Sharon Stone, who was at the Taormina Film Festival Friday to receive the Golden Cariddi Lifetime Achievement Award, spoke about her battles with ill health, her fears for the future of her country, and the changes happening in the film industry.
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“The world has changed dynamically since 1992. When I made ‘Basic Instinct,’ it seemed like a scandal,” Stone said. “The studios have changed dramatically. They’ve changed from making a variety of movies to making really these gigantic $100 and $200 million films. When I was making these beautiful films 30 years ago, they would be $50-60 million tops. Now streamers are taking over our business. And I don’t think that that’s a terrible thing really. We’re coming back to making smaller and more relevant films.”
With films such as “Challengers” and “Love Lies Bleeding” is sex coming back to the movies? “It’s not something we’re coming back to in my mind. It’s stayed on TV. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t natural. None of us would be here if sex and sexuality wasn’t a natural part of our human condition,” she said.
“I just have to say now that women are writing, producing, and are more and more a part of filmmaking, and films are less about men writing about their fantasies of the way women are and actors asked to portray the male fantasy, and the critics are less asked to tell us if we fulfil the male fantasy, or not.
“That film is so changed from whether women are fulfilling the written, directed, produced, edited, and criticized… if we’d have met with a male fantasy, and now it’s more about: are we fulfilling this human condition?”
Her own career was dramatically derailed, and her life threatened by a nine-day brain bleed. Part of her recovery involved writing a memoir “The Beauty of Living Twice,” as well as “making a daily decision to change your reality.”
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Art seems to have been a resource both for her own personal recover as well as for expressing herself fully as a human being.
“I’ve always felt that I was a 360-degree artists. I am a writer and painter. I’m an actor. I wish I could sing. I am good dancer. I started painting when I was a child. My Aunt Vaughn, and Vaughn is my middle name, had two master’s degrees: one in painting and one in literature. And so my growing up was very full of painting; and very full of literature. And I was very, very lucky for that. I studied painting at university. I studied all kinds of art: painting, sculpting, oil, watercolor, acrylic, jewellery making… everything. When I went to New York, I was painting in New York as well as modelling and trying to work as an actress. And things really happened for me as an actress. I didn’t have time to paint anymore. And then when COVID happened, I started painting all the time. And it was also pretty wonderful because I had made some money as an actress, and I could afford to buy canvases that were already stretched…
“I’m thrilled to announce that the Municipality of Rome has offered me a one-woman show at the Richard Meier Museum, and I’ll be having that show in mid-November here in Italy. It’s the most exciting thing that has happened to me as a painter. I’m so excited I could cry but I won’t because I don’t have time to. I’m painting like a crazy person.”
Asked about the current situation in the U.S., although the names Trump and Biden were not mentioned, a genuine sense of dread was palpable. “Thank God I’m not a politician,” Stone said. “Every country historically goes through a period where someone wants to own their country. And we’ve seen many different ways that occurs and then in many different ways that people reclaim their country, both peacefully and through the crisis of war. I have always been a very proud American and I love my country very much of course. I am deeply concerned with what’s happening in my country and this is one of the first times in my life that I’ve actually seen anyone running for an office on a platform of hate and oppression. However, we are not the first country, and we will not be the last country to confront this.”
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