Paul Ver­ho­even: ​‘Hol­ly­wood thinks audi­ences are stupid’

It’s been 10 long years since Paul Ver­ho­even last graced cin­e­ma screens with Black Book. That film marked a return to his native Nether­lands after a run of six US pro­duc­tions. Those films – begin­ning with Robo­Cop in 1987 and cul­mi­nat­ing in Hol­low Man 13 years lat­er – staked his place as the fore­most satirist of Amer­i­can cul­ture in com­mer­cial cin­e­ma, each film smug­gling a dirty bomb of sub­ver­sion into the multiplex.

After the wild suc­cess of Basic Instinct in 1992, Verhoeven’s next film, Show­girls, was greet­ed with out­right hos­til­i­ty. Now he’s back with his most slip­pery prospect to date, a French-lan­guage pro­duc­tion fea­tur­ing a career-best per­for­mance by Isabelle Hup­pert. We sat down with the film­mak­er to chat Elle, con­tro­ver­sy, satire and the good ​’ol US of A.

LWLies: Elle is adapt­ed from a nov­el by Philippe Djian, but the screen­writer is David Birke, who’s best known for his ser­i­al killer movies, Gacy and Dahmer.

Ver­ho­even: I didn’t know that. I met him with regards to anoth­er project that I’m still try­ing to make with the for­mer head of pro­duc­tion at Fox, a film noir. I worked with him from the last draft, final­is­ing the script, and although we nev­er made that movie, I thought he was very tal­ent­ed. I didn’t know about his for­mer career, I based every­thing on the work we did on this thriller, called Rogue. When I thought about turn­ing Elle into an Amer­i­can movie, I imme­di­ate­ly thought of him.

Did the screen­play go through many changes once you got your hands on it?

Not real­ly. I mean, you always make small changes and refine things, if a scene is a bit too long or too short, but the first draft was 90 per cent of what the film is now.

Huppert’s Michèle is a video game designer…

Well, David Birke knows every­thing about video games! In the book, she’s the head of a com­pa­ny that pro­duces scripts for tele­vi­sion and film. I thought it wasn’t very visu­al to talk about screen­plays on film, it’d be bor­ing, just talk, talk, talk. The idea came from my daugh­ter while we were hav­ing din­ner, she said I should make her the head of a video game com­pa­ny. I didn’t know any­thing about video games at all, but David did. Video games work as a per­fect metaphor for com­plic­i­ty in screen vio­lence, you even have Michèle say about the game she’s devel­op­ing, ​‘When the play­er guts an Orc, he has to feel the blood on his hands.’ I don’t think I thought that much about it. I didn’t know any­thing about video games, my oth­er daughter’s hus­band had to explain them to me. I just put the idea to David, and he said, ​‘Great’. He knows the lan­guage. I didn’t think – per­haps he did – about com­plic­i­ty in vio­lence, I just thought, ​‘That’s visual’.

The film also takes some hilar­i­ous swipes at social niceties and mid­dle class pretensions.

A lot of that comes from David.

But with your Amer­i­can films seen as satires of Amer­i­can soci­ety, did you intend Elle as a skew­er­ing of the French mid­dle class?

Nope. I mean, it turned out that way. The ironies in cer­tain scenes came on the set, I think. I’d be lying if I said I fore­saw that, or that I was real­ly try­ing to do that. Per­haps I did, but that came from the book. Nei­ther did I think when I was doing Star­ship Troop­ers that I was try­ing to express some­thing very spe­cif­ic about Amer­i­can soci­ety. When we were work­ing on that film, we were laugh­ing all the time because of ele­ments we picked from real­i­ty and made much big­ger in the movie. It’s only in ret­ro­spect that I see we were fight­ing against the book by Robert Hein­lein, which is pret­ty mil­i­taris­tic and pro­to-fas­cist. I dis­agreed with that, so we were try­ing to counter that in the irony of how these peo­ple are, what the news is and how the news is pre­sent­ed. It all hap­pened in a very organ­ic way, we didn’t sit down and say we’re going to make an iron­ic ver­sion of this book. We didn’t even talk about irony, we just invent­ed scenes and found our­selves laugh­ing all the time.

Didn’t you take spe­cif­ic shots from Tri­umph of the Will? That must have been meant iron­i­cal­ly, no?

