Last Tango in Paris director Bernardo Bertolucci reveals butter rape scene was not consensual

The 1972 film Last Tango in Paris created outrage across the internet over a three-year-old video where the film director Bernardo Bertolucci has confessed that the film's notorious butter rape scene was shot without the consent of 19-year-old actor Maria Schneider.

Speaking in a recently resurfaced video interview from 2013, Italian director Bertolucci admits that he and actor Marlon Brando planned to film the entire rape scene without telling Schneider the details of it.

Best remembered for its explicit rape scene, the movie was highly acclaimed by the critics at that time. The film follows the story of a man (Brando) who enters into an anonymous affair after his wife committed suicide. Subsequently, the movie shows then-48-year-old Brando sodomizes the character of Schneider (then-19-year-old) using a stick of butter.

"The sequence of the butter is an idea that I had with Marlon in the morning before shooting it," Bertolucci said during the 2013 interview at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris.

"I'd been, in a way, horrible to Maria, because I didn't tell her what was going on," because he "wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress. I wanted her to react humiliated."

Bertolucci said. "I think she hated me and also Marlon because we didn't tell her."

The director also admitted of feeling guilty for what he did to Maria but ultimately did not regret for his decision.

Prior to her death in 2011, the French actress Maria Schneider confessed that the she felt "humiliated" and "a little raped" during the filming of the scene. It wasn't in the script, she claimed, and neither Bertolucci nor Brando consoled her or apologized after filming.

"I was so young and relatively inexperienced and I didn't understand all of the film's sexual content. I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can't force someone to do something that isn't in the script, but at the time, I didn't know that," she said in a 2007 Daily Mail interview.

In an interview with The Telegraph in 2013, Bertolucci said, "No, I don't feel guilty, but when she died I thought, God, I'm so sorry that I can't apologize for what Marlon and I did with that scene and we decided not to tell her."

The news created outrage on social media as several Hollywood celebs expressed their disgust about the incident. Here are some of the tweets.