9 ½ Weeks: how Adrian Lyne pushed Kim Basinger to the limit during filming – CinéSéries

9 ½ weeks : a turning point for Kim Basinger

In the first part of our file, we evoked the humiliating audition of Kim Basinger for 9 ½ weeks. When she tries out with Mickey Rourke for this adaptation of the novel The foreign body by Elizabeth McNeill released in 1986, Adrian Lyne asked her to crawling to pick up tickets. The actress leaves the room in tears and assures her agent thatshe never wants to hear about this movie again.

The director nevertheless insists that she accept the role of Elizabeth, an employee of a New York art gallery who instantly falls under the spell of the mysterious John (Mickey Rourke) when she meets him in a grocery store. Aware that this experience could mark a turning point in his career and make her “stronger”, Kim Basinger ends up saying “yes”.

An actress pushed to her limits

Then begins an exhausting shoot for the actress. Wishing to transcribe on screen the emotional distress of the character she embodies, Adrian Lyne establishes a power struggle with Kim Basinger in order to make her vulnerable. As related by New York Times in 1986, some people present during the production did not understand the intensity of the relationship between the filmmaker and the actress, who went through moments of “rage and despair”.

The director is sometimes terrifying with the actress, not hesitating to manipulate it to obtain the result he wishes. He also makes Kim Basinger fear Mickey Rourke by asking them to avoid each other, which the star of Rusty James and Year of the Dragon tries hard, barely speaking to his partner. At the time, Adrian Lyne explained:

She had to be afraid of him. (…) I didn’t want them to meet again (after the audition) until they started working, I didn’t want them to have a relationship that would exclude me. I wanted the 10 weeks of filming to be like the 9 and a half weeks of the relationship.

“It was not pleasant, but it was useful”

The filmmaker also claims that his approach was not “the result of a sadistic alliance” between Mickey Rourke and him, adding about Kim Basinger:

She knew it was something that helped her. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was helpful.

The director is convinced that if he hadn’t pushed the actress to the limit, she wouldn’t have been able to offer such a performance:

You can’t do that with everyone. Kim is a bit like a child. She is innocent. (…) She is an instinctive actress. She was that woman for ten weeks, she didn’t play it. To make her angry, I got angry at her and she did it back. Mickey did it too. He scared her. And it was done on purpose. (Kim) is not an intellectual. She does not read. She doesn’t really act, she reacts.

Mickey Rourke’s Regrets

A description in which the main interested party absolutely does not recognize herself. She believes that Adrian Lyne did not develop this working method to adapt to her, but simply because it is his way of doing things. If she does not realize that she is being manipulated, she agrees to remain “naive” and malleable during production, out of trust for the filmmaker.

As for Mickey Rourke, he recognizes in the show Actor’s Studio that he went too far with his partner:

The Last Tango in Paris came out a few years ago and I thought we could go even further. I don’t know to what degree she was interested in this role. He is a very reserved person. At that time, I was young and stupid. I did not know her. The film was harder for her to make than I thought. If I had to do it again with her, I would be very different“.

This painful shoot, which had harmful consequences on the personal life of Kim Basingerreached its climax during the shots of a deleted scene, to discover in our article of Wednesday August 17, 2022.