Paul Verhoeven took a tumble with Showgirls, but bounces back with Starship Troopers — a gore-fest full of battles with giant bugs. Phil Daoust met the controversial director.
You’re a big-budget Hollywood director who was once known as a bit of an auteur. You work with Arnie, Sharon and Rutger but are getting sick of seeing your films described as slick but shallow. Then one day someone comes up to you and says, “I have this great idea for a film. I call it Young Adults Fight Giant Bugs in Outer Space.”
Do you: (a) call security – you haven’t sunk that low; (b) stall in case your other projects dry up; or (c) try to interest a studio, then, when that doesn’t work, take an option on one of the loony right’s favourite novels, combine both stories and make Young Fascists Fight Giant Bugs in Outer Space?
If your name is Paul Verhoeven, you plump for (c). But, then, if your name is Paul Verhoeven, you never take the obvious route.
It’s 12 years since Verhoeven came to the United States from his native Holland. He’s made a number of hit movies since then, including the dystopian shoot-’em-ups Robocop and Total Recall. But on the way this 59-year-old has kicked up more controversy than almost any other A-list director. The first film he made in the US, the medieval bandit movie Flesh and Blood, was a tour de force of misogyny, summed up by one commentator as “young bride is kidnapped and raped but grows to like it”.
In 1992 he was accused of demonising gays and lesbians with Basic Instinct, where a knickerless Sharon Stone played an icepick- wielding killer who just happens to like girls as well as boys. And in 1995 his tits-and-ass extravaganza Showgirls somehow managed to outsleaze the sex industry it was supposed to expose.
As if that weren’t enough, the reason Verhoeven came to the US in the first place was that he was almost unemployable at home. In 1980, after more than a decade turning out gritty but lauded work for TV and film, he made Spetters, a biker movie that created no end of trouble in Holland’s state-subsidised film industry, largely because of a male-rape scene. He directed one more movie, then decided the grass had to be greener the other side of the Atlantic.
But the thing about gamblers is that every now and then their numbers come up. This time Verhoeven has produced a movie that’s not just good box-office but great fun – think Aliens with a sense of humour, or Star Wars without all that Force rubbish. “For a lot of people,” he says with a smile of relief, “it took the bad taste of Showgirls away.”
Better still for those who care about the future of the planet, Verhoeven has taken one of the most unpleasant books in the history of popular fiction and undermined its crypto-fascist, militaristic message. “The movie may be about young adults fighting giant bugs in outer space,” he says. “But it also shows you how people get seduced into the war machine.”
The book that gives its name to Verhoeven’s film is 1959’s Starship Troopers. Set at some vague point in the future, in what the author Robert Heinlein thinks is a utopia, it purports to tell the tale of Earth’s battle with a race of huge insect-like extraterrestrials. In fact, it’s a Trojan horse for a mix of authoritarianism, thinly veiled American supremacism and armed- service fetishism, full of little gems like “It’s never a soldier’s business to decide why he fights” and “A human being has no natural rights of any nature”.
The US has a long tradition of right- leaning sci-fi, of course. Particularly in the 1950s, aliens were regularly used as proxies for the Red Peril. But although Heinlein’s young hero talks of the space spiders’ “total communism”, this book is of another order entirely. Heinlein’s original publisher refused to handle the manuscript, presumably because of its ringing endorsement of the death penalty, corporal punishment (the author was oddly fond of whippings and spankings), and, above all, limiting the vote. If you want to be a full citizen in Heinlein’s perfect world, you must first do a tour in the armed services. This is apparently to prove you are willing to put the state above personal wellbeing and has nothing to do with the fact that the author was an ex-navy man.
In London to promote his film, Verhoeven seems chary of provoking another critical stomping. He keeps stressing the fun, fun, fun side of Starship Troopers, going on about the special effects – which are pretty impressive – and repeating that it was screen-writer Ed Neumeier’s Young Adults Fight Giant Bugs pitch that attracted him four-and-a-half years ago. Heinlein’s novel (which had more or less the same plot, of course) was pasted on after Tri-Star rejected that first proposal. “Like you, I laughed at the original Giant Bugs description,” he explains. “But I liked the potentially comic tone. The original concept was to make a Ray Harryhausen movie for the 1990s – something like Jason and the Argonauts or the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.”
But with Heinlein part of the picture, Verhoeven had a great time showing where his politics lead. The young troopers (the prefix “storm” springs to mind) wade through Nazi-style imagery, the novel’s didactics are reduced to their bare, absurd essentials, and the remarkably bloody battle scenes are intercut with slice-of- life infomercials that reveal a bunker mentality reminiscent of the US after the Russians got the Bomb. At the end of each of these “FedNet” announcements come the words “Do you want to know more?” The natural reaction is: “Hell, no!”
