Basic In-stinks. Movie Exclusive

01-04-2006 09:46

By Simon Thompson

There are bad ideas, and there are bad ideas. ‘Basic Instinct 2’ is a terrible idea.In 1992, teenage boys and fully-grown men around the world flocked to the cinema to watch Sharon Stone get interrogated and flash at cop-on-the-edge Michael Douglas.The ‘interrogation scene’ as it’s come to be known was a defining moment in cinema - it was erotic, powerful and shocking. The then 34-year-old’s leg crossing antics had become an iconic image.

Looking back, it could have been very different, she confesses: "I knew that we were going to do this leg crossing thing and I knew that we were going to allude to the concept that I was nude, but I did not think that you would see my vagina in the scene.""Later, when I saw it in the screening I was shocked. I think seeing it in a room full of strangers was so disrespectful to me and so shocking, so I went into the booth and slapped the director and left."

14 years later Sharon is back as Catherine Tramell - the unhinged novelist with a taste for illicit sex - and wants to shock us again. The only thing is this time she’s crossed the line from being a smouldering sex kitten who males mentally-begged to show more flesh.. into a megalomaniacal naturist from hell - she can’t keep her clothes on!In ‘Basic Instinct 2’, a successful London psychiatrist, Michael Glass (played by David Morrissey), is asked to evaluate a woman after she is involved in the mysterious death of a famous sports star. The female in question is bestselling crime novelist Catherine Tramell (Stone), whose grisly fictional plots come to life with alarming frequency. The sexual magnetism between psychiatrist and subject is immediate, and before he even realises it, Glass finds himself sucked into Catherine's web of lies, seduction and murder.The only thing is that this time round hearing the 48-year-old talk dirty and watching her rampant romping leaves the viewer feeling uncomfortable rather than aroused. But, according to Stone, that’s exactly what she wanted.

She revealed: "I felt we should hold off on the full nudity for a while in the movie and then I thought that when I ultimately did do the nude scene it should be done in a startling way that would be disturbing and threatening.

"I wanted to do the nudity in a way that's quite brazen. I wanted my character Catherine to be very masculine, like a man in a steam room. I wanted the audience to have a moment where they realize she's naked and then realize she's a forty-something woman and naked."

And Sharon wasn’t impressed when film bosses and censors got cold-feet and tried to tone it down - in fact, she demanded that put more sex in.

The feisty mum said: "I wanted a lot of sex in the sequel. I was coming from a really kinky place. I wanted more nudity.

"When I saw a rough cut of the film they had taken a lot of stuff out and I asked, 'Where's all the crazy stuff I did? What are we toning it down for?'

"I said to them, 'Let's go crazy!' So we took some things out of the film and a lot of the kinky stuff and sex went back in."