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Director Paul Verhoeven on Blockbuster Sci-Fi and the Art of War
by Kim Williamson

It looked to him then, says filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, like "a special effect. For a child of two, what can you say: This looks like a lot of flames. It was interesting. Of course, you could see the Luftwaffe. They were flying over. They were bombing."
It's just past noon on an L.A.-blue day in August, and the Dutch-born Verhoeven, now aged 59, is having lunch with BOXOFFICE in the Rita Hayworth commissary on the famed Sony (formerly MGM) lot in Culver City, Calif. Prominently displayed in a silver poster case near the restaurant's entrance, the first in a row of posters for such current and upcoming Columbia and TriStar fare as "Gattaca" and "Godzilla," is the one-sheet for Verhoeven's new "Starship Troopers." (Tagline: "A New Kind of Enemy. A New Kind of War.")

But the man who has made his Hollywood repute with films controversial for their violence and sexuality -- "Flesh + Blood," "RoboCop," "Total Recall," "Basic Instinct" and "Showgirls" -- is recalling a real-life moment, a half-century ago and a continent and ocean away, as a toddler during the Second World War. On May 14, 1940, his family having just relocated to Rotterdam's outskirts from his Amsterdam birthplace, Verhoeven stood witness to the brutal bombing of the port city that killed 980 people and destroyed 20,000 buildings. At the time, the German attack -- which came after all Dutch resistance had ceased -- stood as history's most devastating single air offensive. "We were not in the center of Rotterdam," Verhoeven says simply. "But you could see it, of course."

Yet that day was to be only a preface to his World War II experiences. In 1943, his parents and their only child moved to a new abode outside The Hague. "Our house was very close to the launching pads of the V-1 [the German rockets that rained down on southern England during the war's second half]. The V-1s would go right over our heads. So the English and the Americans, but mostly the English, were continuously bombing the area to destroy these launching pads," Verhoeven says. "You would see that in the night: You would open your windows, you would look up, and you would see the searchlights and the [exploding anti-aircraft] flak. Of course, you couldn't see the planes in the night, but you would see when they would be hit, and then you would see them burning and coming down. And crash. "I think these visions are in [`Starship Troopers']," Verhoeven concludes. "With spaceships in this case, of course. And this is against bugs, not Germans."

The evening before, entering under a refurbished pink-and-yellow neon Loews marquee that graces the studio's Cary Grant Theatre, about 100 specially invited members of the press come to see two advance reels of Verhoeven's adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 science-fiction novel. The story: a group of high-school graduates enter the armed forces and, after a rigorous boot camp, wage intergalactic battle against insect-like warriors on distant planets. One journalist, in the dimness not seeing the black-attired Verhoeven near a mid-theatre control board, bumps into the
director and apologizes. He doesn't reply. Verhoeven was already an experienced moviemaker in his native Netherlands -- where he made the likes of "Turkish Delight," Oscar-nominated for the best foreign-language film of 1973, and the 1979 "Soldier of Orange," a WWII story of Dutch university students who join the Resistance -- before a phone call from Steven Spielberg in 1980 persuaded him to try his luck in America.
Still, Verhoeven tonight is nervous. It's the first time footage is being shown of Starship Troopers" -- and it's his first film after his much-pilloried 1995 "Showgirls" (as one reviewer foresaw, "There will be more hooters in the audience than onscreen") -- so Verhoeven's silent unease is understandable.

