Paul Verhoeven (born 18 July 1938 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch film director, probably best known for his international works made in the United States. His films (particularly his sci-fi outings) are typically brutally violent, satirical, and often contain heavy sexual themes.
He is often regarded as one of the best film directors in The Netherlands, and certainly one of the most notable—having won various Golden Calves (the highest award in the national film award ceremony) for his contributions to Dutch cinema. He was a frequent collaborator of the late Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, mostly before Hauer started working in Hollywood.
Verhoeven was born before the onset of World War II and the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, which shaped his outlook on life. After completing the film academy, he started out small in the film community before moving on to full-length features. In the late 1960s, he directed Floris, a TV series about a 16th century Knight Errant that aired on Dutch public TV. In the 1970s he cooperated with producer Rob Houwer on several highly acclaimed Dutch movies such as the erotic/romantic drama Turks Fruit (Turkish Delight) and the World War II epic Soldaat van Oranje (Soldier of Orange).
In the 1980s he branched out into making English-language films, starting with Flesh+Blood (1985). Since then he has became best known to American audiences for his sci-fi action films, although he admits not being a fan of the genre. He became attached to direct the script for the first RoboCop (1987) movie after initially rejecting it. His wife eventually convinced him that there was more to the story than he initially thought (drawing parallels to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ), and he liked the extreme violence. The film proved a major hit that helped jumpstart the Super Hero film genre, while also being hailed as a brilliant Black Comedy satire of 1980s America.
This was followed up three years later by Total Recall (1990), an adaptation of noted sci-fi author Philip K. Dick's story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale about a man who finds out his life is a lie and heads to Mars to learn the truth, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the main role.
His work on the 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct reunited him with Sharon Stone, who had played a smaller role in Total Recall, and started a short period of working with screenwriter Joe Ezterhas. The film was partially a remake of his 1983 Dutch movie De Vierde Man (The Fourth Man), and was controversial in the States, with feminist and gay rights groups protesting against the film's alleged misogyny and homophobia, which puzzled Verhoeven. His career reached a low point in 1995 with the widely panned Showgirls, for which he won a Razzie for Worst Director. Showing that he's not a sore loser, Verhoeven collected the award in person, becoming the first director to do so. He claimed to have had more fun at the award ceremony than reading the reviews.
Verhoeven's last two American films, 1997's Starship Troopers and 2000's Hollow Man received mixed receptions. Fans of the Robert A. Heinlein novel considered the movie a betrayal of the source materialnote , while others appreciated it either as a straight-up action movie or for the satire of military sci-fi that it aimed to be.
His next cinematic effort in 2006 returned Verhoeven to his Dutch roots, to direct the World War II thriller Zwartboek (Black Book). It offers a morally grey account of the Dutch resistance during the last year of the war, with Carice Van Houten as an undercover Jew involved in the anti-German resistance. His 2016 film Elle was his first film in the French language and told the story of Michèle (Isabelle Huppert), a French businesswoman who is raped in her home and who stalks her attacker. By far the most critically acclaimed film of Verhoeven's career, it got a seven-minute standing ovation at Cannes (and was nominated for the Palme d'Or), is the French entry for the Best Foreign Language film at the 2017 Oscars, and has earned a bunch of awards, most of them for star Isabelle Huppert, who is a huge Verhoeven fan.
Despite being long dismissed in the English-speaking world as an uncomplicated "blockbuster" filmmaker, his Hollywood films have gotten considerable critical attention in recent years for subtly satirizing American culture's obsession with sex and violence—while also containing enough sex and violence to make them highly appealing to the same people whom they were intended to mock. This has led to Verhoeven developing something of a reputation as a master of Stealth Parody, known for delivering a peculiar breed of satire that straddles the line between straight-faced sincerity and abject mockery, yet still manages to entertain the portion of the audience that doesn't get the joke. Even Showgirls continues to inspire debates about whether it was supposed to be funny.
Filmography:
- Floris (1969)note
- Turkish Delight (1973)
- Keetje Tippel (1975)
- Soldier of Orange (1977)
- Spetters (1980)
- The Fourth Man (1983)
- Flesh+Blood (1985)
- RoboCop (1987)
- Total Recall (1990)
- Basic Instinct (1992)
- Showgirls (1995)
- Starship Troopers (1997)
- Hollow Man (2000)
- Black Book (2006)
- Elle (2016)
- Benedetta (2021)
This director's work provides examples of:
- Euroshlock: Most of his Dutch productions, the only major exceptions being Soldier of Orange and possibly Zwartboek.
- Fanservice: He has directed several films with strong erotic themes, and even his other works feature a lot of nudity. Notably, while filming the co-ed shower scene in Starship Troopers, several of the actors joked with Verhoeven that he should be naked as well. Verhoeven, being Dutch and thus much more casual about nudity than the nearly all-American cast, obliged and proceeded to direct the scene without a stitch on, along with the cameraman and director of photography.
