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Director Paul Vehoeven goes over the top with Hollow Man
by Jermeny Doner, Photograph by Sean Shroff.


Paul Verhoeven has a way of talking in run-on sentences with the unstoppable enthusiasm of a kid. In the parlance of Hollywood, he might be described as Oliver Stone meets Rick Schroder on a ton of caffeine. Given the thrashing the director has received from the press, it is remarkable how enthusiastically he courts it. In fact, it's remarkable that he talks to anyone at all. But with the release of his latest film, Hollow Man, the 63-year-old director is hoping to repair his reputation.

Verhoeven left his native Netherlands to make films in America in 1983, fleeing what he saw as persecution by the media. Though he has since enjoyed a few box office smashes, including Total Recall and Basic Instinct, the critics in the New World haven't been much kinder to him, particularly for his greatest bomb, Showgirls, which starred Elizabeth Berkeley. "We thought it would be a bit controversial," he says. "We never dreamed in our lives that it would be like, 'Whoooaaaaw!'" he roars, nearly jumping from his chair as he curls his fingers into claws. He settles back in his seat. "I mean, she was crucified." He shoulders the blame for that debacle. "We were offending the rules to such a degree that nobody in the mainstream had done. Nobody has ever done anything like that, and nobody will do it [again]. And neither will I," he says with a laugh. "Now I look at the movie and say, 'How the fuck? Why did I do that?'" When he was voted worst director and Showgirls earned the worst film award at the annual Razzie Awards, Verhoeven bravely showed up to claim his prize.

Hollow Man may go a long way toward obscuring the bad memory of Showgirls. In the movie, government scientist Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) tests an invisibility serum on himself, against the orders of the Pentagon. The power of invisibility soon goes to Sebastian's head. As he becomes increasingly evil, it falls to his collaborator and former lover (Elisabeth Shue) to stop him. "It's more or less [about] where you put your borders," says Verhoeven. "Where exactly are you going to follow Sebastian in his adventure in evil? It's seductive. Although he's arrogant, he's also clever and very charismatic."

Hollow Man may be Verhoeven's most mainstream American film yet. "I got the straight R," he says in disbelief. "It's the first time in my life that I didn't get an X. I think for Basic Instinct, I had to go back 10 times to the MPAA with 10 different cuts before they gave me an R."

Verhoeven has been incurring the wrath of censors since he arrived in Hollywood. His second American film, RoboCop (1987), struck a chord as a brutal critique of corporate culture in the go-go 80s. At the time, urban violence was at an all-time high, rising alongside the S&P 500. In the first 10 minutes of the film, a young exec is riddled with bullets in a botched product test and falls out the window of a sleek skyscraper overlooking the rubble of old Detroit. "All these kind of ironic statements were me looking at American television at the time the Challenger exploded," says Verhoeven. RoboCop also established his signature movie style -- a lot of severed limbs and stunts like filming naked men and women showering in coed locker rooms.

Some have linked Verhoeven's unique brand of ultraviolence to his childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland. "It's true that my father took me one day," remembers the director, who now lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Martine. "An English plane had been shot...and had crashed very close to our house.... You saw the Germans picking up pieces of the bodies of the pilots and putting them in little boxes."
But as much as those memories have shaped his work, Verhoeven also finds that he's been changed by his two decades in the United States. "Now I cannot even look at American society so well anymore, because I have become part of it.... You get integrated. It starts to become your world." So he has worked harder to shock people. His 1997 alien bug-warfare epic Starship Troopers re-created the style of Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi documentary Triumph of the Will so faithfully that many questioned his point of view. "The book is fascist," he notes. "I think the movie uses that, too, but it's more aware of its own point of view, and it's criticizing it. Or not criticizing it -- ironizing it."

In Hollow Man, the director, who holds a doctorate in mathematics and physics, turns his sardonic eye on the world of biology. For the film, he modeled Kevin Bacon's innards using studies of 18th-century wax replicas, which special effects supervisor Scott Anderson photographed at the famous Museo della Specoli anatomy museum in Italy. "We constructed a three-dimensional model that is exactly like Kevin -- with all the measurements taken, by scanning everything," explains Verhoeven. "His elbows, the thickness of his nails, his eyebrows, whatever, are all scanned into the computer." According to the director, it's the first time any creature has been re-created by a computer in three-dimensional space down to the organs inside -- to the very pumping heart.

The Hollow Man cast was struck by Verhoeven's obsessive attention to detail on the set. "He's a very passionate person," says Bacon of his director. Then, recalling a time when Verhoeven dunked his head in a pool to see if it was ready for his actors, Bacon adds, "He has just the right amount of insanity to make it a lot of fun to work with him."

Indeed, a bit of insanity is what we've come to expect from Verhoeven -- and he surely won't let his audiences down on that account. "I like controversy," he says. "It has always been inspiring to me...to say, 'Fuck it. [If] nobody thinks I am going to shoot it, I'll shoot it!'"

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