For upward of three decades, Paul Verhoeven has established a reputation as one of the world's most provocative, controversial directors, known for his unblinking portrayal of sex and violence as well as a keen satirical bent. Born in Amsterdam and raised in The Hague, where he and his family lived under German occupation during World War II, Verhoeven put Dutch filmmaking back on the map with a number of dark thrillers and dramas in the '70s and '80s, including Turkish Delight, Soldier Of Orange, Spetters, and The Fourth Man. In the mid-'80s, he made his American debut with the bloody fantasy film Flesh+Blood, but he staked his claim in Hollywood for good with the surprise hit RoboCop, which immediately established him as a go-to guy for hard-hitting science fiction. From there, Verhoeven specialized in controversial blockbusters that continue to attract passionate support and derision from many corners; they include Basic Instinct, Total Recall, Starship Troopers, and Showgirls. Six years after his last movie, Hollow Man, Verhoeven has resurfaced in Holland for Black Book, a rousing World War II adventure about a Jewish woman (Carice van Houten) who joins the Resistance and uses her wiles to infiltrate the Nazi elite. Verhoeven recently spoke to The A.V. Club about his World War II experiences, his battles with the MPAA, and how Starship Troopers was made and misinterpreted.
The A.V. Club: You were only 7 when World War II ended, but the period obviously left a strong impression on you. What sort of memories do you have about living in the occupation and the years after the war?
Paul Verhoeven: Strangely enough, I used those memories in [Black Book] only as an emotional and environmental background. So the narrative of the movie had nothing to do with my youth, really, and the narrative was based on historical research that I did with my scriptwriter [Gerard Soeteman] for the last 20 years or even longer, before we got all the details and events that we needed to write the script. So whatever specific memories I have didn't make it into the movie—or at least not the events I witnessed. I used only, let's say, my memories of how the streets looked, how the Germans looked, how people walked, what kind of cars there were on the street, and that sort of thing. But having been in that situation made it easy for my scriptwriter and I, because we both grew up in Holland, more or less in the same location, although we didn't know each other then. It was very easy to jump into that time, I would say. It's easy to let myself go and think of the empty streets and occupied territory. My mind drifts back to that period all the time.
AVC: What stays with you?
PV: Well, very close to our house was a launching pad for the V-1's and later the V-2's, which were the big rockets that Wernher von Braun made. V-1 was a small one, maybe a little smaller than a jet fighter. But the big one, the V-2 that came at the end of the war, was a big thing. Ultimately, von Braun was secretly brought to the United States in October 1945 with all his colleagues to work on the rocket program. He later worked on the Saturn rockets that put Armstrong on the moon. That's the same guy who invented the rockets that were standing about one mile from my house and were fired toward London. These V-2 rockets were really gigantic, and they were going over our house, because the launch was close by. I remember the fire coming out of the end of the rocket, and this enormous sound. And sometimes when the rockets misfired, you saw them basically stopping, and then they would fall down and head—not close to our house, because they would already be on the other side of the city—but they would fall down on a quarter or some streets in the city I lived in, which was the government city, The Hague.
I also remember being in a car with my father when we were coming home one day from visiting family, I think. We were suddenly forced by the Germans to take another route to our house. They wouldn't allow us to take the normal way, and instead, we were forced to pass the bodies of Dutch citizens that were taken out of prison by reprisal, because some German officer had been killed on that street. The Germans would take something like 20 or 30 people out of prison—political prisoners, resistance fighters, sometimes just criminals—and they would put them on the road at the spot where the German soldier was killed, and they would execute them. And so that had happened in the street next to our house, and my father and I were forced to pass the dead bodies as an act of terror. Of course, the Germans were showing us that if we were, let's say, naughty or bad, that they would shoot you and kill you. So that, I remember. I remember, of course, the burning of a quarter of the city that happened, I think, in '44, when the Allies bombed the city by mistake. They were supposed to bomb the area where the Germans were launching their rockets. But somehow, the English reversed the map, or there was a problem with the coordinates, and so what they did is bomb an area that was filled with civilians. And those bombs fell the next street over from our house. The whole quarter of The Hague was ruined, it was all flames and ruins and dead bodies wherever you looked.