It was our way of coun­ter­ing Robert Hein­lein by going fur­ther than him. These peo­ple are Nazis, so we gave them Nazi cos­tumes and took shots from Leni Riefenstahl’s movies. We were say­ing, ​‘These are our heroes, but they’re liv­ing in a fas­cist utopia.’ What comes out of mak­ing a movie can have more depth in ret­ro­spect than you real­ly thought while you were doing it. There are, of course, ele­ments in your brain that do these things while you’re not aware of it. You can read all these things into it after­wards, but it’s good that you’re not think­ing about them while you’re doing it, oth­er­wise you’re going to preach. Intrin­si­cal­ly it’s a com­men­tary on Amer­i­can soci­ety, where every­one has a gun, but while we were mak­ing it, we weren’t think­ing of it as a crit­i­cal study of the Unit­ed States, we were just laugh­ing at our ideas.

Do you think Trump’s Amer­i­ca has moved beyond satire, or is it more nec­es­sary than ever?

We don’t know if it’s Trump’s Amer­i­ca. We hope it’s not. You couldn’t get a green-light on that movie today, cer­tain­ly the way we made it. If you took all that stuff out, like they did with the remakes of Robo­Cop and Total Recall, you’d be tak­ing out all the ambi­gu­i­ty, satire and irony. Straight, that’s what they want now. They think audi­ences are so stu­pid that they can’t han­dle anoth­er layer.

There were expec­ta­tions of a lot of con­tro­ver­sy over Elle after it played at Cannes, but that doesn’t seem to have materialised.

Every­body was warn­ing me that it was going to be very con­tro­ver­sial, but I’ve not noticed any­thing. Per­haps it’ll hap­pen in the US, but there was no prob­lem in Toron­to or Cannes.

There was a much greater out­cry over the rape scenes in Basic Instinct and Hol­low Man. Do you think that’s a ques­tion of con­text or the way you shot the scenes?

It could well be that this is more artis­tic. If you want to use that word. If we’d made this movie in the Unit­ed States, it would have been very con­tro­ver­sial. It would have been flat­ter, more direct, more banal. Here we get to add more lay­ers, and an actress like Isabelle Hup­pert who real­ly believes in the part. There’s a dif­fer­ence between artis­tic and just well made. I mean, I think Star­ship Troop­ers is artis­tic too. There’s no way we would have reached this lev­el of authen­tic­i­ty or ​‘art’ if we’d made Elle in the US.

When you were speak­ing in Cannes of the Amer­i­can actress­es who wouldn’t take the part, you said they wouldn’t go near such an amoral script. But Elle isn’t real­ly amoral, it’s not pre­sent­ed in moral terms.

I would express it more pre­cise­ly in that they were offend­ed by the third act. It’s real­ly her going to start an affair with her rapist, going into a sado­masochis­tic rela­tion­ship. That was unac­cept­able to Amer­i­can actress­es who only want­ed to see a third act about revenge. In the Amer­i­can ver­sion, the first two acts would have been the same, you wouldn’t have lost much there, but the moment she dis­cov­ers who the rapist is, Amer­i­can cin­e­ma and phi­los­o­phy dic­tates it would have to be a revenge movie. The film goes in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion, it’s real­ly, ​‘love your enemy.’

The tide is slow­ly turn­ing on appraisals of one of our favourite films of yours. Why do you think it’s tak­en so long for peo­ple to realise that Show­girls is a fuck­ing masterpiece?

I dun­no, too many tits? To talk in the lan­guage of that movie, it’s tits and ass all the time. I think it was too much for every­body. It’s a very neg­a­tive, cyn­i­cal movie. Sex is mon­ey and mon­ey is sex. It was a com­plete­ly neg­a­tive state­ment. On top of that, you could see it as an attack, not just on Vegas, but on the US in gen­er­al. Every­thing is about mon­ey. So it cre­at­ed an unpleas­ant feel­ing, and the abun­dance of nudi­ty made peo­ple feel very uncom­fort­able. I remem­ber when I was work­ing on the Jesus sem­i­nar, half a year after Show­girls came out, two of the pro­fes­sors came to me and whis­pered, ​‘We loved Show­girls!’ That was how peo­ple told me they liked it. It wasn’t like that with Robo­Cop, but that was less perverted.

Per­haps Jesus sem­i­nar­i­ans are the peo­ple that most need a lit­tle Show­girls in their life.

That may well be true. They were real­ly look­ing around to make sure nobody heard them. At the time, there were reviews of the film that said they didn’t even watch the sec­ond half of the movie because they had to go to the toi­let to throw up. Nor­mal reviews were like that. The New York Times wrote, ​‘This man will nev­er under­stand the Unit­ed States.’ Which you could say was xeno­pho­bic, per­haps. Or maybe I under­stand the Unit­ed States bet­ter than they do.