Turkish Delight HFP/Lagardere Photo Archive

The French were always progressive about showing nudity and the Dutch became very progressive when the sexual revolution started in Holland with the late '60s. And Turkish Delight, which I did in '72, is based on the fact that the sexual revolution had taken place. And you didn't even have to talk about nudity any more. It was kind of natural. You would say: "Well, it's kind of sexy, then you take your things off and basically, then you start fucking..." And basically people would do it. It was like everything sexual was permitted. Women started to take the Pill. There was herpes no yet and there was no AIDS; syphilis was controlled. It was a completely free time. You could do everything you wanted and people did. I think it was a complete liberation. I was young at that time, in my thirties, and I participated in that and certainly presented a lot of that in my movies, especially the Dutch ones — they are extremely explicit for American audiences. There are erections and there is rape and you would see them in close-up.

I used a lot of that kind of thinking for Basic Instinct. I didn't feel any embarrassment asking the actors to do it. Because I had asked them before to do it, and nobody had ever raised their voice with: "Oh, it's too much!" And strangely enough that natural attitude convinced Michael [Douglas] and Jean [Tripplehorn] and Sharon [Stone] to deliver themselves completely to me. And trust me — whatever Sharon sometimes says. But we all know that is a lie, of course.

Is there much of a difference between explicit sex scenes and pornography and if so, what is it?
I would say it is really intuition. My only intuition is that basically I am doing porno but there is nothing wrong with porno and you should do whatever you want. But it is not interesting to me. I feel that sexuality should be used for what it is: a beautiful thing, the ultimate communication between people. And pornography basically neglects that, of course. Pornography is really about nothing else than the sexual deed. The sexual deed is in film kind of boring — I mean, these two bodies basically on top of each other moving back and forward. You really need good reasons to do that.

In Basic Instinct I felt that I was putting the situation in a different context — I was using the sexuality not so much as these people loving each other but as a murder scene. I always felt it was not a sexual scene but it might be a murder scene. That made it possible to do a sexual scene because the audience would not be looking at it as pornography. I feel that pornography — but let me say that pornography should be done by whomever or looked at by anybody and it is fine—but basically I am not interested in pornography in my movies. I think that is boring. I don't know how to handle these copulation scenes if it is not about something else.

So then within your own filmography, what would you regard that as your best sex scene?
My best sex scene? [laughs] Well, I think the most beautiful sex scene is the one I just described. The most aggressive sex scene and perhaps the most disturbing sex scene that I ever did was probably the one between Michael Douglas and Jean Tripplehorn. It is pretty violent and you never know where it's going. Is this a date rape or is it just within the boundaries of what these people accept from each other? How close are we coming here to this small line that divides that which is accepted by both parties? And I thought that the tension in that scene was extremely interesting. And I think that the scene between Michael and Sharon is also a really good scene. Of course, both were helped enormously by fantastic music by Jerry Goldsmith. Without that music we would have lost some of that beauty or the strength or the erotic atmosphere of the scenes.