Those are just a few of my memories. They're all pretty violent, clearly, because that's what you would remember. I also remember all the hunger in Holland, because all the supply lines were cut off. The northern part of Holland, where I lived, was occupied, and the southern part was still liberated. And so food didn't come anymore to the northern part. And if there was food, it was sent to the German soldiers on the eastern front, basically. It was called the Hunger Winter in Holland, and many people died because of it. I remember that we were eating tulips and sugar beets and all that stuff. Some of those memories pop up a little in the movie, but rarely in the foreground.
AVC: One section of the film deals with the retribution against collaborators after the war. Do you remember what the atmosphere was like then? Was there a lot of suspicion among neighbors?
PV: I don't have vivid memories. I didn't understand what was going on at that time with respect to the collaborators; I remember more the parties. I mean, people dancing in the streets continuously for days and weeks and weeks. There were parties, big parties in the streets. It was also a very nice summer, so basically everyone was outside. But the treatment of the Dutch, how they treated the collaborators, the women that had slept with German officers or people that had profited from the war, had collaborated with the Germans, had the Nazi ideology or whatever… All that stuff happened, and that's what the movie concerns itself with. [The heroine's] abuse in prison reminds us of Abu Ghraib, clearly. In about '66, I was doing research at the Institute For War Documentation in Amsterdam for a television movie I was making about a Dutch Nazi leader named [Anton] Mussert, and I was looking at things that happened during the war, of course, but also after the war. Then I found in the archives all these papers about how the Dutch had treated their prisoners. So all that abuse in the movie comes directly from archival research.
AVC: What has it been like for Holland to revisit that part of its past?
PV: Well, the Dutch have embraced the movie. It was the most successful R-rated movie since 1981, in fact. There might have been some reviews that were negative, I've been getting very mixed and negative reviews in Holland my whole life, even before I moved to the United States. In fact, that was probably one of the reasons that I moved to the United States. But I would say the Dutch had no problems with the movie in general. I think the Dutch were more or less prepared for it. They had never perhaps seen it that way, but they were not shocked. It was more like the film confirms what they were probably already thinking had happened anyhow. And so there were no protests on the streets. And I have seen my share of protests, when I released Spetters in Holland, or when I did Basic Instinct or Showgirls or whatever. So I could have been prepared for the worst. And, of course, I was not sure exactly how they would react, but fortunately, they reacted in a very positive way. The film was released in September, and is still in theatres. So basically, it's an enormous success. And they would not have embraced it if they hadn't been aware of these things that I showed them.
AVC: After making movies in Hollywood for so long, did it take any adjustment for you to shoot movies in Europe again?
PV: Not too much. The crews I used in Europe were all very professional, because all kinds of tax incentives have been introduced in Holland in the last 10 or 13 years. A lot of movies have been made, and the crews have become very professional. So that was not the big difference. The big difference was the financial situation, and how we got this money together for a movie that was about $21 million, which is an enormous amount of money for a Dutch movie. A lot of the money came from Germany, England, and Belgium, so it was four countries that contributed money to the movie.
To get that money together and to keep the cash flow going, however, turned out to be extremely difficult, because a lot of these committees that give you the money only want to give it on certain terms, and the terms are not exactly coinciding with the way you shoot a movie. Because when you start shooting, the expenses jump up a couple hundred percent. And so it was very difficult financially for the producers, not so much for me, of course. But you do start to notice when people in the crew have not been paid for weeks. Then you feel awkward when these people stay on the project because they feel passionate about it, or they want to work with me, but they have not been paid. So I think that was kind of a nuisance. And sometimes really nightmarish to the degree that you would think, "Am I going to shoot next week? Are people going to walk away?" It never happened, but it was sometimes really on the edge. It's certainly something that never happened to me all these 20 years in the United States, because the money was always there.
On the other hand, of course, the artistic freedom that they gave me, the fact that I could write the script the way I wanted together with my scriptwriter, and that I could write down whatever I would like and that I could shoot it the way I liked it, and that nobody was hanging over my shoulder telling me that it was politically incorrect or that it should be more conservative or not so violent, or that was too sexual, or too this or too that… I didn't have to deal with that at all, or the MPAA [ratings board], which doesn't exist there. From an artist's point of view, I have the pleasure of doing the film precisely the way I wanted it, without interference from producers or anybody. So that, I think, is a big plus. That's a lot of fun. You can invent it and shoot it as you want, and nobody is criticizing that it might be morally or ethically wrong. I mean, a Jewish girl having an affair with a German officer, a Nazi officer, would not have been an easy thing to sell in the United States.
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