

Would you trust the man who brought us Showgirls and RoboCop to make a film about the betrayal and murder of Dutch Jews in the second world war? Director Paul Verhoeven talks to Stuart Jeffries
Paul Verhoeven
'I quite like shocking people'... Paul Verhoeven. Photograph: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty

'Some Dutch critics have said that my film is superficial, perverted, decadent," says Paul Verhoeven as he slathers bread with pâté in De Posthoorn, a pleasant cafe in The Hague. "Ach!" he says, shrugging his shoulders and filling his mouth. "Don't they know I have heard these criticisms before? It was the same for me in Hollywood, isn't it?"

  1. Black Book (Zwartboek)
  2. Production year: 2006
  3. Country: Rest of the world
  4. Cert (UK): 15
  5. Runtime: 135 mins
  6. Directors: Paul Verhoeven
  7. Cast: Carice van Houten, Derek de Lint, Halina Reijn, Sebastian Koch
  8. More on this film

Verhoeven, for all his years in Hollywood, can't help saying "isn't it?" every two minutes. The sweet ghost of a Dutch idiom haunts much of what he says during the two hours I spend in his engaging company. It proves hard not to like, isn't it?

But what Verhoeven says is true. His Hollywood years were filled with critical roastings that would have made weaker men give up the movies. This is the man who made Showgirls (1996), which Variety called "impossibly vulgar, tawdry and coarse ... akin to being keelhauled in a cesspool". "After that they would only let me direct science fiction," says Verhoeven, "not normal films - if you can call Showgirls normal."

This is the director of Basic Instinct (1992), a picture summed up by the Washington Post as a "sleekly made skin-flick, an extended Hustler magazine fantasy whose heroine isn't a little butch, she's metaphorically male".

In Basic Instinct, Verhoeven created some of the most seamily memorable images in recent cinema (Sharon Stone seductively crossing and uncrossing her legs before Michael Douglas and a roomful of drooling coppers) and got slapped by his leading lady for doing so.

This is the man whose Hollywood career seems to have come to an end with Hollow Man (2000), a sci-fi picture with terrific special effects damned by critic Roger Ebert's faint praise: "At some kind of mechanical level I suppose the movie works." Verhoeven himself said: "After Hollow Man, I felt as empty as the movie was."

Verhoeven says his Hollywood career was stymied not just by the big boob that was Showgirls, but because of the collapse of independent studios such as Orion that allowed him to work relatively freely. "Their only demand was that I would accept the actor they had chosen. They would contact the actor - say Arnold [Schwarzenegger] in Total Recall, or Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct - themselves and he would be aboard before me. After that I was free. But when these companies went bankrupt, I realised I had nowhere to go. I hadn't made a really solid network of actors or been to enough networking parties. I had forgotten to do that."

To be fair, Verhoeven is also the director of three of the most thrilling sci-fi films ever made - RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990) and Starship Troopers (1997). But, really, is this the guy who you'd want to helm a film that deals with such sensitive matters as the murders of Dutch Jews during the second world war or to explore the vexed question of the allegedly inhuman postwar treatment of Dutch people who collaborated with Nazis? Many Dutch people believe it is. One million of them have seen Verhoeven's wartime thriller Black Book since its release last September. There are only 16m Dutch people. "That's nearly as many as saw Pirates of the Caribbean, isn't it?" says Verhoeven. And at the Dutch film awards last year, the picture scooped a clutch (maybe that should be herd) of Golden Calves.

"People have called it a comeback," says Verhoeven, who had a career in the Netherlands before he was sucked into Hollywood's orbit. "I don't know if that is the right description, perhaps it is. But at least I have come back to myself. That's what I felt when I made this film." Not since 1973 has Verhoeven been so successful with a Dutch-language film.

As if to clinch the point about Verhoeven's triumphant homecoming, halfway through the interview, a stranger comes up to our table and says something in Dutch. Verhoeven translates: "He just said: 'You are one of the few people in Holland I am proud of.'"

What is making Dutch people proud - and go to the pictures - is that Black Book is a populist thriller about an episode in Holland's history that makes Verhoeven's countrymen and women seem not so much like the relaxed sexually liberated funsters of myth, but a people as capable of venality as everybody else. "There have been no complaints about what the film says about the resistance or what we did to the Jews, because everyone knows it's the truth. People would get 10 guilders (or five euros) for telling where a Jew was," says Verhoeven. "Some people in the resistance and the police did that. Everything was there: there were people who didn't care about the Jews, people who wanted to help, people who sold them to the Nazis, and people who really refused - like anywhere, isn't it? Statistically the Dutch had the highest percentage of Jewish people who were led away. You can't say there was an enormous effort by the Dutch to do anything about it." Only 30,000 of the 140,000 Dutch Jews survived the war. "They were mostly dead before my film starts. Black Book starts in late 1944, but they were mostly dead by 1943. Only a few survived longer - Anne Frank, for example, was arrested in the spring of 1944."

Black Book takes place in the months before and immediately after the collapse of Nazi occupation. It focuses on Rachel Steinn, a beautiful Jewish revue singer eluding the Germans after she sees her family slain by a Nazi patrol boat as they try to escape to Allied territory. She joins the Resistance in The Hague and then falls for the Nazi she is assigned to seduce. Like you do. Indeed the film's aesthetic and ethical choices might make some queasy.


