AVC: Have you been in situations in Hollywood where you've embarked on making a movie one way, then had it compromised during the process?
PV: No, not during production, but afterward. For example, I made Basic Instinct, and it was given an NC-17. But contractually, I had to deliver an R. So I had to go back to the MPAA nine or 10 times to change my movie so that they would accept it. The same story happened, nearly in the same way, with Robocop, and to a smaller degree, with Total Recall and Starship Troopers. Every time, you have to submit the movie, and people tell you "This has to be taken out, this has to be changed." That's what the MPAA does, isn't it? [Laughs.]
AVC: With all your experience facing off against the MPAA, did you ever figure out tricks to get in what you wanted?
PV: I've never done that. I don't believe too much in these tricks. Perhaps they exist. I don't know exactly what they would be. Sometimes people say you have to make everything originally very strong and much more violent than you want, and then they tone it down, and it's exactly what you wanted in the first place. I've never done that. I don't know if that works. I mean, I've always delivered the movie to the MPAA as I wanted it to be. And I found myself confronted by people who felt that certain elements in my movie were too strong. So you end up with the European version of Basic Instinct, which is the director's cut, and was the one that was released all over Europe and many other countries, and then there is the American version, which is really different from the original version, and has been released in Australia, the United States, and Korea. So these are three countries that didn't accept my original cut. So basically, you put them together, then you see what the difference is. Stanley Kubrick, when he was doing Eyes Wide Shut, called me and asked me exactly what problems the MPAA would have with his movie. And I explained to him what happened with Basic Instinct, and I sent him both versions, so he could see in what directions I had been forced to change.
AVC: Then he still had to put those digital figures to block out the sex.
PV: I think he assumed that because he was seen as one of the best film directors in the world, perhaps he could get away with more, but ultimately, he had to put the [figures] in the shot. I don't know if he did that because it was NC-17, or if he had done that already in the beginning to present them with an R-rated movie. That, I don't know.
AVC: With regard to the MPAA, Quentin Tarantino once said that basically, you end up getting punished for doing violence and sex well.
PV: I fully agree with that. It's not a great system. When it was given to the different states, it was even worse, of course, because everybody could make their own rules. I think this compromise is not pleasant, but it might be, in a big country like the United States, the only way to do it. Of course, for people who are not as extreme as I normally shoot, it is not a big problem. For me, it has always been a problem. The only movie that has been accepted by the MPAA ever that I did in English was Hollow Man. But all the others, from Flesh+Blood, my first English-speaking movie, to Total Recall and Basic Instinct, I've run into trouble with the MPAA.
Showgirls was not a problem, because that was from the beginning an NC-17, so we brought that out without any interference. But normally, a studio wouldn't do that. Studios would be really afraid to bring out a movie that was an NC-17 at this moment in time, especially with this kind of government and this kind of puritan thinking. It would be something they would totally try to avoid, and they would put in your contract that you have to deliver an R. They would certainly do that with me, knowing my history of controversy with the MPAA. I've always felt that we shouldn't be afraid of sex and we shouldn't be afraid of violence, because they are part of the world. Why can I not shoot what is the reality of every human couple—heterosexual, bisexual, or whatever? Why am I supposed to be cryptic when it's about sex? That you could argue, but I don't think that would fly at the moment, in any way.
There's a very puritan streak about this government, and it has to do with their being highly influenced by Christian thinking. Christians, of course, have never been happy with sex. If you read the apostle Paul, the letters of Paul, you see that he is on the side of the President. "Better not do it. If necessary, do it, but it's better if you don't."
AVC: So it's no coincidence that you haven't made a film in Hollywood since the Bush administration took office?
