Streaming has been good for Hollywood: Sharon Stone

Sharon Stone, 66, believes that streaming networks have been vital in keeping mid-range budget movies alive as studios focus on blockbusters.

Speaking at the Taormina Film Festival, where she received the Golden Cariddi Lifetime Achievement Award, Sharon told Variety: “The world has changed dynamically since 1992. When I made Basic Instinct, it seemed like a scandal. The studios have changed dramatically. They’ve changed from making a variety of movies to making really these gigantic US$100 (S$134) and US$200 million films.

“When I was making these beautiful films 30 years ago, they would be US$50-60 million tops. Now streamers are taking over our business. And I don’t think that that’s a terrible thing really. We’re coming back to making smaller and more relevant films.”

And Sharon believes there is now more of an opportunity for women to write, direct and produce.

She said: “I just have to say now that women are writing, producing, and are more and more a part of filmmaking, and films are less about men writing about their fantasies of the way women are and actors asked to portray the male fantasy, and the critics are less asked to tell us if we fulfil the male fantasy, or not.

“That film is so changed from whether women are fulfilling the written, directed, produced, edited, and criticised… if we’d have met with a male fantasy, and now it’s more about: Are we fulfilling this human condition?”

“It’s not something we’re coming back to in my mind. It’s stayed on TV. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t natural. None of us would be here if sex and sexuality wasn’t a natural part of our human condition.”