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Joe Eszterhas said he was paid $1.5 million to “have nothing to do with” Basic Instinct’s “really bad” 2006 sequel
“What they did was turn it into a bland police procedural. They set it in London and the whole piece was really boring,” he said in a new interview
The screenwriter has since announced that the 1992 film is being rebooted, teasing that it “will be controversial,” much like the original was
Joe Eszterhas said he was paid $1.5 million to “have nothing to do” with Basic Instinct‘s 2006 sequel.
The screenwriter of the original film, which was released in 1992, told Interview magazine that he didn’t have anything to do with the “really bad” “so-called sequel” that followed his cult classic erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas.
“They paid me a million five to have nothing to do with it,” Eszterhas, 81, admitted in a recent interview, published on June 29. “It’s easy money. Nobody said this to me, but I didn’t think they wanted to take the kind of creative chances the original did.”
David Morrissey and Sharon Stone in ‘Basic Instinct 2’
Credit: Moviestore/Shutterstock
“They didn’t want controversy,” he continued. “What they did was turn it into a bland police procedural. They set it in London and the whole piece was really boring. It didn’t have any humor. It didn’t have the spice and earth and wit of the original.”
While he was ultimately left disappointed by the sequel — written by Leora Barish and Henry Bean — Eszterhas has signed on to create an updated spin on the film in the form of a reboot.
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He noted that, “in the 30 years since it came out,” he has gone “through a lot of Basic Instinct revivals” after seeing how audiences “just adored the f—ing movie.”
When Eszterhas met with producers to pitch his “bare bones” idea for a reboot, his one requirement was that the experience be “fun and enjoyable.”
“Some people will laugh at some of the dialogue. Others will be pissed off by it,” he teased of the upcoming reboot, which will be released with Scott Stuber‘s United Artists banner and Amazon MGM Studios. “But even those who are pissed off will secretly enjoy it, even if they don’t publicly.”
“It will be controversial,” he continued. “With the original, people forget that one of the things that made it so successful when it opened commercially, right off the top, was that there had been controversy for months before its release. There were protests in New York and L.A. I’m not afraid of controversy.”
‘Basic Instinct’ poster
Credit: Moviestore/Shutterstock
Directed by Paul Verhoeven, Basic Instinct follows crime novelist Catherine Tramell (Stone) as she becomes implicated in the death of retired rock star Johnny Box (Bill Cable), while embarking on a complicated relationship with the detective on her case (Douglas).
Eszterhas teased that Stone’s character is in the new project, “and so is a new character, her daughter, Jezebel,” but he didn’t want to “say too much about it.”
While the film courted controversy for its depiction of an LGBTQ+ character as a dangerous killer at the tail end of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as well as its onscreen female nudity, Eszterhas emphasized that his new script will be full of moments where the audience will inevitably ask themselves, “Holy s—, did I hear that right?”
“One of the things happening in filmmaking today is films have become more tepid and whitened,” he added. “My script for the sequel is anything but that.”
Read the original article on People