A newly-surfaced interview with Bernardo Bertolucci has revealed a horrifying confession.
According to the director, he and Marlo Brando conspired in 1972 to shoot a scene in the film Last Tango in Paris that depicted the actor actually raping co-star Maria Schneider with a stick of butter.
Brando was 48 at the time of the movie and Schneider was 19, with the later saying herself back in 2007 that the famous scene was actually a sexual violation.
“I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci,” she wrote in an essay for The Daily Mail.
“After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or [apologize]. Thankfully, there was just one take.”
Schneider passed away in 2011.
Meanwhile, in a Q&A filmed at La Cinémathèque française in Paris, Bertolucci confessed three years ago that he and Brando came up with the idea to use a stick of butter to rape Schneider on camera the morning of the shoot.
Excerpts from this interview only just came to light this week.
“The sequence of the butter is an idea that I had with Marlon in the morning before shooting,” the director explains in this interview.
“We were having, with Marlon, breakfast on the floor of the flat where I was shooting. There was a baguette, there was butter and we looked at each other and, without saying anything, we knew what we wanted.”
(In the horrifying scene, which earned Schneider critical appeal from those who presumed for years that she was acting, Brando uses the stick of butter as sexual lubricant.)
One of the most respected filmmakers of his generation, Bertolucci went on to acknowledge that he “had been, in a way, horrible to Maria because I didn’t tell her what was going on.”
So why did he go forward with this despicable idea?
“[I] wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress,” the director said. “I wanted her to react humiliated.”
Soon after Last Tango in Paris was released, movie critic Roger Ebert gushed over Schneider as an actress who “doesn’t seem to act her role so much as to exude it.”
We now know why. How awful.
As news of this declaration by Bertolucci went viral, stars in Hollywood reacted on social media with shock and horror.
“To all the people that love this film, you’re watching a 19 year old get raped by a 48 year old man,” Jessica Chastain Tweeted. “The director planned her attack. I feel sick.”
Bertolucci and Schneider didn’t stay in contact once the film was released.
“After the movie, we really didn’t see each other because she was hating me,” Bertolucci said.
The director concluded that he felt a bit “guilty” about the whole thing, but not to the point where he regretted the decision.
“To obtain something I think you have to be completely free,” Bertolucci said.
“I didn’t want Maria to act her humiliation her rage, I wanted her to Maria to feel, not to act, the rage and humiliation. Then she hated me for all of her life.”