Paul Verhoeven

Overview

Born
July 18, 1938 · Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands
Height
5′ 8″ (1.73 m)

Biography

Family

Spouse
Children
Parents

Trademarks

Famous for his extremely violent, yet intelligent, science fiction films (RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Starship Troopers (1997) and Hollow Man (2000)).
Frequently works with screenwriter Gerard Soeteman (on his Dutch films), photographer Jost Vacano, and Rutger Hauer (Turkish Delight (1973), Katie Tippel (1975), Soldier of Orange (1977), Spetters (1980) and Flesh Blood (1985)).
A lot of his films include media coverage of some kind, ranging from real archive footage (Soldier of Orange (1977) ) to fictional news (RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Starship Troopers (1997)) and sportscasts (Spetters (1980)).
Heavy use of Christian symbolism (Turkish Delight (1973),Spetters (1980), The 4th Man (1983), Flesh Blood (1985), RoboCop (1987), Basic Instinct (1992) )
Sexually-charged subject matter (Turkish Delight (1973), Basic Instinct (1992), Showgirls (1995) and Black Book (2006)).

Trivia

Became the first nominee ever to actually show up at the Razzie Awards. He personally accepted the 'Worst Director' and 'Worst Picture' awards for Showgirls (1995).
Despite directing four science-fiction movies (RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Starship Troopers (1997) and Hollow Man (2000)), he has admitted that it is definitely not his favorite genre. He has said that as a European, he understood too little about American issues at the time to make a contemporary American movie, and science-fiction movies were a nice way to avoid that problem.
Considers John Landis his only friend in Hollywood.
Says he declined the offer to direct three back-to-back sequels to The Fast and the Furious (2001) and 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003).
He briefly considered directing RoboCop 2 (1990), but could not agree with the studio on the storyline. He ultimately did Total Recall (1990) instead.

Quotes

People seem to have this strange idea that films can influence people to be violent, but in my sincere opinion film only reflects the violence of society.
As a director, my goal is to be completely open. Just look at how I portray sex in my films. They're considered shocking and obscene because I like to carefully examine human sexuality. It has to be realistic. I really like documentaries, therefore, reality is important to me when I do fiction. It is often related to my own life, my Dutch background. The art scene in Holland has always attempted to be realistic. The Dutch painters of 400 years ago were meticulously realistic. The example I always like to use is a marvelous painting by Hieronymus Bosch titled "The Prodigal Son". It is a painting of a brothel, and in the corner is a man pissing against a wall. You would never, never find something like that in an Italian, French or English painting of that epoch. The Dutch have always been more scientific, interested in detail; certainly less idealistic and more realistic. The sex scenes in The 4th Man (1983) and Turkish Delight (1973) were based on real experiences I had or a friend had. It's very personal. Of course, I must admit that I love to shock audiences.
The 4th Man (1983) has to do with my vision of religion. In my opinion, Christianity is nothing more than one of many interpretations of reality, neither more nor less. Ideally, it would be nice to believe that there is a God somewhere out there, but it looks to me as if the whole Christian religion is a major symptom of schizophrenia in half the world's population: civilizations scrambling to rationalize their chaotic existence. Subsequently, Christianity has a tendency to look like magic or the occult. And I liked that ambiguity, because I wanted my audience to take something home with them. I wanted them to wonder about what religion really is. Remember that Christianity is a religion grounded in one of the most violent acts of murder, the crucifixion. Otherwise, religion wouldn't have had any kind of impact. With regards to the irony of the violence, much of that probably comes from my childhood experiences during and immediately following the Second World War. In fact, if it hadn't been for the German occupation and then the American occupation, I would have never been a filmmaker.
The sooner we admit our capacity for evil the less apt we are to destroy each other.
People love seeing violence and horrible things. The human being is bad and he can't stand more than five minutes of happiness. Put him in a dark theater and ask him to look at two hours of happiness and he'd walk out or fall asleep.