Jeremiah S. Chechik

[on Diabolique (1996)] It was a chance to do something very, very challenging. I wanted to make a movie that took the original story of the French film, which I thought was a flawed and misogynist film and just by, not changing the story, but changing the point of view, create a feminist story. I wondered if that was possible. So that was my artistic challenge. It was a nightmare. You just never know going in. Did I know what Sharon Stone was like? But let bygones be bygones. Sharon and I began friendly. We were friends before we did it. When the project ended, we weren't speaking. I tried to help her to go through whatever she had to go through to do it. She had her issues with the producer and the studio and used me in her game with them. And used the movie against me. I was trying to make the movie - I wasn't trying to deal with the politics outside of the movie, of which there was a huge amount. Some of what was reported in the press was true, but everyone used it to their own ends and really forgot about the movie. That's what made it so difficult. We'd hired Don Roos to do the script and he's such an amazingly good writer. Don and I worked on the script for about a year and at some point I thought, "Let's make this movie inexpensive in Morocco, in the sun." The studio went, "We want noir. We want noir. We want noir." To this day I love the performances of Kathy Bates and Isabelle Adjani, with whom I became very close. Actually, I love Sharon's performance. I think it's good. But the movie itself was extraordinarily turbulent. It was a very difficult everyday experience. The film turned out the way I wanted it to, love it or hate it. It really did. But I had to battle it constantly and battle a lot of personalities. It was an experience unlike any other but doing the drama was something that I loved. I feel that my movie and the first are flip sides of the same coin. I wanted to see how far I could take a movie perceived as a classic by reinterpreting it, as a man, as a feminist movie. That's pretty bold, in retrospect. Maybe I shouldn't have done it. I wanted to do a movie that was not light. What I ended up with was a movie that was so dark it had no light at all. Which may explain why it was trounced critically - unfairly, I believe. A lot of the critical hostility came from just my attempt to redo it. I think it will be reevaluated, I really do. When there are no issues, no baggage, the movie will be seen in the light that I made it. Probably after I'm dead. The irony is, just recently somebody re-reviewed it and gave it a beautiful review, and I don't say that just because it was a good review, but it was an analytical review that really addressed the intentions of the movie I mentioned earlier.[2011]