A recently unearthed video interview with Bertolucci... (Associated Press) 
 
 ROME (AP) — Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci is clarifying details about the infamous butter rape scene in the "Last Tango in Paris." According to Bertolucci, he and Brando came up with the idea of using butter just before the scene was shot on the set of the Parisian apartment where much of the film takes place. I feel sick.” 
 
 The Office’s Jenna Fischer called on all copies of the film to be destroyed, claiming it contained an “actual rape.” 
 
 On Dec. 5, Bertolucci, released a new statement in which he defended the simulated scene, adding that the only thing unknown to Schneider, who, he said, read and agreed to the explicit nature of the script before signing onto the role, was “the idea of the butter.” 
 
 Storaro, who was on set throughout the shoot, says he had not been following the renewed controversy, but was sent a story from a friend about the resurfaced interview and was shocked that a three-year-old discussion about a film released in 1972 was being turned into a “ridiculous” scandal. Bertolucci says the only novelty sprung on actress Maria Schneider was the butter — not the simulated rape, which he said was written into the script. The controversial film made headlines in recent days after a 2013 interview surfaced in which Bertolucci said neither he nor Marlon Brando had told Schneider of their plans to use the stick of butter during the scene. We knew the script and we knew what we wanted to do, but every morning you come up with different ideas, so you are specifically discussing that scene in that moment. Bertolucci wanted her, he said, to feel "the rage and the humiliation."
– The butter was the surprise, not the simulated rape. That's what director Bernardo Bertolucci is adding to the conversation on the recent dustup about one of his most famous movie scenes. Outrage ensued after an interview with him from 2013 emerged in which he said he and Marlon Brando decided the morning of shooting to use a stick of butter (as lubricant) on actress Maria Schneider during the rape scene in Last Tango in Paris, but Bertolucci says the scene itself wasn't a shock to Schneider, the AP reports. "Some people thought, and think, that Maria wasn't informed about the rape," he said Monday, per ANSA. "False! Maria knew everything because she had read it in the script, where it was described. The only novelty was the idea of the butter." Schneider, who died in 2011, was 19 when the scene was shot with 48-year-old Brando; she said in 2007 that she "felt a little raped" by both men. The movie's cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, weighs in, telling the Hollywood Reporter that Schneider loved being in the film and that the element of surprise was part of Bertolucci's moviemaking MO. "I was there with two cameras and nothing happened," he says. "Nobody was raping anybody. That was something made up by a journalist." He adds Bertolucci likely felt "a little guilty and nothing more than that" for not completely explaining the butter to Schneider before the scene was shot. Bertolucci also calls anyone who thought Schneider was actually raped "naive" and the controversy "ridiculous." "Those who don't know that in film, sex is [almost] always simulated, probably also think that every time John Wayne fires, someone actually dies," he said in the statement. He admitted in the 2013 interview that Schneider "hated me for all of her life," per the Express. More from Storaro.