After 20 years of sex-and-violence-drenched Hollywood films, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has gone back to his beginnings for a crackling thriller that takes a hard look at Dutch behaviour during the Nazi occupation. His critics will carp, but for most moviegoers resistance will be futile, writes Donald Clarke.
HEN, in early 1996, Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls swept the board at the annual Golden Raspberry Awards, the eccentric Dutch director surprised the organisers of this celebration of terrible cinema by turning up to accept his statuettes in person. Showgirls' domination of the event was of titanic - and, indeed, Titanic - proportions. No other film got a look in.
"It was purifying for myself," Verhoeven shouts. "It ended up being a triumph, because they were all so pleased that I turned up. I would sit down and then have to get up again right away. We won seven or eight awards: worst screenplay, worst directing. It was a great night."
The longer the evening went on, the louder and more joyfully boisterous Verhoeven became. News footage shows him waving the statuettes above his head like a matador who has just been presented with the slaughtered bull's dripping ears. James Cameron's performance a year later at a more prestigious event seemed restrained by comparison.
The incident illustrates the dilemma that faces Verhoeven's many detractors. The director of RoboCop, Starship Troopers and Basic Instinct may demonstrate a predilection towards vulgarity. He may allow his unreconstructed sexual politics too much free rein. But, in an age of bland, polite film-makers - tasteful men mindful of their mortgages - he exhibits the same eccentric individualism that characterised many of the European directors from Hollywood's golden era. All he needs is a riding crop and jodhpurs.
Looking a decade or so younger than his 68 years, his ruffled shirt opened at the collar to reveal a leathery neck, Verhoeven bites at questions and tears them to pieces like an overexcited dog happening upon a particularly tasty slipper. I might, if we were not opposed to ostentatious punctuation, end each of his answers with an exclamation point.
The director is here to promote Black Book, the first film he has made in his native Netherlands since the fascinating 1983 shocker The Fourth Man. The new picture, both a broad adventure and a critique of the Dutch response to Nazi occupation, follows a Jewish woman who, after falling in with the resistance, is persuaded to insinuate her way into the affections of a prominent German officer.
The arrival of Black Book - thrilling and dubious in equal measure - allows us to delve into a prominent aspect of the Verhoeven myth.
Born in 1938, the son of a teacher and a hat maker, Paul grew up in a house near a launch site for German V1 flying bombs. As a result, he witnessed the results of Allied bombing nightly for many months. It has often been suggested that the promiscuous violence in Verhoeven's films stems from the director's desire to exorcise the awful bloodshed he observed in those early years.
"I have said that myself, but I am not sure it is true," he bellows. "That felt like me searching for an explanation to satisfy an interviewer. It is true that we would sit at dinner and suddenly the house next door would blow up. But who knows where those images in my film come from. Maybe it is something genetic."
He told a story in an earlier interview about looking into the dead eyes of a German pilot when his father took him to see a crashed plane.
"He just wanted me to see the plane, but when we got there he realised that the Germans there were collecting bits of meat from the pilot's body. My father took me away then. But, look, I don't know what images I remember from those times and what I remember from seeing documentaries afterwards. What's real? I don't know."
Verhoeven initially studied physics and mathematics, but, though he graduated with a Master's, admits that he never seriously believed he would become a scientist. While he made a few shorts after college, he confirms that it was not until he began developing propaganda films for the Dutch navy that he began to find his feet as a director. Verhoeven enthusiasts who remember the satirical promotional clips for government policy and big business incorporated into RoboCop and Starship Troopers will be particularly intrigued by this period in Paul's career.
"I actually made those films look like James Bond movies," he laughs. "But it was still propaganda and I saw how easily you could fall into the trap of becoming Leni Riefenstahl. That is why I returned to it later."
A few of the half dozen or so features Verhoeven made in The Netherlands have become minor classics. Turkish Delight from 1973 starred Rutger Hauer as a sculptor addicted to sex, violence and any other indulgence within reach. Soldier of Orange, again with Hauer, marked Verhoeven's first attempt to address the Dutch war experience. The Fourth Man, alternately avant-garde and exploitative, dealt with obsession and closeted homosexuality.
The films received decent reviews when they made it to English-speaking territories, but Verhoeven never felt appreciated at home. "The committees that granted funding hated my films," he snorts. "They said I was decadent and there was no sociological basis to the work." Accordingly, encouraged by his ever supportive and still long-suffering wife, Martine, Verhoeven eventually decided to travel across the Atlantic.
His first American film, a sword and sorcery romp titled Flesh + Blood (1985) starring Hauer, did not trouble the box office overmuch. But RoboCop was a smash. Total Recall, another noisy futuristic blockbuster starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, followed.
Looking back at the summaries of Verhoeven's Dutch films it becomes clear that many of his characteristic themes were in place before he touched down in LA, but there is no indication in that early work that he had, at this stage, any particular interest in science fiction.
