You only have to look at Paul Verhoeven's track record - from the cartoon violence of Robocop and Total Recall to the steamy sleaze of Basic Instinct and the risible Showgirls - to know that his latest film, the intergalactic war movie Starship Troopers, is unlikely to be subtle or quiet. Big, brash and violent, this shamelessly trashy intergalactic war movie wears its tastelessness on its sleeve, as the Dutch director explains with some pride.
"The original outline of the story was: `Young people fighting giant bugs in outer space,' so you start to laugh and ask what is this idiotic, childlike project? I got interested when I realised I could do it as a Ray Harryhausen movie, but if you had tried to make it look real, it would have been very silly. By giving it this comic book tone, that creates a distance. We all know that fighting giant bugs in space is ludicrous, although I was reading the other day that Stephen Hawking believes that there must be other life forms out there, and that they will probably be aggressively hostile."
Starship Troopers features a cast of young, clean-limbed, rather vacuous-looking unknowns, led by the little-known Casper Van Dien, who sports the sort of chin rarely seen outside a Dan Dare comic.
"I was probably looking for a younger version of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a guy that believes the propaganda of the federal government, who would want to go to the other side of the galaxy to fight giant bugs. Of course, Arnold in Total Recall and Peter Weller in Robocop both have a comic book quality, and Starship Troopers has that too, which influenced the choice of the faces, because in comic books faces are like that."
The future Earth society depicted in the movie is comically unsettling, a sort of fascist mall culture populated by bright-eyed, brainless cannon fodder only too ready to sign up for Armageddon as soon as they finish high school. It's a hi-tech Born On The Fourth Of July without the anti-war activists, with the action punctuated by information bursts from the "FedNet", an interactive government propaganda medium that ends every blood-soaked report with a chirpy "Want to know more?"
The device is similar to the television inserts in Verhoeven's Robocop, with their cheesy advertising and "I'll buy that for a dollar!" tag lines. If Robocop was a black comedy about privatisation, then Starship Troopers pokes fun at the notion that technology gives you a real choice.
"Yes, that's what the movie's about, but they didn't pick up on that in the United States. When we were writing the script, we were wondering whether we were repeating ourselves from Robocop, but ultimately it worked so well in the narrative. It allowed us get rid of all the political stuff with the generals and leaders, and it also meant that we could put more irony or satire in. The statement at the start is that `We are the Masters of the Universe, not these insects! Kill them all!', which is almost exactly the same thing that NASA said about the Pathfinder probe to Mars: `This proves that the United States are the masters of the solar system'!"
The film has not done particularly well in the States, with audiences unamused by its broad humour and tongue-in-cheek cynicism. As with Tim Burton's Mars Attacks, it seems that American audiences prefer their intergalactic shoot-em-ups done straight. It would be highly misleading to describe Starship Troop- ers as sophisticated, but critics have been thrown by its mixture of zany humour, gory action and broad satire, especially the overtly fascistic military sequences.
"They didn't understand that using socalled fascist symbols was not anything to do with Hitler," says Verhoeven. "For me, using that Leni Riefenstahl style was a way of commenting on a certain part of American society, but they took it straight and said it was Nazi propaganda or something like that. The way it was done was very playful, but I don't think Americans picked up on that, or maybe they just didn't want to. They wanted something like Independence Day, with a good guy-president saving the world."
It seems that throughout his career, since his first feature film, Turkish Delight in 1973, Verhoeven has been a provocateur, accused of producing pornography or exploitative violence. Films like the teen-sex melodrama Spetters and the violently erotic The Fourth Man outraged the Dutch film establishment while packing in the punters in the early 1980s. In Starship Troopers, as in most Verhoeven offerings, there are copious amounts of cartoonish gore.
"This is the reality, of course," he says drily. "These insects either stab you to death or cut you in two." He seems to take pleasure in flying in the face of good taste and upsetting people. "Yes, I do, but it's more important with some movies than with others. Spetters was one where I said, OK, I'm going all out. This is what it's about and basically, if you don't want to see it I'll shoot it anyway. Some other director might back off or shoot it elliptically, but I'll do it straight on. That element of provocation is often there, yes, which means I get irritated when I have to back off."
When I ask about the banning in Ireland of his last film, Showgirls, he defends the film against the charge that it's degrading to women (but not, interestingly enough, against the suggestion that it's just a load of old rubbish).
"It's not degrading to women, but it tells you that women are degraded, which is a very different thing. Whatever you think about the movie, because there may be problems, which are a bit more difficult for me to see probably than for an outsider, it's really about the use and abuse of sex as a tool, not only by the boss but by the central character - she's backstabbing along with everybody else. So I suppose it's not a very optimistic portrayal of our human situation."
Now almost 60 years old, Verhoeven describes himself with a laugh as a "very highly respected person" in the Netherlands. Last year he became a knight of the order of Orange Nassau. "It's the order of the queen. They were all glad when I left the country, but it took about seven or eight years after my disappearance from Holland to make me into a saint. Now the tone has completely changed. Most of my movies in Holland were bashed down by the media at the time, but even the whole attitude of the critics has changed now."
I suggest that in recent years there's also been a shift away from the auteur-driven European cinema of the 1970s towards a commercial style more attuned to his own sensibilities. "Yes, most notably in the German film industry, where they're now making these extremely successful comedies. For 20 or 30 years nobody in Germany went to see German films because they were so intellectual or ultra-left or Maoist or Trotskyist or whatever the hell it was. It feels now that there's a possibility that cinema in Europe might find a place for itself again."
In retrospect, he thinks, it's surprising that this movie, with its darker elements, was made at all in Hollywood. "But something like Starship Troopers can only be made in the United States. There are some elements in the American industry that aren't repeatable anywhere else. Other kinds of movies, of course, you can certainly do. I've been working on a project about the Marquis De Sade, which I would do in France."
With Arnold Schwarzenegger, he's also been trying for years to make a medieval war epic set at the time of the Crusades. "That's still in the works, but the budget is difficult. It was Arnold's idea, and at first I thought it would be, you know, Arnold leads the Crusades - great! But as I read about it, it became much darker. What interested me was how horrible it was. It was a slaughterhouse. The first Crusade started because they were fighting among themselves, and the first thing they did when they set out was to begin killing the Jewish population of Europe. When they got to Jerusalem they slaughtered Arabs, Jews, everyone in a bloodbath. It's a horror story, and the screenplay was written by Walon Green, who wrote The Wild Bunch, so it has a really harsh style."
Given that the projected budget for that movie is over $100 million, surely he's hardly surprised that the studios aren't queueing up to back him? "Well, Arnold owns the script now, and he hasn't been able to set it up, because it doesn't portray the Christians as heroes, they're the villains and the nicest guy's an Arab. Arnold still wants to do it, but I know that people around him are advising him against it, because basically it's a political movie, and obviously it could be explosive."
Starship Troopers opened nationwide yesterday