She added: “I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can’t force someone to do something that isn’t in the script, but at the time, I didn’t know that.”īertolucci responded to the renewed controversy on Monday, saying in a statement in Italian that it was based on “a ridiculous misunderstanding,” Variety reported. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize. “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. “Marlon said to me: ‘Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie,’ but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears,” she said. Schneider, who died in 2011 after a long battle with cancer, told the Daily Mail in 2007 that the scene “wasn’t in the original script” Brando had come up with the idea and she was only told right before they had to film that part. (A fuller version was uploaded to YouTube in 2013.) Last week, Spanish nonprofit El Mundo de Alycia published the interview clip with Bertolucci, adding Spanish subtitles and posting the video on its website in recognition of International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on Nov. Similar remarks had been previously reported, but didn’t generate this level of outcry until now. In the clip from a 2013 press tour, Bertolucci describes how he and Brando had come up with the idea to use the butter in the scripted rape scene, but did not tell Schneider “what was going on, because I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress. "I had been, in a way, horrible to Maria because I didn't tell her what was going on." Bertolucci said he felt guilty about how he treated Schneider, but does not regret the scene." Since the lost interview has surfaced the Hollywood community has been in an outcry in outrage over this staged assault.Nearly a decade ago, Maria Schneider revealed the unsettling details surrounding an infamous rape scene in the 1972 drama Last Tango in Paris, in which Marlon Brando’s character uses butter as a lubricant before forcing himself on her.īut over the weekend, a clip of director Bernardo Bertolucci talking about the scene resurfaced, setting off wide media attention and sparking outrage in Hollywood. There was a baguette, there was butter and we looked at each other and, without saying anything, we knew what we wanted," the director said then. "We were having, with Marlon, breakfast on the floor of the flat where I was shooting.
In a recently resurfaced video interview from 2013, Bertolucci confirms that Schneider, who died in 2011, did not know the details of the rape scene ahead of time, and that the graphic nature of the scene was improvised on set. This Screen Rant article described the latest controversy: "One of the most notorious scenes in cinema history, the Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider butter rape scene in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, is making headlines once again, 44 years after the film's debut. There has been a recent discovery of tape recorded conversations in which both Brando and Bertolucci admit that the rape of Schneider was done on the spur of the moment, onscreen, without the actress knowing beforehand.