Paul Verhoeven.net - all about a unique director

"The sooner we admit our capacity for evil the less apt we are to destroy each other."

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"People seem to have this strange idea that films can influence people to be violent, but in my sincere opinion film only reflects the violence of society."

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"People love seeing violence and horrible things. The human being is bad and he can't stand more than five minutes of happiness. Put him in a dark theater and ask him to look at two hours of happiness and he'd walk out or fall asleep."

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"I try to take these elements out of life that I have detested or admired and put them in a movie, be it violence or sex. I think there's no 'why.' It's just the man I am, and it comes from the inside. It's something I just do."

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"Robocop is mostly about the idiocy of American television. These kind of people that flip-flop between extreme sadness, and fun, and a commercial. I always thought that Robocop was my reaction to being thrown into American society, and looking around with wide eyes, thinking ‘this is completely crazy’."

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"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."

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"Looking at the animosity that's on Earth and the criminality and the darkness and the wars, we are not really nice people. We are not a benevolent species in any way. We are killers. Because we are that way, you have to assume that life in the universe is that way. And if there would be other species that would say be 20,000 years ahead of us in their evolution, and they would know that something like a nice little planet is here, that would be extremely dangerous to notify them of our existence."

"Remember that Christianity is a religion grounded in one of the most violent acts of murder, the crucifixion. Otherwise, religion wouldn't have had any kind of impact."

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"Religion has really lost its non-aggressive attitude that was originally proposed by Jesus, and has come to be part of a political system where people think that they do good and they do the wish of God when they kill the other people."

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"The Fourth Man has to do with my vision of religion. In my opinion, Christianity is nothing more than one of many interpretations of reality, neither more nor less. Ideally, it would be nice to believe that there is a God somewhere out there, but it looks to me as if the whole Christian religion is a major symptom of schizophrenia in half the world's population: civilizations scrambling to rationalize their chaotic existence. Subsequently, Christianity has a tendency to look like magic or the occult. And I liked that ambiguity, because I wanted my audience to take something home with them. I wanted them to wonder about what religion really is. Remember, that Christianity is a religion grounded in one of the most violent acts of murder, the crucifixion. Otherwise, religion wouldn't have had any kind of impact. With regards to the irony of the violence, much of that probably comes from my childhood experiences during and immediately following the Second World War. In fact, if it hadn't been for the German occupation and then the American occupation, I would have never been a filmmaker."

Truth or rumour?

Steven Spielberg suggested to George Lucas that he should ask Paul Verhoeven as director for Return of the Jedi. After seeing Soldier of Orange and Turkish delight, Lucas turned down Spielbergs advise.
Verhoeven made the following comments to the media: "I guess George was a afraid the Jedi would start fucking rightaway"

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"..... And for this scene, we had to digitally animate the breast."

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"I think the essence of the movie (Starship Troopers) is really young kids fighting giant bugs."

"Do I feel I have a responsibility as a film-maker.... Nope, I just do what the fuck I like..."

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"I like controversy, 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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"When I was making movies in Holland my films were judged by the critics as decadent, perverted, and sleazy... so I moved to the United States. This was ten years ago. In the meantime, my movies are criticized as being decadent, perverted, and sleazy in this country."

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"It's still difficult if you are a European director and your first language is not English to be exactly aware what the nuances of the American language are. Even after fifty, sixty years you are basically kind of a little bit retarded there."

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"Actors are always making fun of my accent basically. [...] But that gives a certain pleasure to the set, doesn't it?"

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"There has always been a pleasure of me to work in the B-genre and elevate that, or use that as a vehicle for other thoughts. It’s like the paintings of Karel Appel, our Dutch guy, who was copying all these children’s paintings. That was a heavy influence – or you could even look at Dada. It’s a normal thing in art, to use the ‘mediocre’ and the ‘banal’ to make a statement. That kind of sophistication in art is rare in film-making."

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"I try to take these elements out of life that I have detested or admired and put them in a movie, be it violence or sex. I think there's no 'why.' It's just the man I am, and it comes from the inside. It's something I just do."

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"There are three American films I really stand by: ROBOCOP, BASIC INSTINCT and STARSHIP TROOPERS. The rest was considerably worse. Showgirls wasn’t really a good movie. It had a bad story. But I liked the way we filmed it though."

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"As a director, my goal is to be completely open. Just look at how I portray sex in my films. They're considered shocking and obscene because I like to carefully examine human sexuality. It has to be realistic. I really like documentaries, therefore, reality is important to me when I do fiction. It is often related to my own life, my Dutch background. The art scene in Holland has always attempted to be realistic. The Dutch painters of four hundred years ago were meticulously realistic. The example I always like to use is a marvelous painting by Hieronymus Bosch titled 'The Prodigal Son'. It is a painting of a brothel, and in the corner is a man pissing against a wall. You would never, never find something like that in an Italian, French, or English painting of that epoch. The Dutch have always been more scientific, interested in detail; certainly less idealistic and more realistic. The sex scenes in 'The Fourth Man' and 'Turkish Delight' were based on real experiences I had or a friend had. It's very personal. Of course, I must admit that I love to shock audiences."

