Sharon Stone "slapped" her Basic Instinct director the first time she saw her infamous leg crossing scene.

The 55-year-old actress had been reluctant to remove her underwear for the provocative moment but had been assured by Paul Verhoeven that nothing would be visible - so she was furious when she watched the 1992 thriller in the cinema for the first time and realized just how much she had exposed.

"When we did it, it was going to be an innuendo and the director said, 'We're seeing the white of your underwear, I need you to take them off.' And I'm like, 'I don't want you to see anything and he's like, 'No, no you're not going to.' So I gave him the underwear, put them in the pocket of his shirt, and he said, 'Now watch on the monitor...' In those days... it's not like now where everything is high definition, and when I looked at the monitor you really couldn't see anything. So when I saw it in the theater, with a bunch of other people, I was like [in shock]. When the film ended I went in the booth and I slapped him and I said, 'You could have showed me this to me by myself.'"

However, despite her anger, Sharon admits the scene feels "right" and was appropriate for her novelist character Catherine Tramell. "It's so right for the movie and so right for the character but if I would have gotten that, even by accident, I would have had the courtesy to show it to my actor. But, I would have kept it in the movie," she added.