Evidence Grise

By the time of his last American production, 2000’s deliciously kinky invisible-man story, Hollow Man, Verhoeven also realized he’d become typecast as “a science-fiction-action director, expensive and not very reliable.” Yet, to assemble a film of Black Book’s scale — small by Hollywood standards but enormous by European ones — without the backing of an American studio was no mean feat. The film went into production in 2005 with an elaborate co-production deal that involved financing from Dutch, Belgian, German and British sources, plus a variety of tax-credit deals and other incentives that Verhoeven describes as “a financial mosaic that at every moment seems about to fall apart.” But Black Bookheld together and, even before it opens in North America, has already been a massive hit in Holland and performed strongly in other international territories.

That doesn’t mean, though, that Verhoeven, who continues to reside in Los Angeles, has turned his back on America. “I never changed location,” he says with a smile. “I just took a sabbatical.” His next movie, The Winter Queen, which he hopes to shoot this summer, will be filmed in English, though the financing was again assembled independently. “It’s from a Russian novel [Azazel, by Boris Akunin] that my daughter discovered — a detective story that’s pretty edgy but also quite charming, so it’s really a step away from the more realistic darkness of this movie and toward another world.” Perhaps by then, Hollywood will have picked up on the fact that Paul Verhoeven is anything but a one-trick pony. “At least,” he reasons, “it’s good for them to know I can also work for $20 million and direct actors.”

Evolutionary man (Photo by Kevin Scanlon)

Related Content

• Behaving Badly: Bad Apples, Empanada for a Dream and Slice, Reviewed
  November 8, 2012
• Bad Apples
  October 18, 2012
• Total Recall: A Look Back at the Older, Better One
  August 10, 2012
• Richard Serra, Ed Ruscha and Others Created Artwork to Help Obama. But Is it Any Good?
  September 21, 2012
• Total Recall Is a Retread of Blade Runner, Brazil, Minority Report...Oh, and Total Recall
  August 3, 2012

More About

• Paul Verhoeven
• Hollywood
• Anne Frank
• Rachel Stein
• Abu Ghraib

Black Book opens Wednesday, April 4, in Los Angeles theaters.