Verhoeven's brash blockbuster sensibility and his trademark fondness for cinematic sex and violence are deployed heavily in Black Book, an approach that made critics brand him perverted. "Of course there are nude scenes," he announces loudly across De Posthoorn. "I'm Dutch!"

There is even an homage to that scene in Basic Instinct, when Rachel dyes her pubic hair blonde so as not to arouse Nazi suspicions. And then, as Verhoeven holds the crotch shot much longer than he would have been allowed to do in Hollywood, an aroused resistance fighter moves in to fondle her breasts.

Promoting the film in Israel recently, Verhoeven was asked how he felt about connecting the Holocaust with sexual pornography. "I had a hard time understanding the question. In any case, my film isn't really about the Holocaust. So I asked the interviewer if he believed the premise and he said no." Understandably: after all, what Verhoeven has done is to make a wartime thriller with a Jewish heroine; Black Book is hardly The Night Porter.

"But my film is controversial in Jerusalem because I do not believe the Holocaust was a sacred singularity and I have no problem linking the story of a Jew during war with sex or with the history of the Resistance. The Holocaust for me was a fact in history, a terrible fact, but a fact all the same."

What moral vision do you bring to this historical material? "We all should realise that we live in an extremely violent universe, isn't it?" replies Verhoeven. "If you look at the sky with the Hubble telescope, you will see galaxies hitting each other. Just think of the amount of life that every moment is being destroyed. It is basically our destiny to be destroyed. So before you say the Nazis are bad, you have to say the whole universe is full of violence, isn't it?"

One of the film's chief allegations is that the Dutch treated presumed wartime collaborators as contemptibly as the Nazis treated Jews, and Verhoeven says he found the evidence that they did in Dutch official archives in 1967. In the picture, there is a scene in which presumed Nazi collaborators incarcerated in the Scheveningen prison are humiliated by Dutch guards and day trippers. "On Sundays if you paid a couple of guilders, you could come and humiliate them," says Verhoeven. "What they would normally do is throw bottles on the floor and make the prisoners walk through the glass. It was in the script but I took it out because I thought it was too much."

Was it hard to believe the Dutch could do such things? "Yes, I felt amazement and disgust and anger. How was it possible that we behaved as bad as the Nazis? If you look at the pictures, you wouldn't have wanted to be at their mercy."

The story of Black Book was personal for Verhoeven. He was born in 1938 and brought up in The Hague during the war. He and his childhood friend Gerard Soeteman, his scriptwriter, dreamed of making Black Book for several decades to dramatise what happened when they were too young to fully understand it. Most of the characters, he says, are based on real people. The Nazi lover, for example, is based on the head of the intelligence arm of the SS in The Hague. "He was a pretty OK German who was trying to prevent further bloodshed. Because the Resistance was shooting any soldier they saw. It felt like Baghdad a little bit. The Germans would retaliate. They would take 10 or 15 political prisoners to the point where a German was killed and they would kill them. Then they would force the Dutch people to look at the bodies, to scare them. I remember this happening on a street near my house. I saw a lot of bodies when I was a kid. The OK German thought this was mad, especially because the war was nearly over. So he tried, as I show in the film, to broker a deal with the resistance to stop the killing."

Could you have made this film in Hollywood? "I don't think so. They would have toned it down. They might have even thought this treatment of prisoners after the war - which is a little bit Abu Ghraiby, isn't it? - is too much and cut it out. Hollywood would have diminished the dangerous things, they would have tried to avoid possible protests from the beginning and make other people more heroic to balance things out. The way I did it is, in my opinion, pretty European. It isn't trying to create ultimate heroes, although I still feel that the girl is pretty heroic."

Black Book has been nominated for the best foreign language Oscar: winning it might reopen doors double-locked and bolted against the maverick Dutchman. Would you like to work in Hollywood again? "I would say I go where the best script is. My trip to Europe was partly provoked by trying to get away from science fiction."

Verhoeven's recent years have been littered with projects that never quite got off the ground. For ages he planned to do a film about Hitler's rise. There is a script about the first crusade. "Arnold has it. Maybe when he has finished as governor he might want to be in it, or maybe produce it. But Ridley Scott may have ruined it for me because of Kingdom of Heaven. In Hollywood if you make a movie that's not so good in a particular genre, then that genre is verboten for 10 years. So probably no crusades picture with Arnold for a while."

Instead, he hopes this year to start filming an adaptation of Boris Akunin's Russian detective novel The Winter Queen, set in 19th century St Petersburg. While he waits for the film's forbiddingly complex Euro-financing to be put in place, Verhoeven is writing a book about Jesus. "I treat him as a normal man and debunk the myths that surround him. The resurrection? Couldn't happen. Virgin birth? Couldn't happen. I bring my respect for science and historical fact to bear on this myth.

"I want to make a movie using my research on this, but my friends said: 'Don't do that. They will shoot you in the US.' So I'm writing the book, which may be less risky." A worried look flits across Verhoeven's face. "Of course, they might shoot me for even writing the book." That would be unfortunate. "Yes it would. I quite like shocking people, but I don't want to be shot dead just yet, isn't it?"

· Black Book is released next Friday. The film will be previewed, as part of a fortnight retrospective of Verhoeven's work, on Sunday at the ICA, London. Tickets and details: 020-7930 3647

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