Sharon Stone is apparently a lot more high maintenance than you might imagine — a whole lot more — if movie director Pupi Avati’s comments, made recently to The Hollywood Reporter , are anything to go by.
When Stone was cast for the movie Golden Boy , Pupi and his brother-producer Antonio were thrilled to be working with one of Hollywood’s finest. But when the shooting of the movie started, Stone was apparently anything but easy to work with.
Talking in the interview about the casting, Avati said, “The idea of having her in the role of an actress from the 90s who becomes a book editor was mine. I knew there are American actresses more capable than her, but I wanted a film icon. Everyday on the set I was telling her: ‘But do you realize that you are Sharon Stone because of that day when you crossed your legs?’”
He continued to speak about how painstaking the negotiations to secure Sharon Stone for the movie were, suggesting that her high-maintenance demands “bordered on ridiculousness.”
“My brother asked me if I was crazy. Rai [Cinema] told me you will never ever get her. Then a correspondence started, enough to write a book, between her agents and our lawyers. It was a negotiation that bordered on ridiculousness, concerning embarrassing details, as if Italy was a third world country. By the way, we do have electricity in Italy.”
Antonio Avati added, “Then she arrived in Italy, and we went to pick her up in Florence with a train from Italo that we rented just for her. She was there to visit [Andrea] Bocelli. We had our first meeting with her: she was on the wrong railway track, sitting on her luggage and no one around recognized her.”
But it wasn’t until the final scene for the movie was shot when Sharon Stone’s real diva-like behavior began, “It was the last scene in the day and we had to do the last shot where Sharon kisses Scamarcio.”
“Suddenly, she realized that together with all the photographers there was also a TV cameraman who was filming. She immediately disappeared. We looked for her everywhere, but nothing! Then my brother received a phone call from Los Angeles from her manager: she wouldn’t come back on the set until the photographers and especially that damned TV cameramen had gone away. Obviously we did so and she, like nothing happened, shot the scene. The thing that I found most absurd is that she had to call to the States and to close herself in a car, instead of coming to ask us directly.”
According to Sharon Stone’s rep, Cindi Berger, the allegations made by the Avati brothers are wholly false, as she told the publication, “None of this is true. Ms. Stone is the consummate professional.”
