Bill Murray Was Afraid of Doing His Love Scene With Sharon Stone After Watching ‘Basic Instinct’

Actor Sharon Stone once paired up with Ghostbusters alum Bill Murray in the 2005 feature Broken Flowers. But when it came time for the pair to be intimate, Murray felt a little threatened by Stone’s body count in Basic Instinct.

Bill Murray and Sharon Stone collaborated on ‘Broken Flowers’

Murray and Stone teamed up for the 2005 romantic drama Broken Flowers, which was shot by director Jim Jarmusch. In the project, Murray played a man who receives a mysterious letter claiming he has a son he’s never met. Afterwards, Murray’s character retraces his steps back towards his ex-girlfriends to see who’s likeliest to be the mother of his child.

Stone portrayed one of Murray’s flings in the picture. And speaking to Cinema, Jarmusch confided that Stone conceived a lot of the ideas when interacting with her co-star.

“Sharon added some beautiful things. It was Sharon’s idea to be smashed up on top of Don in bed when they wake up in the morning; it was Sharon’s idea to, on leaving, kiss his hand,” Jarmusch recalled. “Her idea was, ‘What if we reverse the traditional gesture of a man kissing a woman’s hand, and I just take his hand and briefly kiss it in a little gesture to leave him with, showing that I’m not needy or devastated but that I’m appreciating a tender thing that happened between us, and whatever it means is okay.’ And that was a perfect solution.”

Murray and Stone would also share an intimate scene together. Murray was already well aware of Stone’s work in Basic Instinct, and that led to the comedian’s own discomfort in the scene.

“It was kind of a disappointment. I didn’t think there would be all those people watching. With cameras,” Murray once said according to Irish Examiner. “And then she put her hands all over my face and neck. She’s been in those movies where people end up dead, so it made me a little jumpy.”

Sharon Stone found her famous murder scenes in ‘Basic Instinct’ unsettling

Stone’s intimate and violent scenes in Basic Instinct weren’t just uncomfortable for Murray. Stone recalled the anxiety she experienced when performing the takes as well. Playing Catherine Tramell, the femme fatale suspected of butchering victims with an icepick, was sometimes a nightmare for the star.

“I made my best friend lie by the bed while I did the scene — just lie there by the camera telling me jokes. God! They had a paramedic with an oxygen mask there because I’d start to feel like I was going to pass out,” Stone once recalled to Playboy.

For the Casino star, it was even easier to disrobe for the camera than to simulate a horrific murder.

“Because killing is much further from my personal self than taking off my clothes to have sex. I had such a hard time with the killing scenes that [director Paul Verhoeven] screamed at me the entire time we were doing them. He screamed like a lunatic, to evoke or provoke or, I don’t know, he just generally badgered the s*** out of me,” she said.

But Stone was soon able to adjust and meet the scene’s demands.

“Eventually, I had to loop the sequence. When I did, it was so disturbing to everyone that they couldn’t deal with it. See, by then I had seen the film and recognized that Catherine was like a carnivorous cat on the kill. That’s how I understood the energy of it. Once I got that — once I understood the roar of the kill — I told them I didn’t want to loop it one bit at a time like they usually do. I wanted to do it all at once,” she said.

Bill Murray had a conversation about all of his exes to star in ‘Broken Flowers’

Murray didn’t nab the part by rehearsing. Instead, he had a long conversation with his Broken Flowers filmmaker before portraying his onscreen role. Jarmusch recalled his brief time together with the Lost in Translation star in an interview with BBC.

“Well Bill doesn’t like to rehearse so our preparation for the film consisted of long talks. Our biggest one was about a two hour walk we took though New York at night and we just meandered and talked about our ex lovers, women in general, and about all kinds of things,” Jarmusch said. “It wasn’t a conversation specific to how do we approach the character, but it always came back to the character and we got a lot from that.”