As Wrong Move is removed from circulation, it’s being hailed as a landmark moment and the beginning of a long-overdue reckoning with how the film industry has treated young girls
Nastassja Kinski was 13 years old when a film director put her in a scene with a 30-year-old man who undressed, got into bed with her and lay on top of her. Years later, she said: “Although I didn’t know much at the age of 13, I could already tell that it wasn’t right.” Nastassja, now 65, first demanded action in 2011, saying director Wenders “didn’t protect me” during the 1975 film Wrong Move.
Fifty years on from its release, he’s finally agreed to remove the film from circulation. Hailed as a landmark moment, experts warn his decision may be the beginning of a long-overdue reckoning with how the film industry has treated young girls for decades.
Tanya Horeck is a Professor of Film and Feminist Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, who has spent 25 years teaching cinema and researching how to keep actors safe on set. She told the Mirror: “It took Wim Wenders an incredibly long time to address and honour what she wanted to happen. The film as a piece of art is not more important than the fact that a child was harmed. A film director’s ego does not matter more than that.”
Wrong Move is not an isolated case. The history of cinema is littered with examples of young girls, placed in sexual situations on screen. Brooke Shields was 11 when she appeared nude in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby in 1978, playing a child raised in a brothel whose virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder. It was her first ever kiss – on camera, with her 29-year-old co-star Keith Carradine.
When she scrunched her face in discomfort during the scene, Malle reprimanded her. Decades later, Shields’ own daughter watched the film and told her mother: “It’s child pornography. Would you have let us do that at the age of 11?” Then, aged 14, Brooke starred in The Blue Lagoon – a film she would later describe as an attempt by its makers to “sell my actual sexual awakening.” She told her 2023 Hulu documentary: “They wanted to make it a reality show. The irony was, I wasn’t in touch with any of my own sexuality.”
She has since said of the film: “Never again will a movie be made like that ever. I mean, it wouldn’t be allowed.” Of her own childhood sexualisation, Shields has said: “I was at the centre of it. And I was promoting it and I was doing it.”
Martin Scorsese cast Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver in 1976, when she was just 12 years old. Although there was a welfare worker on set throughout filming, Foster has since described the experience as “a little awkward.” Recalling some of the instructions she received, she said: “I was 12, and they had to say things like, ‘can you pull his fly down?’”
Olivia Hussey was 15, while Leonard Whiting was 16 when Franco Zeffirelli cast them in his 1968 film Romeo and Juliet. Filmed naked in bed together, the actors alleged that Zeffirelli had assured them they would wear flesh-coloured body suits and that the camera angles would avoid showing nudity. But on the day of filming they were told to perform with only body makeup.
In 2022–2023 she and Whiting sued Paramount for sexual exploitation and child abuse, claiming emotional harm and lost career opportunities. The lawsuits were ultimately dismissed. Sue Lyon was 14 when Stanley Kubrick selected her from 800 auditionees to play the title role in Lolita in 1962. When the film was released, Lyon – who died in 2019, aged 73 – was still too young to watch it at the cinema and was photographed at a nearby soda fountain during the premiere.
Years later she said: “My destruction as a person dates from that movie. Lolita exposed me to temptations no girl of that age should undergo. I defy any pretty girl who is rocketed to stardom at 14 in a sex nymphet role to stay on a level path thereafter.”
Thora Birch was 16 when she filmed a topless scene for the Oscar-winning American Beauty in 1999. Her parents and a child labour representative were required on set. And Dakota Fanning was 12 when she filmed a rape scene for the independent film Hounddog in 2007. The scene prompted the Catholic League to demand a federal investigation into whether child pornography laws had been broken. Prosecutors examined the footage and concluded it did not meet the legal definition of sexual activity.
Prof Horeck said: “There is not a time limit on these cases. Trauma is a very complicated thing. It’s not necessarily that these films will always be removed, but we do need to reframe them and have open conversations about the production context. You can’t separate what happens on set from the final product. Every film can’t be withdrawn, but the point is that we need to recognise the harm that has occurred on sets, and acknowledge that that has to be part of how cinema is now framed and viewed.”
The Wrong Move incident lands at a complicated moment for the MeToo movement. Eight years after it went viral, Prof Horeck says the mood has darkened considerably. She said: “We’re in the midst of a backlash against MeToo. Things are quite bleak. There’s a crisis of violence against girls and women. We were thinking, ‘okay, maybe things are starting to shift in the entertainment industry.’ Unfortunately, we’re now in a moment where we’re seeing that this sort of thing still goes on, and we have to fight to make sure that it stops.”
She suggests the recent Married at First Sight scandal, in which women have made allegations of sexual violence and a failure of duty of care on the show, as evidence that exploitation remains in the entertainment industry’s structures more generally.
She claims: “Care is incompatible with capitalism and the film and TV industry is all about making money.” Lawyers for CPL, the independent production company that makes the UK version of the show, have said that its welfare protocols are “gold standard”.”
The full story of Nastassja’s battle with Wenders illustrates exactly that point. She first raised her objections to Wrong Move publicly in 2011 – describing how as a 13-year-old on her first ever film set, with a director almost 20 years her senior, there was no one in her corner. She said: “That was my first film, he was my first director and he didn’t protect me.”
Finally, at the German Film Awards last month, collecting a lifetime achievement award, he addressed the controversy – but his speech was widely condemned as an attempt to frame Nastassja’s demands as a threat to cinematic freedom.
Days later he issued a formal statement withdrawing the film and apologising directly to her. “I recognise that Nastassja Kinski should have been better protected back then,” he said. “For that, I apologise to you, Nastassja, unreservedly, no ifs and buts.” Nastassja’s response, posted on Instagram in German, noted it had taken newspaper comments and public pressure to achieve what years of private requests had not. She wrote: “Wim, after all these years, only now the public has commented in so many newspapers …. although I asked so long ago.”
Prof Horeck said: “It is important that there is not a time limit on these cases. Trauma is a very complicated thing. Yes, it took a long time, but it has finally happened. I think it is an important turning point.” Whether the current climate allows others to follow Nastassja’s lead is another matter. Prof Horeck warns that the same forces driving the MeToo backlash risk silencing the women the movement was built to protect. She said: “The moment you become complacent, more harm occurs.”
