Verhoeven Returns

Paul Verhoeven should not be so misunderstood, since his films are efforts to tell simple truths, usually in the simplest cinematic language. The truths are painfully simple in the case of Black Book, which looks at survival and betrayal in the Dutch resistance to the Germans, as World War II was drawing to a close and the Dutch were preparing to govern themselves once again. The title comes from a black book in which the names of Dutch collaborators with the Nazis are listed. Let's just say that the top priorities as the war ends are not truth and reconciliation.

In this riveting melodrama, Carice van Houten plays the Jewish songstress who watches her family die while "escaping" into a Nazi trap, and then falls in the love with the Gestapo chief whom she's seduced as part of an undercover operation. Sebastian Koch is the Nazi who is supposed to be hunting down people just like her, the realist who negotiates with the Dutch resistance in the hope of avoiding killings on both sides.

True to his reputation, Verhoeven has made a film that is violent, often gross in its tactility, and skeptical about lofty motives when money or opportunity are at stake. Black Book was a huge hit in Holland, in spite of the Dutch critics who accused Verhoeven of being too American in the first film that he's made in the Netherlands in 20 years.

Setting his story against the backdrop of the Occupation gives Verhoeven everything he seems to need - a tense situation where death can come at any moment, the intrigue of young idealists fighting the Nazis with whatever means they have, and a grey moral zone in which those idealists learn that they are putting their lives on the line for someone else's benefit. When the British troops roll in to liberate Holland, keep your eyes on the Dutch who are most extreme in punishing the collaborators.

Verhoeven is almost 70, and certainly seems much younger than that, with two long careers behind him, one in Holland and one in the US, and a third that seems on the rise with an epic that took all of $21 million to make. Soldier of Orange (now more than 20 years old), also about young resistants in Holland during the German Occupation, was an earlier shot at the same period, which pointed to the betrayals that Verhoeven would examine in Black Book. Bear in mind that a higher percentage of Jews were deported to the Nazi camps from Holland than from any other country. Verhoeven first witnessed the war as a child in Holland, and it's been with him ever since. He's the kind of Dutch Calvinist who seems to know that everyone is in need of salvation, but very few deserve it, or are willing to earn it.

Is his target hypocrisy? America was a perfect place to refine his aim at that bull's-eye - it was a sandbox where simple ingredients could be used to construct fables, and to deconstruct them. The ingredients were as easy to parody as they were to pile on top of each other. It certainly was the case in RoboCop, in which a young policeman (eventually resurrected as a mechanical savior, in Verhoeven-esque Christian imagery) ends up fighting two battles, one against the everyday crime that takes over Detroit, another against corrupt politicians who devote much more money to developing a rival robot police enforcer from a rival private company. RoboCop wasn't making the streets safe. He was eating up market share that the politicians saw as their turf. Are we talking about private contractors profiting from a public function that they are performing badly? Sound familiar in the Iraq context? It should. You're paying for it.

The other Verhoeven film from which to draw parallels to our contemporary quagmire is Starship Troopers, one of the reasons Verhoeven hasn't made a Hollywood film in a long time. Spend $100 million, and bring in half of that at the box office, and shoot your mouth off, and maybe you'll be looking for work somewhere else, too. Watching it again, I saw parallels to war movies, westerns, and old sci-fi, but Verhoeven also seemed to be taking us back to the sensibility of Psycho Beach Party, or something like it. His satire is so inanely deadpan that we lose sight of the bodies - insect or human. Try switching back and forth between Starship Troopers and C-SPAN. On C-SPAN you don't get the happy ending.

I spoke with Verhoeven about war and resurrection - personal, that is.

You've made a film that goes against the official mythology that the Dutch behaved nobly during the German Occupation in World War II. What was that official mythology and whom did it serve?

There was the feeling in Holland that after the war many people pretended to have been among the resistance. In Holland, there is an expression: "Many people were in the Resistance during the war." That has slowly been disintegrated, this mythology, and a book written a couple of years ago, Grey Past, by a scholar, lets you find out how few people really had resisted. People had basically been very neutral - waiting, looking, seeing, standing on the side. If they took sides against the Germans, it was mostly after the defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad. If there was a big resistance movement - which never was there in the first place - the resistance movement got bigger after the defeat of the Germans in Stalingrad, because after that, people began to realize that it was possible to defeat the Germans. And there were already Allied troop movements in North Africa.

But the resistance should never be too exaggerated. In the last 20 years, with studies by young academics who looked at the numbers and the archives with a lot less prejudice, it became clear that there had been a lot of things happening, mostly in the last years of the war, where Dutch resistance fighters had secret deals with the Germans, betraying their friends. It became more and more clear that there were many shadows to the Dutch resistance, and I think that the movie is stepping into that.





