Infamous screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (“Showgirls,” “Sliver”) has offered a brief update on the proposed reboot of 1992 erotic thriller “Basic Instinct” at Amazon MGM Studios’ United Artists label.
First announced last year, Ezterhas closed a $4 million deal to pen the film, but further specifics were under wraps. Ezterhas teased in April that “Saltburn” helmer Emerald Fennell was considering the project, a claim that was quickly shot down by her reps.
Now, speaking with Interview Magazine, he confirmed that Sharon Stone’s Catherine Tramell character returns for this:
“Catherine Tramell is in this one, and so is a new character, her daughter, Jezebel. I can’t say too much about it.”
He explained how the project came about and brought up the widely panned 2006 sequel “Basic Instinct 2”:
“They came to me and asked, ‘Do you have any ideas for this?’ and I said, ‘I do.’ I really talked about bare bones. As you know, after Basic, there was a so-called sequel. … it’s really bad. They paid me a million five to have nothing to do with it. It’s easy money.”
Talking about what went wrong with that film, he says it simply played things too safe:
“Nobody said this to me, but I didn’t think they wanted to take the kind of creative chances the original did. They didn’t want controversy. 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. In the 30 years since it came out, I went through a lot of Basic Instinct revivals and saw audiences who just adored the fucking movie.”
With the reboot, the plan is to get back to the sheer fun and edginess of the original, as his condition for returning to work on the script was that the movie had to be “fun and enjoyable. I just finished the script, and we’ll see.”
