Staying alive

>> Paul Verhoeven on moral ambiguity,
the Dutch underground, lesbian dogs
and his new WWII thriller Black Book

by MATTHEW HAYS

As Paul Verhoeven explains it, a change had been needed for some time. His Hollywood career—six feature films that had made him a household name—had been running on empty for at least one feature. That would be Hollow Man (2000), his Invisible Man riff that left him downright, well, hollow.

After that, Verhoeven, the man behind such landmark, boundary-pushing films as RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Basic Instinct (1992), Showgirls (1995) and Starship Troopers (1997) headed back to his native Holland to regroup. And now, seven years after his last feature, Verhoeven has performed a trick that appears surprising, even by this director’s standards: his latest is Black Book (Zwartboek), a Dutch-language, two-and-a-half-hour epic about betrayal and dire double-crossings in WWII Holland, a film that challenges the popular theory that the entire Dutch population were virtuous Nazi haters who hid their Jews (à la Diary of Anne Frank). Instead, Verhoeven indicates, the Holland he grew up in was a vast grey zone, a place where the Dutch were as capable as any Nazi of committing hate crimes connected to genocide.

Black Book recounts the tale of a Jewish chanteuse (Carice van Houten) who bleaches her hair (pubic hair included) blonde in an effort to pass for gentile, trying to go under the radar, while also joining the Dutch resistance. So adept at using her feminine wiles to get what she wants, van Houten is soon given the crucial task of infiltrating Nazi headquarters; there, she falls for a sympathetic Nazi officer (Sebastian Koch). As the two navigate their way though a series of double crossings and near misses, they find that nothing within the resistance—nor within the Nazi ranks—is precisely how it first seemed.

At first, this inspired-by-a-true-story film seems rather strange turf for Verhoeven to be entering. And his timing is odd: this period in WWII and the Holocaust have now been given the cinematic treatment extensively, from Spielberg to Costa-Gavras to Polanski, not to mention the huge numbers of documentaries on said subjects. But Verhoeven—who toyed with fascist iconography before in Starship Troopers—has his own take on the period.

“I felt this had not been done,” he says, on the line from Los Angeles. “The Holocaust is symbolically there, in that we see the killing of her parents. But this has much more to do with the corruption that was inside the German army and the Dutch resistance. In the last two years of WWII, the Dutch and Germans knew the allies had won. There was tremendous greed and betrayal, double crossings and secret agendas. It’s more about the shadowy aspects of the War itself.”

Shadowy is right: on this front, Black Book seems perfectly Verhoevian. Here is a filmmaker whose basic hallmark has been ambiguity. This is a director obsessed with grey areas, and this is his bit of grey history. “I think you’re right, and that’s one of the reasons I was drawn to telling this story. Total Recall is ambiguous in a more philosophical way. What is the reality in that movie? Basic Instinct is ambiguous in that you don’t know who the killer is. Here, the ambiguity is in the characters. Are they good or bad? The people who are supposed to be mean and dirty often turn out to be human, and the characters who are supposed to be good turn out to be rotten.”

But Verhoeven might not get into trouble for taking on the Dutch resistance—his stylistic choices create a strange tension in Black Book. These are serious themes, of course, but here they are given an almost comic-book veneer, with brightly-coloured art direction, over-the-top characters and borderline-ludicrous plot twists driving the narrative. This has led some to suggest that Verhoeven has fused European filmmaking style with Hollywood storytelling technique.

“I don’t think I’ve done that consciously, but I can see why people would say it. Making six movies in America made me quite aware that American cinema is rarely as thoughtful as European cinema. There’s no narrative driving a lot of European cinema—it’s more like a series of big paintings. Take a look at La Dolce Vita; the central character is a man who becomes a gossip columnist—he never reaches his goal of becoming a more serious journalist. That’s the story, but it’s snowed under by the incredible filmmaking of Fellini. In European cinema, not having a strong narrative is actually okay. But American cinema, the narrative is everything. You have to have three strong acts.”

As Verhoeven fans will expect, there are some sexually titillating scenes included. (How could he resist a copulation-with-Nazi-officer sequence?) “The sex scenes are important, but only when they’re a part of the story. If you look at Match Point, there are sex scenes there. It’s natural to have those scenes in Basic Instinct, because it’s a movie about a woman who’s obsessed with killing men during sex. So it’s part of the story. If you look at Total Recall, or RoboCop or Starship Troopers, the sex isn’t such a big part of it. It’s only because of Basic Instinct and Showgirls that people think of me that way.”

