Credit: Georges Biard
There are quite a few directors working in Hollywood who are willing to push the boundaries a bit, but few are quite as ‘genuinely could not give a fuck’ as the Dutch mentalist Paul Verhoeven has been for more than 50 years now.
Long before the likes of Lars von Trier and Gaspar Noé were making audiences drop their bacon sandwiches in shock, Verhoeven was doing his level best to upset the film censors, and not in low-budget art house films, but in actual, proper Hollywood productions intended to be shown on the biggest screens possible.
He is, and has always been, of the opinion that there’s no point making movies unless they’re provocative in some way, and he set out doing that right out of the gate as far back as his Academy Award-winning 1973 movie Turkish Delight, which was not solely about those tasty little chocolate bars full of jelly which may lead you to sell out your family to an ice queen, but in fact about a sculptor who has vivid dreams of ambushing and murdering strangers.
A mixture of sex, death, car crashes and brain tumours, the movie, which starred Blade Runner’s Rutger Hauer, marked Verhoeven out as not only a talent, but someone who was not afraid to put anything he liked onto celluloid. Hauer again starred in the Dutchman’s first English-language film, 1985’s Flesh and Blood, which was a similar mixture of carnal exploits and outright violence, but earned him a ticket to Hollywood and to make movies on a scale he’d never been able to before.
He certainly made the most of it, and set about directing films that would go down as classics of the era, first with the ludicrously cool and ultra-violent Robocop in 1987, and then in 1990 with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s unhinged sci-fi Total Recall, featuring three-boobed women, tiny alien despots living in bellies, robot taxi drivers, probes being pulled out of noses and people being boiled alive on the surface of Mars. Both those movies earned Academy Awards for special effects, and everyone wondered what Verhoeven would do next.
What he did was bring movie royalty Michael Douglas and a then B-movie actor Sharon Stone and put them together in a steamy, erotic ‘killer thriller’ that featured the most notorious leg-crossing scene in history and made a star out of Stone. 1992’s Basic Instinct would go on to make $353million at the box office on a budget of less than $50m, and by now Verhoeven was more than aware of what the public wanted: sex and violence, regardless of the order they came in.
He focused on the former in a big way when he made Showgirls three years later, a film that was critically panned, censors hated and that barely made any money, but was still one of the most discussed films of the decade and has gone on to achieve cult status.
Verhoeven actually pulled back from all the sex to make one of his better films in 1997, the bug-blasting satire Starship Troopers, but after he publicly regretted making his invisible man update Hollow Man in 2000, he left Hollywood and returned to his native Holland, where he stayed for several years.
By 2016, he was in discussions to make his first film in ten years, a psychological thriller with some incredibly dark subject material called Elle, but struggled to make it in Hollywood because so many American actors turned down the lead role due to the rape scene that was central to the film.
In the end, he relocated to France in order to get it made and cast the highly-regarded Isabelle Huppert as the main character, explaining, “There’s no problem in France. As a director, you can do what you want. I escaped to France because I couldn’t find anything that was, for me, challenging. Why bother, you know?”
It proved to be a very wise decision, as France put the movie forward to represent them at the Oscars, and Huppert was Academy Award-nominated for her performance, in addition to picking up a Golden Globe award.
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