My personal research from 60s and 70s had already revealed a lot of that. Some of the stories that are now part of this narrative were already discovered in the late 70s. There's been a low demythologizing of this period for some time, to the degree that when this movie came out, the Dutch audience, the Dutch public - I'm not talking about the critics - was extremely positive about the movie.ÊIt's the most attended Dutch R-rated movie since 1981. Ultimately, you have to consider that the Dutch audience was not provoked, and there were no angry letters to the newspapers, there were no television programs on which the film was attacked, as happened when I did Spetters in Holland. People seemed to all feel that what I was presenting was not fiction, that it was real. The Dutch seem to be highly educated enough at this moment that demythologizing the war was something that was accepted.

Why did the Dutch critics attack you?

The Dutch critics have always been not on my side, let's put it that way. They were very positive when I was not in the United States, but as soon as I came back to Holland, they sharpened their knives and went at it again. In Holland, and in most of Western Europe, success is not something positive. If you're too successful, you're too entertaining, and if you're too entertaining, you're not an artist. That's basically the thinking.

The Dutch critics criticized the movie by saying, "Well, there were no bicycles in Holland in 1945." These were younger people who had read some article saying that people lost their bikes, because the Germans took them, but I can assure you that there were bikes, because my father had one until the end of the war. I think they attacked the movie because they just wanted to attack me. Since the beginning of my career, there's always been a part of the Dutch critics - or all of them, in the case of Spetters - that turned against me, because they felt that I was too popular. They would always accuse me of being superficial, to entertainment-oriented. Now they call me too Americanized.

In Black Book, you seem interested in a well-told story, and you've moved into melodrama to tell it.

If you look at the rest of my Dutch movies, then you would see that the narrative is not so driving there. It's more Fellini-esque, I would say, with many scenes. So, working 20 years in the American film industry, I developed an interest in compelling, driving narrative. You certainly could say that I became Americanized. Yet even in the American cinema, this interest in strong narrative has disappeared because of all the digital things we can do, leaning so heavily on fantasy and fictional reality. There has always been a strong narrative in American movies. I think I read in an article about this movie, Black Book, suggesting that American movies look at it, and that they try to lean more heavily on narrative, which they have lost a bit.





France has built an industry on films about the Occupation. They've constructed a huge myth about the resistance, and they also have a lot to atone for. What did you want to address in your film that had not been addressed?

Mostly the situation after World War II, after the Liberation, this whole part at the end of the movie where you are being witness to and a participant in what the Dutch heroes and the resistance - anybody who was on the side of the Allies - did with these people who, during the war, 1940 to '45, had been in collaboration with Germans, whether by sleeping with the Germans, working for or with the Germans, negotiating with the Germans, building bunkers for the Germans, profiting from the Germans. All these people were put in prison, including all the people who took the political side of the Germans by becoming members of the National Socialist Dutch party, which existed in the 30s but became much stronger when the Germans invaded. A lot of Dutch people felt that Holland had become a German province, which a character mentions in the movie. As they were taken from the street, their hair was cut off, their clothes were torn off. Then there was further humiliation in the Dutch prisons. There weren't enough prisons for them, so they were put in warehouses and whatever other places they could find. The Dutch were extremely denigrating toward them. I would call it a very black page in Dutch history, and nowadays we find it repeated at Abu Ghraib.

To the American context for a second. You noted that it's striking that lies about the nature of the Iraq war, which have been exposed so publicly as lies, are still being defended, and that there seems to be a weak public response to the flagrant telling of untruths.

I'm quite aware of that. Of course, I did not make this movie to be a critique of the United States. I was quite aware of this by the time that I made this movie, although the elements of this movie were long concocted and put together and found and researched before the invasion of Iraq. I was quite aware, by the time I was shooting the movie, which started in September of 2005, that the American government had been lying and cheating, and that they still seemed not to be willing to admit to that - notably, of course, Mr. Cheney. I was aware that somehow the movie, by making clear that good people should not be trusted, and that even good intentions should not be trusted, that we were paralleling in some way the situation that happened to the United States by invading Iraq - clearly. I did not try to retro-inject elements of the now into the past.It was more that my brain was strongly programmed by what had happened in the last four or five years, and my eye on the movie was somehow programmed to emphasize certain aspects that jumped to the mind as being more corresponding or looking similar to Abu Ghraib than I was aware of - but I tried not to falsify history.

But here, you're Dutch, you still live in the United States, and the government is using a heightened moral rhetoric that seems beyond anything that a Dutch Calvinist would use today. I really don't see any filmmakers addressing this in a fictional context, although there now are documentaries about torture being practiced in the name of the "war on terror."





If you want to say, "I Accuse," I think you need distance. Otherwise, you're better off reporting as much as you can, without any transcendence, and running behind the facts as you present them to the audience. You're better off not to make a movie; just make a documentary. But to transcend this American reality that we've gone through in the last five years is often extremely difficult when you're right in the middle of it, and you don't even know where to go. I have not seen any script in that direction, although I think you could say that there are some aspects in Syriana.

