Interview with David Morrissey - March 14th, 2006

Promoting: Basic Instinct 2
Venue: The Dorchester Hotel
Interview type: One-on-one



ViewLondon (VL): How did you get involved with Basic Instinct 2? Were you a fan of the original film?

David Morrissey (DM): I was in London and I got a phone call from my agent to say that they were interested in me for Basic Instinct 2. I remembered really enjoying the first one although I hadn’t seen it for ages. I read the script, which I really liked – it was set in New York when I read it but I knew that they were going to transpose it to London. And I got the first one out again and I really thought it was great, seeing it a second time, it had a real Hitchcockian feel to it. And I met Michael Caton-Jones and we got on immediately, and the next thing they fly me to L.A. and I meet Sharon and I get to stay in the Four Seasons Hotel and I’m all very swanky and then I go down and I meet her and we get on. I’d prepared three scenes to do with her and they’d blocked out an hour for me to be with her and I was there for two hours and about an hour and a half of that was just chatting, so we got on well. And then we did the scenes and then I went home and they told me I’d got it. But in my pessimistic way I thought “This’ll never happen”, but it did.

VL: A couple of explicit deleted scenes from the film have ended up on the internet. Can you explain why they were cut out?

DM: I can’t really answer the question about why they were cut out because I wasn’t privy to those decisions, really. Probably because my arse wasn’t good enough. But I think one of the things about the time that’s gone on between the two films is that we do live in a different time, and not that it’s a more prurient time but I think that with the internet and advertising, sex is pretty much out there and available to us in a way that it wasn’t with the first film. So the first film was quite full on but now I think less is more and that might have been behind the decision to pull the threesome scene. But there’s also that maxim, that I think is very true, that you set out to make one film, you actually shoot a second film and you edit a third.

VL: Have you ever been cut out of anything?

DM: Yeah, I was cut out of Girl With A Pearl Earring, which was fine, actually, I mean I was really, well, not happy about it, but as a director you can see why those decisions were made and you don’t take it personally. And I liked the film and I think it benefited from me not being in it!