Being Maria, a new film starring Matt Dillon and Anamaria Vartolomei, explores the life of Maria Schneider and the making of one of the most notorious films in cinema history.

It may be the most infamous scene in the entire history of cinema. The sexually explicit drama Last Tango in Paris, made by Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci and released in 1972, is the story of an affair between a middle-aged man, Paul, and a young woman, Jeanne, in a Paris apartment. The notorious "butter scene" was not in the original script and elements of it were made without 19-year-old actress Maria Schneider's prior consent.

Warning: This article contains themes of sexual assault that some may find upsetting.

Schneider struggled with drug addiction and her mental health for years after the film's release, but her story, and the making of Last Tango in Paris, is now being told through the film Being Maria. It stars Matt Dillon as Marlon Brando, who played Paul, and Anamaria Vartolomei as Schneider. The film's French director Jessica Palud adapted the story from a 2018 memoir by journalist Vanessa Schneider, Maria's cousin.

"I think we have to look at the context of the time of Last Tango in Paris, it's now fifty years since the film was made," Matt Dillon tells the BBC. "That time was a different time, but it's very important to look at it now from a different perspective.

"It was really a traumatic experience for her. And not just at the time it happened, but as it continued to follow her and haunt her wherever she went in her life, in so many ways."

Being Maria explores Schneider's background: she was the product of an affair between a famous French actor, Daniel Gélin, and a Romanian model. She first met her father as a teenager, and he introduced her to film sets. Last Tango in Paris was her first leading role, and she would later recall in a 2007 interview, then in her fifties, that she was persuaded to take the part instead of starring in a film with French film star Alain Delon, and, at the age of 19, "didn't understand all of the film's sexual content". She "had a bad feeling about it all", she said, but was told by her agency she couldn't possibly turn down working with Marlon Brando, one of the greatest stars of 20th-Century cinema.

She remembered what happened on the day of filming that scene, in which her character is raped by Brando's, using butter as a lubricant. "That scene wasn't in the original script. The truth is it was Marlon who came up with the idea. They only told me about it before we had to film the scene and I was so angry… I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn't console me or apologise," she said. "Marlon said to me: 'Maria, don't worry, it's just a movie,' but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn't real, I was crying real tears.

"Thankfully, there was just one take."

Bertolucci would later talk about why he withheld details of the scene from Schneider, saying: "I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress. I wanted her to react humiliated." He insisted that it was only the use of the butter that had surprised the actress, but Matt Dillon says what happened was "really wrong".

"It's something that we often do, actors, we won't tell the other actor, or the director will encourage us to not reveal what we're going to do, so we can get a real reaction," he says. "But it was really wrong, with a scene that was so sensitive, to do something like that."

Jessica Palud tells the BBC that recreating the rape scene "couldn't be avoided" in Being Maria, but this time, the audience sees events from Maria Schneider's perspective. "I couldn't avoid shooting this scene because it was the very moment in which her life completely switches. Everything goes wrong from there," Palud says. "It was important to have the scene from her point of view, in her body, in her gaze, what she went through, and the fact that there were witnesses. Maria was being assaulted in the presence of the whole crew, who were observing and not reacting."

This time the scene was prepared using an intimacy co-ordinator, which 61-year-old Dillon says was his first time working with one. "I said to the intimacy co-ordinator, 'do you know what the scene is about?'" he recalls. "They said yes, and I said, 'Because you can probably trace back the role of an intimacy co-ordinator to that moment, in that film.'"

The use of an intimacy co-ordinator, who acts as a choreographer and a liaison between actors and production during simulated sex and nude scenes, is increasingly standard in the industry since the #MeToo movement.........

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