Superstar action director Paul
Verhoven spoke recently with
Suicide Girls.com about his upcoming feature
BLACK
BOOK, and while slightly off subject
from a film about Dutch Nazi’s, Verhoven was asked about his kick-ass fun flick
STARSHIP TROOPERS. However what he had
to say about it really surprised me.
Here’s what Verhoeven had to say
when asked what he thought about the fact that Takashi Miike’s favorite flick is
STARSHIP TROOPERS:
“That’s very nice. I
always thought the movie was badly understood. There was an article in The
Washington Post when it came out that was not written by a movie critic. One of
the editors wrote it saying that this was a neo-Nazi movie and I was promoting
Fascism. That same article was published in all the European newspapers. When I
went to do the publicity tour in Europe, everybody was already looking through
that lens. The Washington Post is not a reliable newspaper anyway but they said
the film was written by a neo-Nazi or a Fascist and directed by one. I strongly
disagree with that. I saw it as a critique of American society. It is done in an
ironic way but not pushing it very hard, which I hate because then it becomes
dogmatic and becomes something else other than filmmaking. It was more that the
novel by Robert Heinlein is very militaristic and has a tendency to be
pro-Fascist a bit. We took a lot of cues out of American society at that time,
which was [President Bill] Clinton, not realizing that a couple years later this
whole situation would be much more acute and now you can put the film as a
blueprint over Iraq or Afghanistan. But of course, I didn’t know of bin Laden at
that time.”
I mean I understand the fact that
being a pro-military lean in the book could be regarded as fascism, but to say
that it was written and directed by a Neo-Nazi? You’ve got to be sh*tting me! If
anything I always felt that the film showed the utter facelessness of the
general soldier and the fact that in times of crisis the government looks to
society as a group of disposable grunts to push an agenda. And to call Verhoeven
a Neo-Nazi seems more like slander to me than anything else. What does everyone
else think about this? Spit some bullets below and let me know!
To read the rest of the interview on
Suicide Girls, click
here.
Don’t worry Paul. She loved Starship and that’s all that matters!
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