Moving into action at the theatre's front, though, Verhoeven seems comfortable enough to tell a joke. Explaining that what tonight's audience will be seeing begins about 60 minutes into the movie, he says the characterizations of the multitude of players onscreen will already have been developed. "That is there -- but I cannot prove it to you," he says. The journalists laugh. "Remember it's a war movie," Verhoeven closes, just before the lights fade to black, "so it's not only lighthearted."
Indeed not: Although the footage includes scenes of comic fraternization and simple fisticuffs between young bucks, incipient romance among the Mobile Infantry's bi-gender ranks, and back story (Buenos Aires, home of the story's hero, Johnny Rico, has already been obliterated by enemy attack), the showcase sequence is Earth's starship invasion of the aliens' home planet of Klendathu. It's a D-Day gone horribly wrong. Plasma bugs, a sort of giant ground-based firefly that can shoot far aloft a kind of biological dynamite, bring one after another of Earth's mightiest space vessels
flaming down through the atmosphere. Lander vehicles that make it safely to the planet discharge mammoth waves of infantry, only to have hundreds of thousands of those valiant soldiers cut to pieces -- quite literally -- by fast-moving warrior bugs. Retreat is called. The camera rests on a devastated landscape, dotted with the corpses and parts of corpses of insects and humans. A mix of darkness and light, flesh and soil, it's a ghastly but not surprising mise en scene, coming from a filmmaker who as a child saw Germans "picking up pieces of pilots," and who as an adult believes "the natural state of my mind I feel is still more war than peace."

The psychology that Verhoeven brought to the project is, of course, only prologue in bottom-line terms. The studio's focus now for the movie is in generating audience interest in going to see this first big film of the Christmas moviegoing season.
On the day of BOXOFFICE's visit with Verhoeven, the Motion Picture Association of America announces the rating for the TriStar release: R for graphic sci-fi violence and gore, and for some language and nudity. The director is unfazed. "It was always an R," he says, with a finality that recalls Verhoeven's foreknowledge that "Showgirls" would be an NC-17. "There's nothing you can do about it. I mean, [deciding] `let's change this movie completely to make it to a PG-13' would defy the whole setup of these bugs, wouldn't it? I don't know how you could make these scenes work for a PG-13. Because that's what [the bugs] do: They cut you in two. They stab you to death."
Verhoeven's previous exercises in the sci-fi genre, 1987's "RoboCop" ($53.4 million domestic) and 1990's "Total Recall" ($119.3 million), were also Rs, but their older stars -- Peter Weller and Nancy Allen, and Arnold Schwarz-enegger and Sharon Stone, respectively -- perhaps attracted adults in numbers that made up for the restrictions on under-17 attendance. But "Starship Troopers" could reverse that demo draw, as its leads are young, relative newcomers. Casper Van Dien (who plays Johnny Rico) is best known from TV's "Beverly Hills, 90210." Dina Meyer ("Dragonheart") is another "90210" alum. And both Denise Richards ("nowhere") and Patrick Muldoon are veterans of another young-teen TV favorite, "Melrose Place."

"If [`Starship Troopers'] is `Melrose Place in Space,' I don't know. I don't think so," Verhoeven says. "[But] this is not `Memphis Belle'" -- the 1990 WWII movie that cast a decade older than the true ages of the Army Air Force pilots the film portrayed. That decision "didn't work," he says. "`Let's destroy the story and go for something different' -- I don't believe in that. I don't believe in second-guessing your audience. "This is about young people that come from high school. That's the story! They are these young kids, they're sitting in class, you introduce the audience to the society, and then we go to boot camp. And then war breaks out and they go off to die."
That "Starship Troopers" is a throwback to two types of movies familiar to older audiences could help interest them. "It really is a Second World War movie in its tone, like the movies in the '40s. You get to know certain people, you build [their characters], and then at the end of the war you look back and say, `Well, only a couple survived,'" Verhoeven says. But "Starship Troopers" in its combination of war and humor -- part boot, part camp -- also recalls another well-known genre. "When I was a child, my favorite movie was `The War of the Worlds.' But [I liked] all the
science-fiction movies, even the B-movies. This is an upgraded B-movie in a way, isn't it? An animal that's big and ferocious -- that's of course an element of the movies of the '50s."

Budgeted at $90-plus million, "Starship Troopers" disembarks on November 7, and Verhoeven expects that the film will succeed with diverse ages. "It's not a movie for `kid-kids,' of 12 or 10, but perhaps even them. [Ages] 14, 15, absolutely. They will see [the TV spots] and drive their parents crazy [to take them]. "And I think this movie is good enough if you're 22, and it's good even at 30. It has all of that [`Star Wars' element], but it has its own tone and its own dimension of looking at the world, at the universe. And I think it's a thrill," Verhoeven says, "to go inside that world. People will have the feeling that `here is one of my ultimate fantasies.'"

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