In general, I think that it's very difficult to find these scripts, and I don't think the studios are willing to develop projects in that direction, because being overtly critical doesn't make you look too good. How long has it taken for most of the media in the United States to admit that there was something wrong in this whole concept of attacking Iraq, even to the degree that the highest political organs, like the Senate and the House, have been supporting this? I was always flabbergasted that the president who started this war was re-elected with even more votes than he had at the beginning. Are they not seeing that there is something really very wrong here? Why are the media not accusing more? Everything that they were reporting for years and years had the same spin that the government was using.

But if Bush hadn't been re-elected, we'd have gay marriage.

I think there were other reasons to re-elect him, too, but there's also the effect of what Edward Neumeier and I wrote in Starship Troopers: "Let's go, and let's fight, and let's die." I think that idea also had an appeal, to be victorious and to bring democracy, or whatever they call it. They've given up on that one now. They're rephrasing it, "to bring stability."

There's another idea. We have to fight the war to protect the troops that we sent there.

The slowness of this government to react to the circumstances, even after realizing that things went wrong, is quite amazing.

You live in the United States. You are going to be making films for American audiences. Have you given any thought to an allegorical science fiction approach to addressing these films, something along the lines of the parody of American militarism in Starship Troopers?

I have been talking about that with Ed Neumeier, who wrote Starship Troopers and RoboCop, but our conversations have not yet reached the point where we've found a proper script or whatever. He's probably the most political writer whom I've worked with - of course, always using the B-genre to subversively inject other political ideas than the ones that are current. It's difficult to find the way to do that. And no one had brought anything to me that would have the subversive quality of Starship Troopers. I've been quite distracted in the last one and a half years from American filmmaking, by doing European filmmaking. It's only now that I've come back to myself, and I hope that I'll find a way to do it.

Back in the 1990s, you were working on a film, The Crusades, with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Is there any way of reviving that project? Schwarzenegger owns the script, I recall, but who wrote the script?

Walon Green, who wrote The Wild Bunch. It's a really good script, and it's political. It's really a shame. The film is saying that the Crusades were a piece of shit, and that the Pope is guilty. It's in the entertainment adventure genre, but the underpinnings were really pretty critical, and you could nearly say anti-Christian. Like RoboCop, the film is telling another story, of Arnold, who's supposed to be the hero, but ultimately decides at the end of the movie that it's the most awful thing that ever happened. The end scene is Voltairean, like Candide, saying, "Take care of your own garden," and the politics are over.

Is there any chance of reviving this?

The difficulty now is that Ridley Scott made Kingdom of Heaven, which was about the third crusade. Our film is about the first crusade. I'm not so sure that the studios at this moment, given the mixed results of Kingdom of Heaven, are dying to do another movie about the Crusades. That might be another five or six years.

Why do you still live in the United States?

It's the most interesting country in the world, with all that you can say against it. It's still where everything happens. It's influencing the whole world. Every step that's made by the United States has waves around the world. In Holland, I was bored to death by Dutch politics. The US is a fascinating country. Clearly, of course, in kind of an imperialist way. Hopefully, that won't go too far, because fascism is looming around the corner. But I strongly feel that, with all the horror that I feel when I open the newspaper, that it's still fascinating. I feel more existentially involved in the United States than I ever was in Holland.

Is there any room for you in the American film industry today at the budget level at which you worked before you left?

I have a slight hope that this movie, Black Book, will help convince American studios that they can trust me not to go over budget and not to only insist that I need a salary of $7 million and a budget of $100 or $200 million to make a movie.





After seeing Black Book, I was thinking that the McCarthy Era in the US might be the period that you could explore with the same tactility - pouring shit over people, as you do in Black Book, throwing the past in their faces. This could be an effective way of exploring that time for us.

In the past 10 years, I've been collecting as many books about that era as I can. It's not at the point where I have an outline, but I have been collecting all the shadows of the McCarthy time.ÊI feel that this is a highly interesting and illuminating American period.

Why did you want Black Book to have the directness, the tactility that it has? What does this say about your relation to the audience? How did you want it to hit the audience in Holland?

I wanted it to operate that way because it was true. I was describing a reality, and I didn't want to get away from that. I know that I'm sometimes provocative, and basically I never think too much about it - to my own detriment in certain cases like Spetters and Showgirls. I've always done it throughout my life. And the period I'm talking about in the film, this last half-year, was providing and commanding to do this.

In fact, if I could describe for you the reality of the prison scenes that I took out at the last moment because I thought it was too much, the situation that happened in Holland at that time, and the betrayals, were so much in-your-face when you dared to open the books to the right page, and I felt, being the person that I am, that I should not refuse that material, and just go for it. You could say that my resistance to openness and violence is probably less than that of the normal person after having written about the things that I saw in my youth. Growing up in a world of violence, violence is more normal to me than it is to people who have not lived in that area. I can only explain it that way. For the rest, I think you need a psychiatrist.

What cinema do you like now? What cinema that's happening now do you find yourself drawn to?

The South American cinema. The Latin American films that come from Mexico, and from Brazil. City of Godand Amores Perros. I feel a connection there because they are really going for a certain reality - they're bringing it to life, and they're representing it, while American cinema to a large degree has been dwelling in the fictional field. For the rest, I still admire American movies, so that's not gone.