In complicity with Mickey Rourke, director Adrian Lyne pushed his idea of the actress's character to the limit. When was the line between reality and fiction crossed?
At the time of filming Nine and a Half Weeks, each of the protagonists had traveled their way to stardom in a different way. Mickey Rourke had grown up in the underworld of Miami, in a dysfunctional home, in which his stepfather abused him and his mother. He wanted to be a boxer, but he left everything behind to pursue acting, having already worked under Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola. He was beginning to make a face for himself, and, above all, a style. Casual clothing, greasy hair, and stubble sticking out, made him the natural contender to fill the ever-hot spot of James Dean's successor.
For her part, Kim Basinger had already been a Bond Girl and a Playboy cover. Born in Athens, Georgia, and raised in a family of artists, she had overcome typical adolescent traumas and was ready to exploit her image, much to her shyness. After winning a beauty pageant she traveled to New York to work as a model and from there she jumped to the non-stop movie Mecca. Her role in Never Say Never captivated the audience. The race to be "the new Marilyn Monroe" had a candidate willing to put up a fight. She had also been married for six years to makeup artist Ron Snyder-Britton, fifteen years her senior.
Meanwhile, Adrian Lyne came from another world... literally. Born in England, he forged his career in London in the field of advertising. He had two feature films behind him: Foxes, starring Jodie Foster, and the famous Flashdance, winner of two Oscars and one of the highest-grossing of the decade. What came into his hands for his new project was more than interesting. A true story, based on the autobiographical novel by Elizabeth McNeil –Ingeborg Day's pseudonym- with passages of perversion and sadomasochism, ideal for playing on the edge. You just had to choose the fair performers and set your own rules.
When Kim Basinger went to her casting, something in her told her that she shouldn't accept that role, that it wasn't meant for her. The production wanted actresses with more experience on the screen, and thus heavy names like Kathleen Turner, Jacqueline Bisset, and Isabella Rossellini paraded.
During the casting, Kim got a taste of what her hand would look like. The director only gave orders to Mickey Rourke while she ignored her. Her character, Elizabeth, played a prostitute who would crawl after the bills that her partner threw at him until he said enough was enough.
When he finished the test, the director rubbed his hands: he had finally found the leading lady. On the other hand, Basinger swore not to participate in that project.
When she arrived at her house, she found 24 red roses and a letter signed by Lyne and Rourke and changed her mind. She had not yet started filming and the perversion was beginning to cross the screen.
The director was delighted with Kim. Her cross between naivety and S- bombshell was exactly what she had interpreted from the novel and that was what she wanted to translate to the screen. “It couldn't have been done by any actress. She is like a girl. She is innocent, therein lies her charm of her. She is a very instinctive actress,” Lyne recounted.
But to make the relationship more credible, the director designed a non-communication strategy between the protagonists. No photos, no eating out, no making friends. "She should be afraid of him," Lyne justified. It was also considered to film the scenes in chronological order, so that Kim's physical, and especially psychological, deterioration was simultaneous to Elizabeth's.
"Adrian wanted me to react exactly how I reacted, because the character of Elizabeth was like that, naive and later transformed by a man into what he wanted from her," the actress told the New York Times at the time.
The director saw in the casting the key to the success of the filming. “There was such hostility and such S- energy between them that I didn't want them to develop a relationship without me there. She must live on the edge of terror. I wanted those ten weeks of shooting to be like the nine and a half weeks of the relationship," Lyne said.
To improve his plan, he decided to ignore the actress and let her notice: only Rourke was going to receive the instructions for the shoot. She also used to yell "cut" leaving Basinger almost N- in positions or replay her scenes dozens of times. The actor and director used to "none" her. Rourke was absent in the scenes where he had to give rise to a sentence and the one who said it to Kim was a camera assistant. He also presented himself as dirty and smelling of sweat, which caused her complaints and his justifications, assuring that he did it to escape her image of her.
The strategy went too far in one of the final scenes, in which the protagonists agree to commit suicide. She was supposed to appear destroyed on camera, but instead, she looked calm and healthy. It wasn't what the director was up to. Her plan was about to fail. She called Rourke and asked him to be more forceful. Back on the set, the actor grabbed her arm tightly. She started to scream, but he wouldn't let go. She tried to defend herself against her and hit him, and he responded with a slap. Just as tears streamed down Basinger's face, the director yelled "Action." He had gotten what he wanted.
The actress reluctantly understood the game: “I knew that if I did this it would make me stronger and wiser. I felt humiliated and disgusted. It was all against my principles. But when you go against your principles, emotions arise that you did not know you had, ”she confessed in the promotional interview.
The route of the film is known. It went unnoticed in the United States, where censorship was in charge of cutting some scenes, such as the one mentioned about the casting. “The American audience was slow to appreciate what we did. Here people are afraid of certain types of romances,” Zalman King, one of the screenwriters, later recounted. Critics were relentless, and Basinger was nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Actress. He had better luck in Europe, and also in Argentina where the public crowded into the theaters. Later she entered the video store circuit and today she is considered a cult.
The filming left physical and emotional scars on Basinger, who had suddenly become a celebrity.
Two years later she separated from her husband, who is a biography of her, and aired a touch-and-go of the blonde with Richard Gere, her partner in No Mercy. In 1989, she was cast in the role of Vicky Vale in Tim Burton's Batman. In charge of the soundtrack was the artist then still known as Prince. They lived an intense romance, she settled in Minneapolis and her family was so surprised that she claimed that the musician had put a spell on her. He fulfilled one of her dreams and produced an album of hers, Hollywood Affair, where a myth claims that the couple's gasps can be heard.
"At that time I did not deprive myself of anything," the blonde confessed, without remorse or false modesty. She even bought herself an entire town, with which she dreamed of making a miniature Hollywood. What she would regret, was accepting the next film.
At the threshold of the '90s, Basinger was showered with offers. She agreed to participate in That Blonde Weakness, where she met Alec Baldwin. The couple's fatal attraction lasted much longer than nine and a half weeks. Kim and Alec confused the boundaries of the script and ignored the cut order. They repeated the formula in The Escape, the other film in which they shared the bill, and where they assure that the scenes are excessively literal.
They married in 1993, and in 1995 they had their only daughter, Ireland, they separated in 1998 and in 2002 they began a scandalous divorce before the eyes of the world. They made their differences public and in the middle, suffering the blows from one side and the other, little Ireland. “A divorce is hard on a child no matter how it happens. But ours was very public and dirty, "acknowledged the actress, who allowed herself to joke about that choice at the beginning of the decade:" They should shoot me for having made that choice. I turned down Sleeping with the Enemy to film That Blonde Weakness and ended up being the one sleeping with her enemy.”
Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger took 23 years to show themselves publicly again after all that Nine and a Half Weeks meant. At that time, they knew of falls and resurrections, successes and failures; loves and betrayals There was even a remake of the famous film, to which he said yes, and she said no. Professional recognition came to each one. She won an Oscar for the hooker role of her in N- Los Angeles and he cherished it—and according to everyone but the Academy, she deserved it—for The Wrestler. They say that among the thousands of congratulations Rourke received, there was a sender in the name of Basinger.
