British director Emerald Fennell has denied that she is in negotiations to helm Amazon’s planned reboot of the 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct.
In a new interview with The Guardian, Joe Eszterhas — who wrote the screenplay for the original cult classic directed by Paul Verhoeven, starring Sharon Stone as a crime novelist suspected of murdering a rock star — claimed that Fennell was “in negotiations” to direct his nearly completed screenplay for the remake.
“The producers are negotiating with a really interesting director — a Brit, Emerald Fennell — who did Promising Young Woman and Wuthering Heights,” the 81-year-old writer said. “Her sensibility is exactly right. She’s someone who is not afraid of controversy and sexuality. So I’m thrilled by that. I hope it works out.”
However, Fennell’s representative quickly told Variety that “there is no truth” to Eszterhas’s claims, and that “she is not involved in any way.”
A representative for Amazon MGM Studios also shut down the claims, calling them “categorically false,” in a statement shared with The Independent.
The Independent has contacted Fennell’s representative for further comment.
Eszterhas was reportedly paid $2 million for the new screenplay and will make another $2 million should it be made, though he remains confident that it will happen, insisting that “there’s a great demand for it. It’s trending all the time.”
Teasing the storyline for his new project, the writer said it would focus on copycat serial killers with supernatural elements.
Initially, Eszterhas wanted Stone to return for the revival, but the actor spurned the idea. “There’s not going to be a Basic Instinct reboot,” she said on the Today show last August. “I hate to break it to you, but Joe Eszterhas couldn’t write himself out of a Walgreens drug store.”
Should Fennell have directed the remake, it would have marked the Oscar-winner’s first major project since the release of her Wuthering Heights adaptation in February.
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Led by Margot Robbie opposite Jacob Elordi as 18th-century star-crossed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff, the film divided critics and viewers, with some finding it “emotionally hollow” and others lauding it as “oozy and wild.”
As a director, Fennell has repeatedly faced criticism for her work, with some arguing that films like Promising Young Woman and Saltburn lean on shock value and aesthetic excess.
“Promising Young Woman, her 2020 debut, in which Carey Mulligan donned a rainbow wig to kidnap and sternly tell off rapists and scumbags, was either an urgent, angry post-#MeToo battle cry, or too coy and gutless to be the revenge epic it wanted to be,” Adam White summated for The Independent earlier this year.
“Saltburn, her 2023 follow-up, was a Talented Mr Ripley riff either embraced for its shock and nudity and bodily fluids, or decried for being a toothless eat-the-rich trainwreck by Britain’s poshest writer/director. Maybe it was a bit of both.”
“Neither sparked quite as much outrage, though, as her ‘Wuthering Heights’, which seemed to generate worry and backlash from its initial announcement, straight through to its release. Now in cinemas, the film ultimately guts the messy complexity of Emily Brontë’s source material, makes the probably-not-white Heathcliff very, very white, and transforms his and Cathy Linton’s brutish dynamic of lust and loathing into basic, Fifty Shades kink.”