- Gorn: His action films were excessively violent for their time. RoboCop (1987) in particular had to be re-edited for the scene where an OCP rookie exec is blasted to bits by the ED-209 robot in the conference room, and the use of Human Shields in Total Recall (1990) received a lot of complaints. This is referenced as part of a gag in Hot Shots! Part Deux where the body count of the Rambo spoof action scene increases until it surpasses both RoboCop and Total Recall. His use of this trope actually makes sense: Verhoeven grew up during the Nazi takeover of his home country of Holland in the onset of World War II, when he would walk to school at a very young age and come across decaying bodies of soldiers, fighter pilots and so on.
- Graceful Loser: As mentioned, he was the first director ever to have collected a Razzie award in person.
- Grand Finale: Starship Troopers almost effectively became this to his American film career, complete with gratuitous blood and action scenes and a sex scene. He ultimately went back to Europe after the flop of Hollow Man.
- Signature Style: You know it's a Paul Verhoeven movie when there's ridiculously over-the-top violence and long action sequences, slightly campy special effects, and lots of gratuitous nudity.
- Take That!: His film adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers was described by Bob Chipman as "without a doubt one of the most staggeringly mean-spirited things that an artist has ever done to another artist or their work", recasting a straightforward heroic sci-far war story as a brutal deconstruction where the human
"heroes" are brutal, unthinking, and very dumb fascists. Which is what you'd expect when you allow a director who nearly became "collateral damage" when he was a boy in WWII to adapt a story promoting the concept that War Is Glorious. Verhoeven himself admitted to only reading the first two chapters of the source material before he simply couldn't stomach any more of it.
Trivia about Verhoeven
- Author Appeal: Verhoeven has never been afraid of dark, complex and morally ambiguous women characters. Women characters in films of his that are written by Joe Eszterhas tend to be aversions, however: Catherine Tramell from Basic Instinct is unambiguously a murderous sociopath, while most of the women in Showgirls are almost ludicrously two-dimensional.
- Awesome, Dear Boy: This is part of the reason why he did the first RoboCop (1987). He initially rejected the opportunity to direct it when he read the script and thought it was silly and stupid. He changed his mind when his wife convinced him that there were more layers to the story than he initially thought, and because the writers pointed out the amount of Gorn there was, to which he responded "Well, I've never seen the hero get his hand blown off!"
- Flip-Flop of God: He has gone back and forth on the issue of whether the events of Total Recall (1990) were real or all in Quaid's mind. His position seems to depend on whether there are hopes of getting a sequel made at the time he is asked that question.
- He Also Did: He was a member of the Jesus Seminar, an international group of religious and Biblical scholars who studied the Gospels and tried to determine which parts actually reflected what they believed to be the "historical" Jesus (i.e. a mere peasant preacher in ancient Judea), and which parts were the later reinterpretations of Jesus as the son of God or God in human form (as the early Christians who compiled the Gospels viewed him). He even wrote a book about his views on the matter. A movie about his version of Jesus has been in Development Hell for some time too.
- Hitler Ate Sugar: His absolutely scathing treatment of Starship Troopers is built on the idea that nationalism, militarism and propaganda are all evil things because the Nazis used them, even though none of these concepts were invented by Nazi Germany by a long shot, and the Allied forces relied on these exact same things in their war effort to defeat the Axis powers.
- Hostility on the Set: Peter Weller's Method Acting (wanting to be addressed as "Murphy" or "Robo", depending on the scene, while on set) during the first few weeks of RoboCop (1987) resulted in annoying Verhoeven, and co-stars Kurtwood Smith (Clarence Boddicker) and Miguel Ferrer (Bob Morton). Verhoeven found it silly and told Weller he couldn't bring himself to indulge it, a middle ground between Smith's reaction (who simply chose to ignore Weller during that time) and Ferrer's (who actively ignored it and addressed Weller by his real name, anyway).
- Production Posse: Verhoeven's films up to and including his first American one, Flesh+Blood (1985), as well as the preceding Dutch TV series Floris and the later Dutch production Black Book, were all written by the Dutch screenwriter Gerard Soeteman. Also, Floris and many of his early films, including Turkish Delight, Soldier of Orange and Spetters, starred a young, pre-fame Rutger Hauer.
- Magnum Opus Dissonance: He has stated that science fiction is not his favourite genre. Ironically, some of his most popular movies, RoboCop (1987) (a film he almost turned down), Total Recall (1990) and Starship Troopers, are science fiction, while his American non-sci-fi movies are generally not as popular or well known with the exception of Basic Instinct.
- What Could Have Been: He planned to do a movie about The Crusades with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it didn't pan out.