"It was just the spirit of the time. That was just what was offered to me. I got offered RoboCop and that led to Total Recall. I opened another door with Basic Instinct and, then that was closed by Showgirls. I had to survive by going back to science fiction with Starship Troopers. I tried to do something else several times - something about the history of the Unites States - but couldn't get anybody interested."
If there's one scene in the films listed above that best exhibits the singular amalgamation of style, tension and misogyny that distinguishes the Verhoeven aesthetic, it must surely be the infamous interrogation sequence from Basic Instinct. As you may regretfully recall, the camera finds Sharon Stone, an author suspected of murder, uncrossing her legs to reveal what lies between while being interviewed by sweaty police officers.
"We had no idea it would become such a sensation," he claims. "We shot it at the end of the day - just me and Sharon and my cinematographer. I never tell editors what to use. I just say: 'Here is what I shot.' Months later when my editor showed me that shot I was surprised. He was a very nice Catholic family guy, so I was astonished. 'Well you shot it,' he said. I had no idea that it would become this remarkable thing."
Sharon Stone later said that she was unaware the shot would show what it showed and that she was "tricked" into removing her underwear.
"That is because Sharon lies," Verhoeven screeches. "There is one answer to this question: she has been lying about it all this time." Has he challenged her on the issue? "Yes. The last time I met her I said: 'Can we stop this lying stuff now? You knew exactly what we were doing.' She eventually said: 'OK. If you acknowledge you are sorry you didn't warn me the shot would be used, that is fine.' We don't talk about it any more."
As well as launching a very narrowly defined genre on blameless cinemagoers - the erotic thriller whose title comprises one noun and one adjective - Basic Instinct confirmed Verhoeven as something of a dirty old man in the mind of feminists. Sure enough, there are more bouncy breasts in Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers and even Black Book than the plots strictly demand (Showgirls is, to be fair, actually about strippers, so some bosom action was inevitable.)
Accusations that Verhoeven's films argue for fascism are a little harder to sustain. Starship Troopers, in which highly trained intergalactic soldiers fight giant bugs, does feature a totalitarian regime that functions unsettlingly efficiently, but the film is clearly intended as a mischievous satire on the values of the American military.
"Of course. I didn't believe in that world for second. I wonder how foolish anybody could be to believe that such a society could work. How could the Germans believe in the Nazis? Look at the United States now. People are willing to believe that things are good when there are clear indications they are not good at all. Even at the time of Starship Troopers there was an indication of a fascist utopia being proposed. The US is not Nazi Germany, of course. But there is a streak there that is eerily similar."
Considering Verhoeven's continuing interest in the Nazis and, specifically, their occupation of his own country, it is, perhaps, surprising that it took him so long to get round to making Black Book. Indeed, he researched many of the themes in the film - particularly the harsh treatment of supposed collaborators after the war - 30 years ago, while preparing Soldier of Orange.
"Well, the main thing was that I got together and began working again with my Dutch screenwriter," he says. "And we finally solved a problem we had with the story last year. We realised the protagonist had to be a woman. Then, after I made Hollow Man in America I suddenly felt: I really need to get out of here."
Oh, really? So the ghastly reception that greeted Hollow Man (2000), an unsubtle take on The Invisible Man story starring Kevin Bacon, was more than he could bear? "Well, mainly it was the bad reception it got from me," he laughs. "I can remember doing the press and thinking: I could find deep things to say about Starship Troopers, but not about this."
Black Book has ended up as a very interesting piece of work. Featuring a powerful performance by Carice van Houten in the lead role, the film cracks along at a rollicking pace and, despite Verhoeven's usual difficulties with women, manages to resolve itself in genuinely moving fashion. I wonder how it went down in The Netherlands. The film is not always kind about the behaviour of the resistance.
"The response has been very good," he says. "I think it would have been very different if it had come out 30 years ago. The Dutch had always declared that the resistance was great and most people afterwards declared they were part of it. That was all a lie. It is easier now. Though people do still get angry about that subject, there was very little anger on the release of the film. Mind you, there were still some who were saying: 'Oh this is a typical Paul Verhoeven film. It is utterly superficial.'"
He's a strange man this Paul Verhoeven. A keen student of the Bible, the author of an upcoming book on Jesus Christ, he makes films whose every surface is drenched in sin. An avid left-winger who can rant about what he considers the evils of Israel for hours on end, he bookends Black Book with scenes set in an idealised Kibbutz and elsewhere has shown characters living comfortably in totalitarian states. Happily married for 40 years, he can't allow five minutes of screen time to pass without his camera discovering a nude woman.
Is everything he does meant as a joke? Certainly his sporting approach to the critical and (at first) financial fiasco that was Showgirls indicates the presence of healthy irony glands. The film, a camp tale of loose women in Las Vegas, has inspired a thriving cult and is set to be transformed into a musical.
"It was clearly hyperbolic on purpose, but nobody seemed to notice that at the time," Verhoeven says. "You know, I have often thought that in a hundred years time Showgirls might be the only thing I am remembered for. Everything else will be forgotten. Oh, I suppose that would be better than nothing."
Black Book opens next Friday
