Basic Instinct | Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas says his reboot will be “spooky”

by Ryan Lambie |
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As well as being ‘anti-woke’, the Basic Instinct reboot will also be spooky and demonic according to screenwriter Joe Eszterhas.

Last week, it was announced that the 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct is getting a reboot courtesy of Amazon MGM and original screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. Since then, TheWrap – which broke that original story – has caught up with Eszterhas to talk about his plans for the thriller.

Now aged 80, and situated in Cleveland rather than Malibu, the veteran writer is still capable of commanding the vast sums he did decades ago – his deal with Amazon MGM is said to be worth as much as $4m if the film gets made.

“Yeah, this is preposterous,” Eszterhas conceded. “The notion that you’re going to pay four million bucks to an 80-year-old guy who lives in Cleveland for God’s sakes, right? You’re going to do all that? OK, so they did.”

As for the film itself, Eszterhas suggests that the new Basic Instinct will be as much a sequel as a reboot, with the hope being that Sharon Stone will reprise her role as the coolly murderous novelist, Catherine Trammel. It’ll be set in the present day, meaning over 30 years have passed since the events of the original, in which Trammel was suspected of killing a retired rock star and was investigated by Michael Douglas’s detective, Nick Curran.

As well as an older Trammel, the new Basic Instinct will also introduce what sounds like a bit of horror, or perhaps even the supernatural.

“In my reboot she [Trammel] is not the star of the picture but she is the main co-star of the picture,” Eszterhas said. “It’s about the serial killers. It’s about copycats. There’s a demonic element to it that I think will be spooky.”

Interestingly, director Paul Verhoeven, who made the original film, once said that he thought of Trammel as being supernatural in some way. When talking about the character’s almost eerie level of intelligence, which means she’s constantly outsmarting the cops, Verhoeven said the following in the documentary Blonde Poison, included on Basic Instinct’s DVD:

“That was extremely contrived, but worked very well. And that I thought, okay, how can I make that true to myself? I say, okay, ‘she’s the devil.’ That basically makes her supernatural in some way, she could foresee with more insight than anyone else… to be so clairvoyant, to be so, let’s say, clever in planning.“

Verhoeven’s 1983 film The Fourth Man could also be seen as a dry run for Basic Instinct: it’s a twisted, bloody erotic thriller in which the femme fatale appears to have a touch of the demonic about her. (If you haven’t seen it, do check it out.)

It remains to be seen just how far into the realms of the demonic and spooky Eszterhas will go. One thing we do know, though, is that it’ll be ‘anti-woke’, per the screenwriter’s earlier statement. But what does that mean, exactly?

“It means that dialogue-wise [Trammel] will be open about her sexuality, character-wise she will be raunchy at times, funny, iconoclastic and all of those things,” Eszterhas said. It’s not clear why those traits would make the film anti-woke, but there we go.

The full interview, conducted by Sharon Waxman, is well worth reading – not least for Eszterhas’s chat about where the ideas for Basic Instinct came from.

More on what could be a quite odd reboot as we get it.

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