Reacting to outrage over reports he and Marlon Brando conspired against actress Maria Schneider while filming a notorious rape scene in “Last Tango in Paris,” Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci said that the outcry was based on a “ridiculous misunderstanding” of what actually happened.
In a statement, issued in Italian, Bertolucci said “I would like, for the last time, to clear up a ridiculous misunderstanding that continues to generate press reports about ‘Last Tango in Paris’ around the world.”
“Several years ago at the Cinemathèque Francaise someone asked me for details on the famous “butter scene.
“I specified, but perhaps I was not clear, that I decided with Marlon Brando not to inform Maria that we would have used butter,” he noted. “We wanted her spontaneous reaction to that improper use [of the butter]. That is where the misunderstanding lies.
“Somebody thought, and thinks, that Maria had not been informed about the violence on her. That is false!”
Bertolucci added that “Maria knew everything because she had read the script, where it was all described. The only novelty was the idea of the butter.
“And that, as I learned many years later, offended Maria. Not the violence that she is subjected to in the scene, which was written in the screenplay,” Bertolucci added.
Read more:
Director confesses infamous ‘butter’ rape scene in ‘Last Tango In Paris’ was non-consensual
Reports over the weekend centered on a resurfaced video of a 2013 masterclass given by Bertolucci in Paris. In the video, the Oscar-winning auteur talks about the scene in his 1972 film in which Brando’s character uses a stick of butter as a lubricant to simulate sex with Schneider, who was 19 at the time. “I had been, in a way, horrible to Maria because I didn’t tell her what was going on,” Bertolucci says on the tape.