Rolling Stone magazine called the film “$100-million worth of smug cynicism spiked with sex and gore” – a tenable, if rather po-faced, view – but then complained: “It’s hell on the book’s politics.” That was rather missing the point. “If we’d just done Heinlein’s novel, it would have been a very heavy and unpleasant statement,” says Verhoeven. “I couldn’t possibly portray that kind of fascist society straight.”
Or at least not in a sympathetic light. One of the many films Verhoeven tried to get off the ground was an early life of Hitler – sort of Führer 18-32. “The idea was to show that charisma is not identical to good – someone can get a whole country behind them and still be evil.” It fell at the first hurdle. “We pitched it to a couple of studios,” says Verhoeven, “and they went like, ‘Vampire! Vampire!'” He brandishes an imaginary cross.
Anyway, for all Verhoeven’s protestations, and despite some deliberately engaging leads and ropy editing, it’s hard not to view Starship Troopers as a smart movie pretending to be dumb. That’s quite a contrast with the director’s last film, which The Guardian’s Jonathan Romney described as “a film with no convincing characters, no convincing performances and a clanking script … feathers in its head, iron in its soul and lead in its crotchless pants”.
Showgirls attempts to tell the tale of Nomi, a selfish ex-crackhead ex-hooker who comes to Vegas for a taste of the good life as a topless dancer, but decides the scene is just too nasty for her (which is saying something). Verhoeven has described the film as “a portrayal of corrupted society … a kind of apocalyptic landscape”; what everyone else saw was $40-million worth of tits and glitter against a soundtrack of “Do my boobs look bigger to you?” and “This top is way too tight; my breasts are just getting crushed in here.”
Elizabeth Berkley, the virtual unknown who played Nomi, split with her agent after Showgirls. Joe Eszterhas, who wrote the script, stopped talking to Verhoeven because of the way the film was marketed. But does the director regret his involvement? “Not at all,” he insists. “Given my time again, I don’t think I’d make another choice.” But, he admits, the reaction was “a catastrophe. I thought that although there would be a backlash, the visualisation would be interesting enough to convince people that the film was not decadent, sleazy or whatever. Apparently I failed.
“Still,” he continues, “it was worse when I did Spetters in Holland. I was sitting there day in, day out, hearing the whole of Holland falling on me and bashing me.”
Both of these films, he says, were based on research and interviews. They were true to life, but the public just wasn’t ready.
Verhoeven is constantly accused of being obsessed with sex and violence. It’s no surprise that he once planned a film about the Marquis de Sade. But at least part of that charge won’t be heard for a while. He’s kept the topless shots to a minimum in Starship Troopers (though he does throw in a mixed shower scene), and while there are a couple of love triangles, there’s very little shagging – and that’s strictly hetero. The violence? That’s another matter. Even before the troopers leave boot camp, the instructors take great pleasure in snapping arms or sticking knives into uppity recruits. Come the time for battle, limbs are severed, torsos ripped apart, bodies burnt and brains sucked out.
It would be easy to see this as a calculated attempt to pull in blood-thirsty teenagers. There’s something pretty creepy about the way the distributor’s PR man crows: “It’s been passed as a 15 certificate with no cuts. It’s a mad, mad world we live in!” But violence has fascinated Verhoeven since his childhood in the world war II. He grew up on the outskirts of The Hague, “where the Germans were picking up pieces of pilots”. “This world was crazy,” he’s said, “but it was also normal. As a child you don’t know anything different. The natural state of my mind, I feel, is still more war than peace. I always had the need to communicate my feelings about it.”
It’s hard to see how he’ll do that in his next film, which will be about Houdini — not the escapology, but the investigations into spiritualism. But after that? For the past 10 years Verhoeven has been researching a life of Christ, part of a fascination with Messiah figures that takes in Hitler and De Sade but reached a climax 30 years ago when he briefly wanted to be a preacher (he was going through a difficult patch at the time). He should finally have an outline for the movie in the spring. “John, Mark and so on all have their own versions of the truth,” he says.
“Mine will be that of a person living in the 20th century and making up his mind at that time.”
Verhoeven knows the risks he’s running in taking on Our Lord. “It’s a very dangerous movie,” he says, “especially in the US. There are lots of fundamentalists who don’t worry about shooting a doctor in an abortion clinic, and they might not take to a director who puts things in a different perspective.” He looks unhappy when asked if he’s budgeted for bodyguards for the rest of his life, and says he doesn’t want to end up like Salman Rushdie.
You’d almost believe he was going to play it safe. But remember Robocop, the ultra- violent tale of a good policeman murdered by thugs, then resurrected to bring bionic justice to the world? Verhoeven once described the film’s crotch-shooting hero as a Christ-like figure.