25 November, 2005
By Geoffrey Macnab
Source: film.guardian.co.uk
Although the sun is shining, the cold is beginning to bite. The work is taking its toll on the 67-year-old director. Verhoeven left for Hollywood in the mid-1980s, where he made his name with ultra-violent flicks such as Robocop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers. In the US he is accustomed to huge budgets, but back in Europe and with only $20m (£11.6m) at his disposal, he is having to work quickly and cut corners. “I have had to abandon perfectionism and wanting every shot to be the ultimate shot,” he says in a break between set-ups. “I have had to go for a rougher style, use less takes and say, ‘Let’s move on.’ I would say it is organised chaos.” ‘The producers have set up a special hotline for anybody traumatised by the Nazi imagery’ … Paul Verhoeven (left), Michael Huisman and Carice van Houten filming Blackbook
Blackbook exposes a particularly uncomfortable moment in recent Dutch history: a period at the end of the second world war when the brutal occupation of the Netherlands by the Nazis fanned treachery, collaboration and anti-semitism. Verhoeven has been planning the project for more than 30 years. He conceived it before his other wartime film, Soldier of Orange, from 1977, and to make it he reunited with his former scriptwriting partner Gerard Soeteman, with whom he last collaborated on Flesh & Blood in 1985.
The pair have been collecting material to feed into their screenplay for many years. “There was a price on the head of a Jew of seven guilders 50,” Soeteman says. “Quite a lot of Dutch policemen earned a nice little sum each month by taking Jewish prisoners and handing them over to the Germans. If you read the newspapers now, everyone was a hero, wringing the necks of German soldiers. That was not the reality. People always say we helped a lot of Jews. That was not true. There were 140,000 Dutch Jews before 1940 and 110,000 of them were killed.”
Blackbook homes in on the story of Rachel, a beautiful young Jewish cabaret artist who has been in hiding for most of the war, but has been betrayed and now does not know who to trust. The script is a Hitchcock-style thriller, full of elaborate plot twists in which the lines between heroes and villains are continually blurred. “In this movie, everything has a shade of grey. There are no people who are completely good and no people who are completely bad. It’s like life. It’s not very Hollywoodian,” Verhoeven explains.
Many of the incidents seem far-fetched but the director insists they’re all based on real wartime occurrences. Rachel is partly inspired by Anne Frank and partly by a Jewish singer whose career ended during the Nazi era. Verhoeven being Verhoeven, there are sensationalist elements and even hints of Sharon Stone about the character (a scene, for instance, in which she dyes her pubic hair).
None the less, this is material with very personal resonance for its director. Verhoeven spent the last years of the war in the Hague, just a short bike ride away from where we’re now standing. Ask him about that era and he rattles off anecdotes about the bombing, the ruined houses, the dead people on the street. “Me and my father were walking home not far from here and we were forced to walk along beside the dead bodies of the hostages they had taken as reprisal out of the prison because a German officer had been killed,” Verhoeven points to the streets behind the square. “They took 10 or 15 people out of prison and they shot them. They were dead on the ground in the middle of the street.”
One day, he and his family were sitting eating and heard an explosion only to see their windows being blown on to the table. A close friend (later to work on several of Verhoeven’s Dutch films) was a Jewish girl who spent the war years in hiding. Unlike Anne Frank, she was not betrayed.
It isn’t just the killing, the hunger sticks in his mind, too. He offers a pathetic image of his father riding on his bicycle with wooden tyres, foraging for food, or trying to grow potatoes. “He’d come back with a little butter, a little this or a little that, and the three of us – my parents and me – would be dancing round the table.” As a child, Verhoeven was given the food while his parents went without. Even so, when he sees photographs of himself immediately after the war, he is always struck by how thin he looks. “But the story I am telling has nothing to do with my life as a child,” he insists. “It’s not that I put autobiographical details in the movie. I put autobiographical emotions in the movie.”
According to producer San Fu Maltha, Verhoeven’s reputation as a driven, uncompromising film-maker is fully deserved. “No matter what he does, he doesn’t do it for personal pleasure. It’s all for the good of the film. He does it to make a great film. He is always pushing, but he is also willing to find a solution – not so much a compromise but a solution. Don’t come to him with bullshit because it doesn’t work.”
Despite the demands Verhoeven places on his collaborators, most show an obvious affection for him. His lead actress, Carice van Houten, has the most gruelling role: one that entails being put alive in a coffin, hiding in freezing water, and being brutally humiliated by Dutch police who think she is a collaborator. “We did some very hard scenes with 200 litres of pigshit,” Van Houten says between shots. “Somewhere at the end of the day, I said to him, ‘You have to go in the shit, too.’ He said, ‘OK, at the end of the day we’ll shitfight together.’ He was prepared to do that.” Nor does she resent the sex scenes that are de rigueur in most Verhoeven movies. “I’m from Holland and so I’m used to that nudity stuff – so that wasn’t my biggest problem.”
On set today is Bruno Bruins, deputy mayor of the Hague. Bruins admits to mixed feelings about having one of his city’s most beautiful squares whisked back in time and draped in Nazi symbols. “We’re very proud that Paul Verhoeven is back here in his home city of the Hague,” he says. “But you have to be very careful when people see themselves confronted with swastika signs like we see here.” The producers have set up a special hotline for anybody traumatised by the fascist imagery. “Up until yesterday, nobody has called this line,” Bruins says, seemingly unsure whether this should be a source of pride or something to fret about.
Years ago, when he left Holland for Hollywood, Verhoeven declared that his ambition was to make films on the scale of David Lean. That’s an ambition he has never really been able to fulfil. Instead, in films such as Basic Instinct, Robocop, et al, he has held US culture up to the microscope in all its contradiction and absurdity. Blackbook is probably as close to a Lean-style epic as he has come. Still, his eye remains as harsh as ever. Anne Frank may have believed that in spite of everything people are good at heart, but that’s not a verdict Verhoeven would ever reach. “My work has never been too optimistic about human nature,” he says.
As the light fades, the tempo increases. Verhoeven is desperate to shoot as much material as possible. His assistants say he loves the whole process of movie-making, but as he rushes around on a cold Sunday afternoon, that is not the impression he gives.
A few days later, he admits that the job is not necessarily fun. “I never felt that shooting a movie was a pleasure. I always thought it was a way of suffering,” he says. “From the very beginning of my career, I’ve often been standing on the set after a few days of shooting and asking myself, ‘Oh God, why did I choose this profession?’ That all disappears when the movie is over, and I really like it again. I start without hesitation on the next one, until the first day of shooting and then I know I have to abandon all hope and go under again . . . for me, film-making is a hellish experiment where you’re losing all contact with society and you have to live in the fires of hell.”