"American critics always complain about the blandness of mainstream movies, but when you do something more ambiguous and ironic, they are pissed off too. I like putting certain aspects of American society under the magnifying glass and showing them for what they are."

"Frankly I’m not a sciencefiction-fan at all! To tell you the truth, I hate sciencefiction! The RoboCop-script was actually in my garbage-can when my wife persuaded me to take another look at it. It was only when I recognized certain elements that reminded me of Tom Poes in the land of the Tin Men, one of my favorite comic books, that I started to see some fun in the script and the film."

"You can't diss your own movie at its premiere. It's just not done, you know? You don't trumpet around that you had restrictions or why you had those restrictions. You just don't say that you wanted to make the movie in a different way, that you actually wanted to do a different ending or this or that. It's not fair when you're promoting a movie. People invested like a hundred million dollars in a movie like that. You can't go around saying things like 'sorry about the ending guys, I really wanted to do it differently'.
Sure, later it's allright. The film is done, it made some money, so it's okay then. But when a movie is just about to be released, you don't trash it yourself, it's not fair. Like Joe Eszterhas did at the SHOWGIRLS-premiere, saying 'I don't like it at all because Elizabeth Berkley stinks in this film', while before that, he continually insisted that the film was going to be great; I think that's just ludicrous. I think it's mudslinging as well; as a captain, you don't abandon your ship when it's going down. That's the reason why I picked up my Razzies that year. I was awarded seven times I think, and I collected each and every one of them; film, directing, acting, script, I don't know. You must carry the consequences that come with the freedom you take in making certain decisions. You shouldn't risk your authenticity by saying things like; 'sure, but that's
not really what I wanted to do'. You should say; 'yeah, that's what I meant!', or at least admit that you actually made that decision and you want to defend your movie because of that. "

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About Showgirls:
"Now I look at the movie and say, 'How the fuck? Why did I do that?"

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"Believe me, there were plans for a Showgirls 2! It's called Bimbo's. Joe and I seriously discussed it at one point. When the movie turned out the way it did, we made a treatment for a sequel, just for fun. Joe came up with the title; Bimbo's: Nomi goes Hollywood. But nobody wanted to do it..."

Do you still have faith in cinema?

"Sure, yeah yeah yeah yeah. But I have to continuously run old movies to keep my faith. When I feel very depressed I look at Ivan the Terrible or The Rules of the Game or Metropolis or even Blade Runner, say, or The Terminator or something like that, or every Hitchcock movie – or maybe 50% per cent of them. I need them – sometimes I come home completely depressed and I have to put them on. It’s so difficult in an industry where the parameters have become so much those of pure entertainment, to still keep your belief that cinema is an art."

"Take STARSHIP TROOPERS, great example, probably the most political statement I've ever made. Five years ago, most of the critics totally trashed that movie. They called me a nazi, saying I was idolizing Leni Riefenstahl. Now, that image has totally changed. A lot of people see now that the film is about the United States. The whole situation in Afghanistan is almost an exact copy of STARSHIP TROOPERS; the whole gung ho-mentality of bombing everything, blasting the Taliban-forces out of the caves. I put all that in STARSHIP TROOPERS! The corrupted atmosphere of propaganda, once invented by Goebbels, has now taken over the United States as well. It's extremely interesting to see how the media can besiege an entire nation with propaganda."

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"After being accused of being fascist myself, a correction has taken place. And fortunately so; it was very disappointing the way I was attacked. There was an editorial in the Washington Post which discussed the film as being done by a Nazi, and this was used by all the European papers – not the Independent, may I say – even before they could see the movie. But people now seem to have largely understood that it was about American politics."

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"It has always been my pleasure to work in the B-genre, and elevate that, use it as a vehicle for other thoughts. It's a normal thing, in art, to use the 'mediocre' and the 'banal' to make a statement. That kind of sophistication is rare in film-making, because everything has to be immediately understood. With Robocop the ironies were about urban situations, but Starship Troopers is more to do with American foreign policy. It's about propaganda versus reality, and the way this reality can be 'spun'. There's a lot of parallels with what happened after 11 September, of course. Not just in the obvious ways of Americans shooting rockets down tunnels at the Taliban, just like the attacks on the 'arachnids' in the movie. In some ways it's a pleasure that it all became true, but on the other hand there's not much pleasure that it came true in this way."

"I think it’s much more difficult to live in the United States for me, than it was a couple of years ago. With all the craziness of the Clinton administration I could easily identify with Mr Clinton. Even with Lewinsky – that could be me. I could do that kind of stuff. I’m what you might call ‘weak’ or ‘interested’ or ‘curious’ or ‘a lover of the female’ – however you want to express it. I identify with that completely."

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"Now, I'm really struggling with my position in the United States. Of course, I'm as guilty as everybody else, by participating and paying my tax there. I'm as much to blame by staying there instead of raising my voice or whatever. It's not just the Afghanistan situation; my anger and resistance to American politics have much more to do with their support of Israel than anything else. The pumping of enormous quantities of money, technology and military into Israel every year has now, unfortunately, created a fascist state."