No, Brooke Shields isn’t taking calls from the Blue Lagoon director

Even before the release of her two-part docu-series, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, the tide was turning on The Blue Lagoon. Not that there was ever much of a place for this weird tale of two naked teens, one of whom, a 15-year-old Shields, going through puberty and falling in love on a remote island. Pitched as a sensual love story for pervy weirdos, the movie made an obscene amount of money for 1980 standards but fell out of favor in recent years; though, it used to be a regular on TBS’ Dinner And A Movie for some reason.

Nevertheless, the rise of the #MeToo movement—not to mention the overwhelming amount of people who probably already thought the film’s nudity was pretty fucking gross—has given star Brooke Shields a chance to open up about how she feels about the experience. On The Drew Barrymore Show, Barrymore asked Shields if she heard from the directors of her three most controversial castings: Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, Franco Zeffirelli’s Endless Love, and Randal Kleiser’s The Blue Lagoon. Shields quickly reminded Barrymore that she had not heard from Malle or Zeffirelli with one word: “Dead.” However, she did screen a call from Kleiser once.

“I saw his name on my phone, and I was like, ‘Oh, what do I do?’ and I let it go to voicemail,” Shields said. “Because I was like, ‘I want to see what the tone is.’ He wants to chat. I don’t know about what, but I don’t feel like bringing any of it back up again.”

“It’s not about that. It was about these males needing me to be in a certain category to serve their story, and it never was about me, it was not protective of me. It was fun and loving at times, but I was just there. I was a pawn, I was a piece, I was a commodity.”

Exploitative roles marked Shields’ early career. When she was 11, she starred and appeared nude in Malle’s Pretty Baby, where she played a sex-trafficked child. Shields doesn’t have many good things to say about Malle in the interview or her documentary (though she did write her college thesis at Princeton on the director’s work), but her co-star Keith Carradine was another story. She described him as “gracious and protective”—even though he was pushing 30 when he kissed the 11-year-old Shields. He helped her through the kissing scene by telling her, “This doesn’t count as a first kiss.” And while that also seems gross and creepy, Brooke saw it as “caring on a level that I don’t even think I knew at the time. I’d never kissed a boy before.” It’s a sad state of affairs when protection for an 11-year-old actor amounts to telling them, “It’s all make-believe.”

Even though Brooke was never lured back for the Blue Lagoon legacy sequel, a follow-up happened with 1991’s Return To Blue Lagoon, starring Milla Jovovich. The movie opens with a new pair of baby lovers discovering Brooke’s character’s corpse. Any way you slice it, this is one grim story.