PV: I'm not sure. The scripts that have come to my office have all been, let's say, pretty tame. The scripts that really interest me are a little bit edgy and have a little tension between the audience and the film itself. Those kinds of scripts have not been written much, or at least they didn't get to me. There has been, mostly because of 9/11, an enormous amount of escapism. I mean, if you see the big successes of the last five or six years, they are all highly into fantasyland. Harry Potter, Lord Of The Rings, Spider-Man—they're all basically things that are not true and are not dealing with the reality of the world. They're not like the South American movies that we see now, that all seem to be based on reality, on what happens really. American movies in the last years have gone in the direction of non-confrontational, easy on the audience, pleasant to the audience, escapist, not confronting reality much, or not integrating reality to a strong and harsh degree, like life is. I think life is full of violence, and that has been avoided, I think, perhaps as a reaction to 9/11, because that was too much reality to swallow. People have, after that, been moving to the other side, to the fantasy side.
I had decided after Hollow Man to stay away from science fiction. I felt I had done so much science fiction. Four of the six movies I made in Hollywood are science-fiction oriented, and even Basic Instinct is kind of science fiction. I wanted to get out of that, so that coincided with an emphasis of the studios on fantasy. So that might have been a reason why I could not find anything that interested me. Ultimately, it was this script that had been in the works for a long time and that was finally finished in 2003. When that script was done, I felt it was a chance to go back to a certain reality that I had been looking for in the United States, but could not find. I felt I should take a sabbatical from the United States and work on this movie in Europe, so that's what happened. Then, of course, it took some time before I could start the movie in Europe. It took a long time to get the money together. Although the script was ready at the end of 2003, before everything financially was okay, it was nearly a year later.
AVC: In order to get a film like, say, Starship Troopers made, do you have to sell the studio on a giant bug movie, then sneak in the satirical commentary?
PV: Sneaking in [those elements] was never something that I intended to do. They were all in the script. In my opinion, the movie got made because there were so many regime changes at Sony at that time, one after the other. Mike Medavoy disappeared, then Marc Platt came in, then Bob Cooper came in, and so on. There were five or six changes, and I don't think anyone ever looked at the movie! All the satire was in the script from the beginning, but they might not have been really aware of it, or had read it precisely. By the time one of them might have understood what movie I was going to make, he was already gone. The next group came in. I think we slipped through this labyrinth of changing regimes until finally the movie was done. By then, it had become a stable regime, but then, of course, the movie was already made. It was not that I was lying to anybody. It was already in the script, all this ironic stuff, all this hyperbolic stuff, all this playing with fascism or fascist imagery to point out certain aspects of American society, that was all in the script.
AVC: What do you think of the film now with regard to the way the current war was generated? It almost seems like they were following that same script.
PV: Well, yeah. If you were very nice to the movie, you would call it prophetic. But we never thought of Starship Troopers as a warning, or something like that. When we were working on the [Robert] Heinlein book, we felt like we had something that was pretty militaristic, pretty right-wing, and you could even say had a tendency to be fascist. We felt we should counter that with irony and other means to make it interesting to ourselves. And, of course, there was a built-in situation that we sensed at that time and that was visible. The new conservatives had already written many articles, and I think we used some of that thinking, and what we saw happening. Although this was all still during the Clinton years, of course, it was vaguely there. I think we picked it up, because we saw it and perhaps it annoyed us, but then, in a pretty playful way, we put it in the movie as a kind of second layer. And of course, the movie is about "Let's all go to war and let's all die." That was clear from the beginning. Not that I had in mind that this would become kind of a reality in the years that followed Clinton. That would have been really prophetic. [Screenwriter Ed Neumeier and I] were just tapping things that we saw at that time, and then extrapolated, unfortunately into a direction that life took.
AVC: That film is really subversive and has found a cult following, but it was so badly misinterpreted in some circles.
PV: It was terrible, and quite punishing. There was an article in the Washington Post—the editorial, not the review—that said the movie was fascist, and the writing and directing were neo-Nazi, or whatever they wrote, that was extremely punishing to us, because that article was picked up, before the film came out, by the whole European press. The movie was introduced to the Europeans as a fascist movie, as a neo-Nazi movie. Which it was not, of course, it was the contrary of that. When we came on our promotion tour to these countries that had been fascist, notably Germany and Italy, and France to a certain degree, it was a continuous fight with the journalists, explaining to them that the movie basically used fascist imagery, and was using images of Leni Riefenstahl to point out a fascist situation.
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