Sharon Stone names the best directors she ever worked with: “They respect you”
Although the world has moved on in the last 30 years, in many ways, rightly so and for the better, one cannot deny just how iconic that famous Sharon Stone scene in Basic Instinct has proven to be.
The fact that I don’t even need to say which scene I’m referring to is testament to how controversial and enduring those notorious few minutes of cinema are, and there is no doubt it was a huge power play from Stone, sitting in a hot interrogation room, casually smoking a cigarette, in complete control while the men around her sweat profusely and hang on her every word and movement.
In the decades that have followed since the release of Paul Verhoeven’s erotic classic, both actor and director have voiced differing opinions on what went into making that scene. While one must side with Stone on her lived experience and recollections before and after the film, Verhoeven himself maintains that the actor knew exactly what she was doing and the effect that it would have on release.
Far from being a film that led to Stone being typecast, it was in fact a stepping stone to the rest of her highly successful career and her being able to show off just what an immense talent she is, probably initially most obvious in 1995, when she was cast as Robert De Niro’s wife in Martin Scorsese’s epic Las Vegas tale Casino.
Stone was a revelation in that movie, earning both a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Actress’, and it made the world sit up and take notice of an actor they previously only knew from Basic Instinct and the woeful movie in the same vein, Sliver.
Maybe those people weren’t aware that she had, in fact, been a busy working actor for a decade before she was cast as the femme fatale, starting off as an extra in a Woody Allen film in 1980, and appearing in the likes of Police Academy and Magnum PI, while never quite breaking through into mainstream cinema.
While Stone no doubt still has her issues with Verhoeven, who she reportedly slapped after first seeing ‘that’ scene, she has since worked with many other directors without issue whatsoever, including some of the most legendary in the business.
Interestingly, in a nod to her longevity, she has also worked for both a father and son director in Barry and Sam Levinson. The latter is helming the upcoming season three of HBO’s teen drama Euphoria, while Barry took the reins on 1998’s sci-fi thriller Sphere, a kind of not-quite-as-good version of the previous year’s Event Horizon, which is one of the most surprisingly terrifying films of all time.
She says Levinson was “divine” to work with and added, “I’ve been fortunate to work with other great directors, too, like Marty Scorsese, Bruce Beresford and Sidney Lumet. They respect you, they leave you free, they aren’t afraid, and they don’t make you small. Less-experienced directors want to make you small enough that they can handle you.”
Although Stone made some good films at the start of the new century, picking up award nominations, she struggled to maintain her ‘90s fame and ended up making a sequel to the film that made her: 2006’s Basic Instinct 2. The film suffered from some very strange decisions, notably pointlessly basing a lot of it in England, and the fact that while she wanted more nudity, the producers wanted less. It ended up bombing quite spectacularly.
It led to a period of direct-to-DVD releases for Stone over the next ten years or so, before she made a successful foray into the world of TV, starring in HBO’s Mosaic, Netflix’s Ratched, alongside Sarah Paulson, and John Malkovich’s The New Pope, for all of which she received significant praise.
