“Those who do not realise that sex is (almost) always simulated in films probably believe that every time John Wayne shoots an enemy on film that someone really dies.”īertolucci’s most ambitious project, a four-hour epic tale on the lives of two boys - Gerard Depardieu and Robert De Niro - through the political upheavals of the past century in Italy. “It is both consoling and distressing that anyone could be so naive to believe that what happens on the cinema screen actually takes place.
#LAST TANGO IN PARIS BUTTER SCENE UNCUT VIDEO MOVIE#
Italian movie director Bernardo Bertolucci, centre, flanked by actor Robert De Niro, right and actress Anouk Aimee, at the 40th Cannes Film Festival. Bertolucci, Brando and Schneider, as well as the producer Alberto Grimaldi, were sentenced to two months in jail and a fine of $40 each - although the jail terms were suspended. The case went back and forth in the courts until the high criminal court banned the film in 1976 and ordered all copies confiscated and destroyed. The movie was banned in Italy just after its release in 1972, and was not released again until 1987. The film, starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider as a middle-aged man and younger woman who engage in a brutal sexual relationship in a bare Paris apartment, shocked the world and incurred censorship in his native country.īut its raw and improvisational style also earned Brando and Bertolucci Oscar nominations and was likened by New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring as a revolutionary work of art. Picture: APīut it was with Last Tango that Bertolucci shot to stardom, and notoriety. By his early 30s, he had already directed highly acclaimed movies: Before the Revolution in 1964, a reflection on politics and the middle-class set in the director’s hometown The Spider’s Stratagem in 1970, the story of a man who returns to the scene of the killing of his father, an anti-Fascist hero, to discover a web of lies and The Conformist, which is based on an Alberto Moravia novel and depicts the struggle of a man, Jean-Louis Trintignant, to conform to society and expectations in Fascist Italy.īernardo Bertolucci with Liv Tyler and Don Moffett in Cannes. Soon he established himself as one of the brightest young stars of international cinema. A year later, in 1962, he made his first film The Grim Reaper, about the murder of a prostitute. He began his career while still a student at the University of Rome as an assistant director on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Accattone. He had originally wanted to be a poet like his father, but later turned to movies. The family moved to Rome when Bertolucci was 13.Īctress Maria Schneider, who died in 2011, spoke out about her alleged mistreatment during shooting Last Tango in Paris. Everything flows into everything else,” said Storaro.īertolucci was born in the northern city of Parma on March 16, 1941, the son of poet Attilio Bertolucci and his wife Ninetta. Bernardo doesn’t just use the camera to convey just one sentence. “His style is not unlike that of Faulkner who’ll go on for 30 pages without a period. It featured grandiose scenes and intimate moments, and a flashback structure that is typical of biopics.Ĭinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who often worked with Bertolucci and won one of his three Oscars with Last Emperor, compared the director to William Faulkner. It was filmed in the lush and vivid style that was one of Bertolucci’s trademarks. The movie - the first Western feature film to win permission to shoot in Beijing’s Forbidden City - follows the life of China’s last emperor, from child-king at the end of the Qing Dynasty to war criminal and finally to an ordinary citizen in the People’s Republic. When speaking to The Daily Mailin 2007, Schneider revealed that she did indeed feel “raped” and “humiliated” by Brando.Italian Film director Bernardo Bertolucci who won the Best Director award for his movie The Last Emperor, has died at the age of 77. “I think she hated me and also Marlon because we didn't tell her,” he added. "I wanted her to act humiliated,” Bertolucci said in the interview, which was taped at an event at La Cinémathèque Française. The infamous rape scene in the 1972 film Last Tango in Paris was non-consensual, according to comments director Bernardo Bertolucci made in an interview he gave in 2013 and recently unearthed by Elle.Īnyone who’s seen the infamous film-for which explicit depiction of sex between a then 48-year-old Marlon Brando and the 19-year-old French actress Maria Schneider sparked widespread outrage-knows exactly what scene Bertolucci is talking about.Īccording to the director, he and Brando didn’t tell Schneider that Brando was going to use a stick of butter as lubricant during the scene, an idea they had on the morning of the shoot.