Michael Douglas: The World on a String

Q: That must have been a life-changing movie, in that Carolco Pictures paid you $15 million and the picture made a fortune, so you became a $15 million-a-picture actor.

A: It was progressively going up before that, but that was a biggie and it worked.

Q: You have had your share of hot, even kinky sex scenes, but that one with Jeanne Tripplehorn in Basic Instinct, where your character practically rapes her, is a difficult scene for a leading man to do.

A: In a scene like that, what I try always to do is make the actress feel comfortable, let her know that I will be looking out for her. OK, I'm going to touch your breast here. So there's none of that where she feels, Hey, what are you doing? It's sort of like doing fight sequences. You go through the beats. I'm going to go boom, kiss, kiss, rip. Then it's action and you do it. It's the most unspontaneous thing in the world. The difficulty of doing a sex scene is that sex is the one thing in movies that your entire audience knows about. Nobody in the audience has been killed and most haven't taken a bullet or been in any brutal fights. Lovemaking, everybody's an expert.

Q: You passed on going back for the sequel to Basic Instinct, which Sharon Stone signed for and Paul Verhoeven is considering. Why not you?

A: I did a sequel once, and I don't see it as anything other than a financial decision.

Q: There was a lot of controversy, even in the making of the film, including when you and Verhoeven clashed with screenwriter Joe Eszterhas.

A: That was tough. In a lot of movies I do, I'm in every single scene of the picture. If you have a producer background, and you're the kind of person who tries to make your environment as copacetic as possible, the danger is you sometimes think you're being taken for granted. Unfortunately, we all know it's the person who needs the most attention who sometimes comes out the best, whereas if you take care of business and do your job, you can suffer in a situation. I've had it happen on a couple of pictures with people who'll go unnamed. Then we had that whole thing where Paul's nose hemorrhaged and there were rumors that I'd hit him. We were just having a discussion and the hemorrhaging started in his nose. Paul did an amazing job with the Eszterhas script. You know...I don't want to give Joe Eszterhas any more press than he's been getting already, but...

Q: Sounds like you didn't bond.

A: Well, he was very, very adamant about his script. When we faced some militant gay and lesbian activity against the movie in San Francisco, he was much more amenable toward script changes than he'd been before.

Q: Basic Instinct, the earlier Fatal Attraction, and then Disclosure made for quite a triple bill for the feminist-in-hell multiplex.

A: Well, they're very different. We took some heat on Disclosure from people who felt that, with all the women who were dealing with harassment, how dare we do a turnaround. But those films span over eight years, and everybody has made it like they're the focus of my career. Did I feel during that time that there was unresolved conflict between men and women? Absolutely. Did I think the roles of men and women in the '80s and '90s were very confused, in terms of what each gender wanted? Yeah. I think it's just recently kind of exhausted itself and women realized they cannot have it all.

Q: Black Rain is a film that was good and should have done better. Why didn't it?

A: It was hard to know who to root for. And people here were uncomfortable with race stuff and talking about the bomb. There was a critic who'll remain nameless who called it a racist film. I called him up and asked, "Have you ever been to Japan?" He said no and I said, "Then what the hell are you talking about?" The Japanese loved it. I loved it--I thought it rocked from top to bottom.

Q: Joel Schumacher once told me he was horrified when he tested Falling Down and found audiences rooting for your character as he committed violent acts against ethnic groups.

A: That was a surprise, to an extent. But I think they understood this nerdy engineer, a patriotic guy who did all these things for his country and one day gets pink-slipped and told, Hey, we don't need you anymore. You know, as we finished that film the riots were going on in L.A. I'll never forget the last day of shooting--that's literally when it all started. We were working in the Valley, and when we finished I headed to the airport. It was a war zone. You could see dots of fires all over the place, all heading for the west side of town. I got my family on a plane--I didn't even know where it was going.

Q: Considering that timing, plus the fact that Three Mile Island happened right after the release of The China Syndrome back in 1979, you manage to choose films that have a finger on the pulse.

A: I read three papers a day and follow the news closely. I don't know if you remember in the movie, but when one character describes the "China Syndrome," he says it could render uninhabitable an area the size of Pennsylvania, which is where the Three Mile Island incident happened days later. The whole thing made a big impression on me and kept me on a course of disarmament. I work with the United Nations as a Messenger of Peace, focusing in the area of nuclear weapons and small arms reduction. And because I was here in Manhattan when John Lennon got killed, and it happened right outside the building I was in, that started me working on the handgun and weapons issues.

Q: Your selectivity saved you from Cutthroat Island, which helped to sink Carolco, the maker of Basic Instinct. What happened?

A: I was fairly far down the road with that film, but I didn't pull out right before production--it was four or five months before. I just didn't feel comfortable doing a picture with the director married to the leading lady. After a couple of drafts, I didn't like where it was going. There was all this momentum to go ahead, but it didn't smell good.

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