Dutchman's Breaches - Interview

ArtForum, Summer, 2000

DR: There's a question of camp and intentionality with that film. Isn't camp one thing that still depends on authorial intention?

PV: Of course it's intentionally camp-y, but on the other hand it wasn't a deliberate attempt to make camp. Because I never try, really, to do that. I'd say that comes into the movie. I didn't start out saying, "Okay, Starship Troopers is going to be ironic." It became that way while I was working on it.

DR: So irony and camp are by-products.

PV: For me they are. I think you set out to do something you think is outrageous or that goes beyond current thinking, something nobody has dared to do in a Hollywood movie. We wanted Showgirls to have a layer of brutal realism on the one hand and a layer of fairy-tale fantasy on the other. A girl comes in from nowhere, and she's picked up because she dances so well. And then she takes somebody out and grabs the best spot.

BD: It's inexorable.

PV: Yes. And it would have been all right if we'd done that story in an inoffensive way--like All About Eve, which is basically the same tale, isn't it? But to apply it to the "dirtiest" level of society--although I don't think it's dirty, but that's how people look at Vegas--and then to present that as glamorous, in a way. (Laughs.)

DR: It had the pleasure of self-revulsion.

PV: Right. I think it played with that, me shooting one of the scenes in the first club--the one with the two girls dancing together on the pole? He was surprised. He said, "I guess you're really doing what you promised." (Laughs.) I don't think he had seen it that realistically. But really, that scene is no different from what you see in Vegas. If you go to the less high-level clubs, that is. And there are things worse than that. I even took a few shots out that were just too far beyond.

DR: While we're talking about camp, there's something about the tone of your early Dutch movies like Spetters and Turkish Delight [1973] that makes me wonder whether you'd seen any Warhol movies at that time.

PV: Yeah, Morrissey, Paul Morrissey.

DR: Trash? Flesh?

PV: And Heat. Yeah. I'm a big admirer of those early Morrissey movies. And of course I know Warhol's work. But I'm not so sure that I used that. I think it was more just the feeling of freedom, and the way Joe Dallesandro--isn't it?--how he behaved in nudity.

DR: His animality.

PV: Yeah, and his directness. It was like, "Okay, do you want to have a man or woman, do you want to be fucked, or sucked, or whatever? Fine, it doesn't matter--man, woman--oh, yeah, another woman, okay, no big deal, whatever." Isn't there this scene in Flesh or Trash where he's in bed with these two women and he thinks there's going to be a great threesome? And then the two women are much more attracted to each other. So in the end he goes to sleep off to the side. I mean, that whole kind of nonchalance, not insisting too much--especially in Heat. That's the one set in the little motel, isn't it? Joe Dallesandro is in this motel, and he has all these sexual encounters, and out at the swimming pool there's this boy who always has a sheet over him, and he's masturbating through the whole movie. I loved that.