Paul Verhoeven

Look, it’s the right word, but it’s a little awkward that Wikipedia refers to Rutger Hauer as a “frequent collaborator” of Paul Verhoeven’s. That’s a bit of a knee-jerk word given that Verhoeven was born in Amsterdam in 1938. He actually spent part of his childhood down the street from a German rocket base, and his parents were nearly killed in Allied bombing attacks. This is Yet Another Reason People Should Really Know Starship Troopers Is Satire. Frankly, knowing basically anything about Verhoeven should be your first clue, but then he thought he’d made it so broad no one could possibly not notice, and here we all are.

Frankly, Verhoeven has spent at least as much of his career not getting things made as getting things made. He’s one of those directors who has a whole page of unrealized projects, including it turns out developing the initial idea that later became Disney’s Dinosaur. Verhoeven’s movie sounds much better, for the record. Spielberg suggested Verhoeven to direct Return of the Jedi, but Lucas was afraid Verhoeven would include explicit content, it seems, and the list just goes on from there and is deeply fascinating.

Americans mostly know him, as far as movies that did get made, for Robocop and Showgirls, and friends let’s talk about how weird a career that encompasses that is. Weirder once we include, say, Zwartboek, his film about the Dutch Resistance during World War II. He also made a series for Dutch television, starring Rutger Hauer, about an exiled knight and his “Indian” friend (presumably as in “from India,” but the actor was Dutch so how much does it matter?) trying to regain his birthright. Even the incomplete projects range from a planned Showgirls sequel called Bimbos to a movie about Jesus as an eschatalogical preacher in the background of Judean resistance to Rome.

Oh, also, Verhoeven’s got an Msc, or its Dutch equivalent, with a double major in math and physics. So, you know, there’s that. He’s one of those people where every detail you learn about him just serves to make him more interesting. He apparently believes in the existence of a historical Jesus who wasn’t divine, which would have been what his movie demonstrated, so surely that would have been perfectly noncontroversial and would have had no protests of any kind. And that’s relevant because he was the Token Famous Guy for the Jesus Seminar, a project that voted on the historicity of each line in the New Testament.

I mean, you don’t have to know all this to just like Basic Instinct or Total Recall. He’s a fascinating man in no small part because it’s possible to watch some of his movies without engaging your brain and requiring deep thought to get into others. Maybe it’s something about surviving World War II in Europe; I can’t help mentally comparing him to Werner Herzog, admittedly born on the opposite side of the war. But they are both fascinating men with complex careers and histories, and I’d buy that for a dollar.