Rape scene revelation sparks outrage

Controversial movie Last Tango in Paris is making headlines again 44 years after it was released.

A recently unearthed video interview with Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci from 2013 has renewedinterest, and outrage, over what happened to actress Maria Schneider on set during the infamous butter rape scene.

Maria Schneider,

Bertolucci said that neither he nor Marlon Brando told Schneider of their plans to use the stick of butter during the simulated rape scene, a concept they came up with the morning of the shoot because he wanted her to react “as a girl not as an actress”. He wanted her, he said, to feel “the rage and the humiliation”.

Schneider, who died in 2011 at the age of 58 after a lengthy illness, spoke a number of times about the scene between her, then aged 19, andMarlon Brando, then 48, even saying in a 2007 Daily Mail interview that she “felt a little raped” by her co-star and director.

“They only told me about it before we had to film the scene, and I was so angry,” Schneider said. “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.”

But despite Schneider’s past comments, the video interview with Bertolucci struck a chord at the weekend as it circulated on social media that the director was admitting that the scene was non-consensual.

Actress Jessica Chastain wrote on Twitter that she felt “sick” over the revelation that “the director planned her attack”.

ChrisEvans also expressed his rage and said it was “beyond disgusting,” while Anna Kendrick weighed in that she “used to get eyerolls” when she brought the incident up previously and that she was “glad at least it will be taken seriously now”.

Schneider, a relative unknown when she was cast in the film, said that the “whole circus” of suddenly being famous made her turn to drugs and she even attemptedsuicideafewtimes. She stayed friends with Brando until his death in 2004, but she said that “for a while we couldn’t talkaboutthemovie”.

Bertolucci, however, did not maintain a relationship with Schneider. He said he knew she hated him for life in that interview two years after her death.

They only told me about it before we had to film the scene, and I was so angry.” and actress