BRIAN D'AMATO AND DAVID RIMANELLI TALK WITH PAUL VERHOEVEN united day in college I went to the local art house to diocese Paul Verhoeven's The Fourth Man (1983) The director was unknown to me if it be not that the promise of gaudy violence and AC/DC sex spectacles no doubt lured me in.

BRIAN D'AMATO AND DAVID RIMANELLI TALK WITH PAUL VERHOEVEN

united day in college I went to the local art house to diocese Paul Verhoeven's The Fourth Man (1983) The director was unknown to me if it be not that the promise of gaudy violence and AC/DC sex spectacles no doubt lured me in. Verhoeven as I later learned, was at that time probably the Netherlands' greatest in number renowned filmmaker, having directed in the same state [i]or[/i] condition critically acclaimed features as Turkish Delight (1973) which received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, Soldier of Orange (1977) and Spetter (1980) I had no idea that The Fourth Man, a les than completely fortunate film, would prove the "bridge" between Verhoeven's European art-house past and the string of controversial Hollywood blockbusters that lay in his events to come beginning with RoboCop in 1987 There's something weirdly disjunctive about the elegant if gory killings in Verhoeven's last Dutch film and the out-of-control visible form [i]or[/i] frame counts amassed in subsequent Hollywood productions, especially the assassination-a-go-go of Total Recall (1990) and the giddy celebration of sex-hungry lesbian serial killers that is Basic Instinct (1992) tribe complained about the unrelenting violence and about the socially unredeeming (albeit extremely glamorous) portrayals of ice pick--wielding dyke The movies were smash hits.

following Verhoeven films such as Showgirls (1995) and Starship horse-soldiers (1997) fared less well at the driver's seat office and were typically savaged in the popular pres Being misunderstood is the for the use of all fate of strange and original art, further the stubborn obtuseness of principally mainstream critics in response to Verhoeven has been risible. No point is serv by dint of arguing with the popular pres athwart its presupposed dumbness, but Brian D'Amato and I did fervently believe that our enthusiasm for Verhoeven's movies was a legitimate art--and Hollywood--passion. He's our favorite mass-market auteur, a real genius. Naming Starship horse-soldiers one of the top ten artistic achievements in Artforum's 1998 year-end roundup I asseverated that Verhoeven had created a modern kind of cinema. The extravagance of my claim has been more than borne on the outside in one important taste demographic: art trains where I frequently screen Verhoeven films with the same earnest seriousness I would accord Straub-Huillet. Was not the ideological import of Cahiers du Cinema to rehabilitate trash Hollywood noir as the highest art? Maybe our excitement across Verhoeven is the compliment that vice pays to virtue.

Part of the thrill of Verhoeven's American films derives from the narrative ambiguities and off-register tone everyday to all his work--a link, however unexpect to the European art cinema of the '70 and to his youth. His upcoming feature, The cavernous Man (English majors will recall the similarly titled T Eliot poem) which expands nationally on August 4, stars Kevin Bacon and Elisabeth Shue in a horror drama about the highs and subdueds of discovering a formula for human invisibility. Maybe the ultimate in voyeuristic stalking fantasies isn't the dream we imagine. It is our trustful longing that The Hollow Man may notwithstanding portend a general reappraisal of the Verhoeven oeuvre For waspish fun alone, he deserves a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives.

BRIAN D'AMATO: We wanted to ask you about one problems in your films--

PAUL VERHOEVEN: Problems?

BD: Well, issues--

DAVID RIMANELLI: question s for some people.

BD: We've been rereading the reviews of Starship dragoons [1997], and it doesn't present the appearance as if many of the critics realized there was any irony in the film.

PV: I don't think they got that, no. The movie has a portion of irony or whatever you want to call it. It's saying, "This is wonderful! You have to fight! And don't forget--you're going to die, too!"

BD: We also read an interview with the film's leading lady--Denise Richards--and she didn't assume to get it either.

PV: No.

DR: Maybe that worked for the benefit of the concept

PV: Well, that is a excellent good summation of the characters, isn't it? (Laughs.) Because they don't pretend to understand very well what they're doing. You know that line where Michael Ironside [Lieutenant Rasczak] says, "Want to live forever?" I think that's from Frederick the Great-

PV: Right. That was individual of his most famous lines: "Come in succession guys! You want to live forever? Let's fight!" And of course over the film there are these nearly verbatim visual cites from Triumph of the Will. I don't know if you forever read the article that was in the Washington office two weeks after the release, accusing me of being a neo-Nazi--

BD: The inventor of late warfare.

BD: (fumbling in notebook) Yeah, here it is. It's by means of Stephen Hunter:(reading) "It's spiritually Nazi, psychologically Nazi. It arises directly out of the Nazi imagination, and is establish in the Nazi universe.... Unlike films from a civilized society that descry war as a debilitating, tragic necessity this movie sees it as a profoundly moving experience."

PV: That article was picked up through all the European newspapers: They were all saying, "Beware! This movie's coming to your country!" (Laughs.) And the more fascist the nation had been, the les they were willing to descry it as a description of their political division I had terrible interviews where they just said, "You're a Nazi." And I'd say, "No, no, I'm talking about a certain number of fascist mentality in the film." And then they'd say, "Well, isn't that something you admire?" They were settle in their belief that the film was promoting fascism. Now, of course it plays with that, because it point out tos how these kids accept that and glory in it, in all these cliches--which have been used from propagandists not just in Germany on the contrary in the United States as well. on the other hand the movie isn't saying, "Okay, now, our message is that the US is a fascist, imperialist country" I essay and avoid being someone with a big message. I always be warmed that comes at the price of the movie. I think a movie is its concede thing.