months after screenwriter Joe Eszterhas had sold the script for $3m (£2.2m) after spending just 13 days writing it, he and director Paul Verhoeven embarked on a much-publicised bust-up.
Basic Instinct was scandalous – and long before Sharon Stone sat down for questioning, uncrossed her legs, and made the sexually charged neo-noir the hottest movie of 1992.