Anyone connected to the film industry would be familiar with the guiding, if unspoken, principle that film is something bigger than ourselves, to which all involved must make sacrifices.
This can take the form of producers placing their crews' life in danger, occasionally resulting in deaths. More often, however, it sees famous directors - tortured geniuses that they are - use almost any means to get that perfect shot.
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Last Tango rape scene non-consensual
Director of Last Tango in Paris has admitted actress Maria Schenider wasn't warned prior to shooting the film's infamous butter rape.
Those "means" all too often include the psychological and physical abuse of female stars.
Young actresses, often cast opposite much older men, are expected to strip off while their co-stars stay fully clothed. This is no coincidence but a reflection of the power imbalance at the heart of the industry. Refusing to play along can mean kissing that Big Break goodbye. In such circumstances, it's simply not the case that these women are exercising free agency.
Over the weekend, footage surfaced of Italian "master" filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci admitting he did the wrong thing "in a way" by 19-year-old female star Maria Schneider during filming of his 1972 classic Last Tango In Paris. It turns out the infamous scene in which the young woman gets raped by her much older lover, who uses butter as a lubricant, was not consensual.
According to Bertolucci, Schneider was not informed of the decision he made with 48-year-old Marlon Brando to use butter as a prop, because he didn't want Schneider to "act her humiliation, her rage" but to "feel the rage and humiliation".
In other words, Bertolucci decided to humiliate and degrade her for the the sake of getting a realistic performance on camera.
Of course the result is not a performance at all, but an actual sexual assault. While there was no penetration, Schneider indicated almost 10 years ago that the entire scene was not in the script and she was only informed of it - minus the butter element - on the day. Despite her fury, she went ahead with doing it because, although "you can't force someone to do something that isn't in the script … at the time, I didn't know that."
![Hefty age gap: Marlon Brando, 48, and Maria Schneider, 19 star in Bernardo Bertolucci's film <em>Last Tango in Paris</em>.](/web/20161206043821im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/3/r/y/c/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt3wr5.png/1480940326711.jpg)
The effect of the film on Schneider's health is well known. The actress spiralled into depression and drug addiction. Refusing to ever shoot a nude scene again, she later claimed she "felt raped" by both Brando and her director.
Bertolucci goes on to say that he knew Schneider spent her life hating him (she died in 2011), and although he "feels guilty," he doesn't regret the decision. Because what is the life of a woman compared to a single scene in his movie?
![In this 1972 file photo originally provided by United Artists, Director Bernardo Bertolucci, left, Marlon Brando and ...](/web/20161206043821im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/3/g/u/e/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt3wr5.png/1480909147197.jpg)
Bertolucci was in his 30s at the time of filming, and the idea of two older, powerful, and famous men conspiring to not only humiliate a teenage woman, but to commit this degradation to film and call it art (both men were nominated for Oscars that year), is not only infuriating, it is indicative of the abuse of power that is prevalent and tolerated in the industry.
"Thankfully it was just one take," said Schneider many years later.
![Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando in the 1972 film <em>Last Tango in Paris</em>.](/web/20161206043821im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/3/g/u/p/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt3wr5.png/1480940326898.jpg)
That's more than can be said for the trauma Shelly Duvall went through on the set of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The gruelling shoot with this famously pedantic director lasted for more than a year, with Duvall saying she had to spend "12 hours a day crying" for the last nine months.
"From May until October, I was really in and out of ill health because the stress of the role was so great," she said.
![Shelley Duvall in 'The Shining'.](/web/20161206043821im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/3/x/b/m/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt3wr5.png/1480909147197.jpg)
Kubrick, not known for coddling anyone, was said to have treated her worse than anybody else, isolating her from the cast and crew and, according to Kubrick's daughter Vivian, demanded no one feel sympathy for her.
Her co-star Jack Nicholson called Duvall's role "the toughest job that any actor I've seen had because 40 per cent of that picture, she's hysterical".
![Tippi Hedren suffered from exhaustion after five days of filming an attack scene with live birds for Hitchcock's 'The Birds'.](/web/20161206043821im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/3/x/l/d/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt3wr5.png/1480909147197.jpg)
Kubrick, he said, "beat Shelley into that performance … If that was me, I don't know what I would do. I do not. I still wonder."
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Other women to be abused or deceived by their directors include Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds where, in one scene he - without informing her until the last moment - substituted the mechanical birds that had been used as props for the real thing.
In the film's attic scene, Hedren is attacked and genuinely injured by live birds. It's a scene that she says took five days to film, with live birds thrown at her and even tied to her body.
Hitchcock "put me in a mental prison", she said. In her memoir released this year, Hedren also accused him of sexually assaulting her.
"I was dealing with one of the most powerful men in motion pictures and it was difficult, embarrassing and insulting. He said, 'If you leave, I'll ruin your career.' And he did."
Likewise, shooting The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a real-life horror story for young star Marilyn Burns. According to Gunnar Hansen, who played the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface, "Marilyn told me about how awful it was for her because she was terrified … just being tied to a chair and then having these men looming over her constantly, she said it was really unnerving."
In a later joint interview, Burns revealed to Hansen, "I thought you were really going to hurt me."
Bertolucci's treatment of Schneider is clearly part of a culture of manipulation and bullying of actresses for the sake of a movie. Of course, this says as much about the world we live in as it does the nature of filmmaking. Women appear to be tormented more by their directors because their roles are secondary to those of men – women are the terrorised, men their terrorisers.
Often, the toll does not appear until well after filming has wrapped, as the stars of Blue Is the Warmest Colour discovered. Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos, who played lesbian lovers in the 2013 French film by the 50-something French director Abdellatif Kechiche, were initially excited by their roles, but began to unravel during the festival circuit as a rift between them and their director became clear.
"You can see that we were really suffering," Seydoux said of the brutal break-up scene. "She was hitting me so many times, and [Kechiche] was screaming: 'Hit her! Hit her again!' "
Clearly, a culture change is required, both within the film industry and in society at large; one that sees women as more than sexual commodities and victims. And one that doesn't sideline female directors while revering their male counterparts as "tortured geniuses", despite the fact that the ones they are torturing are not themselves.
"Don't worry, Maria," Schneider says Brando told her during the filming of Last Tango, "It's just a movie."
If only these male directors actually thought so.
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