Dutchman's Breaches - Interview

ArtForum, Summer, 2000

BRIAN D'AMATO AND DAVID RIMANELLI TALK WITH PAUL VERHOEVEN

One day in college I went to the local art house to see Paul Verhoeven's The Fourth Man (1983). The director was unknown to me, but the promise of gaudy violence and AC/DC sex scenes no doubt lured me in. Verhoeven, as I later learned, was at that time probably the Netherlands' most renowned filmmaker, having directed such critically acclaimed features as Turkish Delight (1973), which received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, Soldier of Orange (1977), and Spetters (1980). I had no idea that The Fourth Man, a less than completely successful film, would prove the "bridge" between Verhoeven's European art-house past and the string of controversial Hollywood blockbusters that lay in his future, beginning with RoboCop in 1987. There's something weirdly disjunctive about the elegant if gory killings in Verhoeven's last Dutch film and the out-of-control body counts amassed in subsequent Hollywood productions, especially the assassination-a-go-go of Total Recall (1990) and the giddy celebration of sex-hungry lesbian serial killers that is Basic Instinct (1992). People complained about the unrelenting violence and about the socially unredeeming (albeit extremely glamorous) portrayals of ice pick--wielding dykes. The movies were smash hits.

Subsequent Verhoeven films such as Showgirls (1995) and Starship Troopers (1997) fared less well at the box office and were typically savaged in the popular press. Being misunderstood is the common fate of strange and original art, but the stubborn obtuseness of most mainstream critics in response to Verhoeven has been risible. No point is served by arguing with the popular press over its presupposed dumbness, but Brian D'Amato and I did fervently believe that our enthusiasm for Verhoeven's movies was a legitimate art--and Hollywood--passion. He's our favorite mass-market auteur, a real genius. Naming Starship Troopers one of the top ten artistic achievements in Artforum's 1998 year-end roundup, I asseverated that Verhoeven had created a new kind of cinema. The extravagance of my claim has been more than borne out in one important taste demographic: art schools, where I frequently screen Verhoeven films with the same earnest seriousness I would accord Straub-Huillet. Was not the ideological import of Cahiers du Cinema to rehabilitate trash Hollywood noir as the highest art? Maybe our excitement over Verhoeven is the compliment that vice pays to virtue.

Part of the thrill of Verhoeven's American films derives from the narrative ambiguities and off-register tone common to all his work--a link, however unexpected, to the European art cinema of the '70s and to his youth. His upcoming feature, The Hollow Man (English majors will recall the similarly titled T.S. Eliot poem), which opens nationally on August 4, stars Kevin Bacon and Elisabeth Shue in a horror drama about the highs and lows of discovering a formula for human invisibility. Maybe the ultimate in voyeuristic stalking fantasies isn't the dream we imagine. It is our hope that The Hollow Man may yet portend a general reappraisal of the Verhoeven oeuvre. For perverse fun alone, he deserves a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives.

BRIAN D'AMATO: We wanted to ask you about some problems in your films--

PAUL VERHOEVEN: Problems?

BD: Well, issues--

DAVID RIMANELLI: Problems for some people.

BD: We've been rereading the reviews of Starship Troopers [1997], and it doesn't seem as if many of the critics realized there was any irony in the film.

PV: I don't think they got that, no. The movie has a lot of irony or whatever you want to call it. It's saying, "This is wonderful! You have to fight! And don't forget--you're going to die, too!"

BD: We also read an interview with the film's leading lady--Denise Richards--and she didn't seem to get it either.

PV: No.

DR: Maybe that worked for the benefit of the concept.

PV: Well, that is a pretty good summation of the characters, isn't it? (Laughs.) Because they don't seem to understand very well what they're doing. You know that line where Michael Ironside [Lieutenant Rasczak] says, "Want to live forever?" I think that's from Frederick the Great-

PV: Right. That was one of his most famous lines: "Come on, guys! You want to live forever? Let's fight!" And of course throughout the film there are these nearly verbatim visual quotes from Triumph of the Will. I don't know if you ever read the article that was in the Washington Post, two weeks after the release, accusing me of being a neo-Nazi--

BD: The inventor of modern warfare.

BD: (fumbling in notebook) Yeah, here it is. It's by Stephen Hunter:(reading) "It's spiritually Nazi, psychologically Nazi. It comes directly out of the Nazi imagination, and is set in the Nazi universe.... Unlike films from a civilized society that see war as a debilitating, tragic necessity ... this movie sees it as a profoundly moving experience."

PV: That article was picked up by all the European newspapers: They were all saying, "Beware! This movie's coming to your country!" (Laughs.) And the more fascist the nation had been, the less they were willing to see it as a description of their country. I had terrible interviews where they just said, "You're a Nazi." And I'd say, "No, no, I'm talking about some fascist mentality in the film." And then they'd say, "Well, isn't that something you admire?" They were set in their belief that the film was promoting fascism. Now, of course it plays with that, because it shows how these kids accept that and glory in it, in all these cliches--which have been used by propagandists not just in Germany but in the United States as well. But the movie isn't saying, "Okay, now, our message is that the US is a fascist, imperialist country." I try and avoid being someone with a big message. I always feel that comes at the cost of the movie. I think a movie is its own thing.