Director Paul Verhoeven has finally addressed Sharon Stone’s claim that she was tricked into removing her underwear for the infamous scene in 1992’s “Basic Instinct.”
The now-63-year-old actress wrote in her recent memoir that she was under the impression that no frontal nudity of her would appear in the film’s final cut. Verhoeven, however, finds this inconceivable.
“She knew exactly what we were doing,” the 82-year-old Dutch director told Variety in an interview Wednesday. “I told her it was based on a story of a woman that I knew when I was a student who did the crossing of her legs without panties regularly at parties. When my friend told her we could see her vagina, she said, ‘Of course, that’s why I do it.’ Then Sharon and I decided to do a similar sequence.”
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Stone recounted in her March memoir, “The Beauty of Living Twice,” that she was told something else on set. “We can’t see anything — I just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on,” she wrote in her book. But that is simply not what happened, Verhoeven claimed.
“My memory is radically different from Sharon’s memory,” he told Variety. “Her version is impossible.”
The “Showgirls” and “Benedetta” director was careful to emphasize that, while he and Stone may disagree on the notorious scene, he respects her performance in the film and they remain on good terms.
In addition to addressing Stone’s recent writing on the topic, Verhoeven also spoke about cinemas’ “general shift towards Puritanism,” an upcoming movie he’s working on that’s “based on my book about Jesus” and another that’s a spy thriller set in Washington.
