‘Showgirls’: Paul Verhoeven on the Greatest Stripper Movie Ever Made

Anyhow, there was another project that came up suddenly: Crusade, with Arnold Schwarzenegger. So I started working on that, with the same company, Carolco Pictures. We were already building sets of Jerusalem in Spain, but then there was a problem with the financing. Carolco was spending a lot of money on another movie, Cutthroat Island, and that all went wrong. So Crusade was buried and we decided to pick up Showgirls again.
We had already done a lot of research. We spent weeks and weeks going to Vegas and talking to everybody in the sex industry, if you want to use that word — the choreographers of the big shows, the producers, the lap-dance girls, the dancers in the big shows. We interviewed about 30 or 40 people, and a lot of the things that you see in the movie came directly from these conversations. Even the storyline was partially taken from those interviews. We continued working on the script, with the idea of taking it in the direction of something like All About Eve. Probably the biggest change was the addition of the Molly Abrams character [played by Gina Rivera], the friend that Nomi makes in the beginning of the movie. The idea was to have a girl on the side who helps her.
I have said this in several interviews, but in retrospect I think it would have much better to have done something similar to Basic Instinct, more or less: a murder mystery in Vegas. And it would have been easier for audiences to go to a movie where there was abundant nudity — which was probably too difficult, in general, for the American public. In Basic Instinct, there are very, very long sex scenes, which aren’t there in Showgirls. Because it was a thriller, the idea that Sharon Stone could kill him during sex was always an element of protection. So we could show sex and nudity much longer than normal, because there was another element there — the element of threat.
But the sexual elements of Showgirls are extremely limited; it’s more about the nudity. If you make a story about a lap-dancer who becomes a showgirl, I think nudity is obligatory. It followed the storyline. But I wouldn’t call that sexual. I would say Showgirls is more anti-erotic than erotic.
“When I was in high school in Holland, my art teacher said: The breast of a woman is the most beautiful thing in the world. I never forgot that.”
With Basic Instinct, I had endless fights for months with the MPAA about what I could and couldn’t show in the film. Which is why the American version is different than the European version, which is much more explicit. We had to go back to the MPAA eight times with that movie before we could get an R rating, which is what my contract required. I had a long conversation with Mike Medavoy, who was then the head of TriStar, who told me, “If we make Basic Instinct as an NC-17, it could make $50 million or $250 million — I have no idea. But if we make it as an R, it will certainly make $150 million. So let’s do that.” [The film went on to earn more than $352 million worldwide, making it the ninth highest grossing film of 1992.]
That was the reasoning. And it made sense, at least from a business point of view, so I had to adapt to that. But going back and forth between the studio or the editing room and the MPAA, having to go back and change more and more frames…it was very unpleasant. Strangely enough, the shot of Sharon Stone spreading her legs was never a problem.
So I foresaw exactly the same problems — or worse — with doing Showgirls. So I told Joe and the others, “If you don’t do this as an NC-17, I’m not going to do it.” Because I didn’t want to fight with the MPAA about one breast here, or another breast there, and another breast over there. So from the beginning, I was very clear that I only wanted to make the movie with that rating.