Certainly, much of Verhoeven’s oeuvre has also been marked as queer. Despite heterosexual habits in his personal life, his obsession with artifice, his penchant for operatic camp and his risqué sexual representations have left his work with a legion of gay fans. Verhoeven attributes part of this to his household pets: “I think it’s probably because when I look at my dogs, they are both female, but they get confused. They jump on top of each other, like one is male. So there’s a lot of confusion there.

“But seriously, I think it comes from reading a lot, and thinking about the possibilities of sex. I’m also living in Amsterdam, where there are a lot of openly gay people. Being gay or lesbian is natural—we’ve known that for a long time in Amsterdam.”

Verhoeven’s boundary pushing will touch audiences in different ways. At times, the comic-book aura surrounding Black Book seems at odds with its moral ambiguity. But this is precisely what has made Verhoeven’s style so intensely intriguing over the years. He has proven the most self-conscious of a generation of self-conscious filmmakers, constantly creating movies that are open to a range of different interpretations, and which offer a series of open questions: what were the director’s intentions? Who is he expecting us to side with? And in what direction is the filmmaker’s moral compass pointing?

Which prompts the question: does Verhoeven ever worry about how his films are being interpreted? “I never worry about it while I’m making the film, just when I read the reviews later. But seriously, I don’t worry about it, because I don’t want to censor myself. It’s not up to me, and it shouldn’t be, to protect the film against false interpretations. I try to make the movie I want to make, and then let the results speak for themselves. In many cases it’s fine, and in others—in particular Showgirls and Starship Troopers—some people see it in another way.

“I think you should take the risk of being attacked or demolished. Perhaps your career will be in jeopardy, but you should risk that. It’s so important for me to do the movie that I want to do. I have to simply say that I don’t care what people are going to say about it.”

OPEN TO INTERPRETATION: Verhoeven

Black Book opens Friday, May 18

Verboten Verhoeven

BISEXUAL KILLER QUEEN: Basic Instinct and its sequel

Over his brilliant career, Paul Verhoeven has directed a series of controversial films. In fact, his 1983 movie, The Fourth Man, featured its protagonist sitting in church, fantasizing about fellating Jesus on the cross. Here is the filmmaker in his own words on a few of our favourite Verhoeven moments.

Basic Instinct. Gay and lesbian activists attempted to shut down the shoot of this movie, after they heard the script involved a bisexual murderess. Loud protests led to court injunctions to keep the protestors at least 100 yards away. “I thought it was funny,” says Verhoeven. “I knew it was preposterous. [Screenwriter] Joe Eszterhas and I met with them before the shoot, and these activists said I was homophobic. I asked if they’d seen The Fourth Man. They said they weren’t interested. They were completely closed about it.”

Showgirls. Did Verhoeven really intend this as a serious exposé of the lives of Vegas showgirls? “Yes, but in a hyperbolic style. It’s the only American movie I ever researched. Joe Eszterhas and I based that film on over 50 interviews—we spent months researching. It’s over the top in every sense. In the pool scene, in the background we lit the palm trees with neon. We were trying to heighten everything.” Did you intend it as camp? “I don’t know what camp is, really. If I said that, it would be a lie. I didn’t really know that word before. If it’s camp, it’s my own camp. I would use the term hyperbolic, in its excesses, in its own effort to push everything to the limit. It’s one of my only films that I really enjoy watching again. People laugh when I say this, but it’s a very elegant movie.”

Basic Instinct 2. Verhoeven didn’t direct this misguided 2006 sequel, of course. But did he like it? “No, for the very same reason I didn’t do it. I talked to the writers and to Sharon about it, but I always said that you need someone to star opposite her who is as strong as Michael Douglas was. We’re talking an A-list actor, and that would have cost them $20 million. They didn’t want to pay that—and I couldn’t do it, because I didn’t believe in it.”

Starship Troopers. Some couldn’t quite make out this sci-fi feature: was it Verhoeven’s dissection of a fascist mentality, or a frat-boy salute to going to war for love of country (or planet)? The intentional double-play led Entertainment Weekly to forgo its usual letter-grade for its review, finding the film so politically troubling that it simply declined to assign it a rating. “I got completely inside the mentality of the characters. The film was about a war mentality. It’s about people who’ve become caught up in this propaganda machine. I think the movie has become much more understandable in light of the war in Iraq. It criticizes America, in a playful way, for its fascist possibilities. In this fascist Utopia, how would they make people go along with war? The Americans went along with a war that was based on fantasy. The neo-cons now are the neo-fascists in the movie. And it’s alarming to think back to the way they torture the creatures in the film—that’s precisely what they ended up doing in Iraq.”

- M.H.

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