How Last Tango in Paris’s infamous explicit scene undid its female star

Bertolucci would later talk about why he withheld details of the scene from Schneider, saying: “I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress. I wanted her to react humiliated.” He insisted that it was only the use of the butter that had surprised the actress, but Matt Dillon says what happened was “really wrong”.

“It’s something that we often do, actors, we won’t tell the other actor, or the director will encourage us to not reveal what we’re going to do, so we can get a real reaction,” he says. “But it was really wrong, with a scene that was so sensitive, to do something like that.” 

Jessica Palud tells the BBC that recreating the rape scene “couldn’t be avoided” in Being Maria, but this time, the audience sees events from Maria Schneider’s perspective. “I couldn’t avoid shooting this scene because it was the very moment in which her life completely switches. Everything goes wrong from there,” Palud says. “It was important to have the scene from her point of view, in her body, in her gaze, what she went through, and the fact that there were witnesses. Maria was being assaulted in the presence of the whole crew, who were observing and not reacting.”

Kino LorberBeing Maria stars Matt Dillon as Marlon Brando and Anamaria Vartolomei as Schneider (Credit: Kino Lorber)

This time the scene was prepared using an intimacy co-ordinator, which 61-year-old Dillon says was his first time working with one. “I said to the intimacy co-ordinator, ‘do you know what the scene is about?'” he recalls. “They said yes, and I said, ‘Because you can probably trace back the role of an intimacy co-ordinator to that moment, in that film.'”