Uwe Boll Goes Postal
Notorious German director spars with his critics, makes an intentional comedy
While Boll will cop to the miscasting of Tara Reid as an academic in 2005’s Alone in the Dark, he has mixed feelings about his newfound ironic status. “If you have House of the Dead,” Boll says of his 2003 zombie-shooting-game adaptation, “it’s kind of campy, and I know that people maybe enjoy it because it’s kind of stupid and over-the-top craziness, violence and gore. But if you say this about In the Name of the King, for example, I would say you’re wrong. I saw people sitting in the theater, when Burt Reynolds dies, and they had tears in their eyes, right? So if people say that it’s the most silly scene when Burt Reynolds dies, I’m not sure that this is the case. I think it was a good scene.”
As for going head-to-head with the new Indiana Jones movie on opening day, Boll seems surprisingly optimistic. “At least there is no other competition, so you know you face only the big movie of the year, and not, like, four other $20 million movies. I hope that Indiana Jones will be sold out, [and] some of the overspill will see Postal.”
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Super Boll: A Web-exclusive continuation of our talk with the Postal director
Need more? Click here to listen to the entire interview while you read along!
L.A. WEEKLY: Why is this your first American movie to screen in advance for critics?
UWE BOLL: It’s not a decision for me alone to say if we should show it to the critics or not. Especially [with] In the Name of the King, I think it was a mistake not to show it to the critics, because everyone thinks it will be completely crap if it’s not shown to the critics. In Germany, where we showed it to the critics, we got, I think, a 50-50 split between people who said, “it’s clearly bigger and better [than] all his other movies,” and the people who said, “ahh, it’s another Uwe Boll piece of shit.” And in the U.S., I think it was 80-20 bad, so I think maybe the reception of it would [have been] better if we [had shown] it before. I think [with] Postal, it’s necessary to show it to the press, because it’s something that you shouldn’t see without any information, and then it comes completely surprisingly in front of you, not only as an Uwe Boll movie but also because of the whole content of the movie.
With Postal, I used that movie to finish up a lot, to make a political statement, and to make a statement about my whole career, showing myself as that lederhosen Nazi guy. So to do all this at once was for me kind of ... I wanted to wash the past away in a way, it was one big hammer hit, and I think I definitely reached my goal in the way that it is a ridiculous, ruthless, over-the-top movie.
This is your first American movie that you also wrote. Is it more personal than the others?
Totally. Not only to show, like, making fun of myself and of the whole situation with the video-game geeks out there; it is also at the same time a depressed look into the political landscape and what’s going on around us. When I wrote it, America was maybe close to starting a war against Iran. So I thought, “if they start the war against Iran, who knows, this will be maybe a third World War coming up, and then we all go down the drain.” It was a scary situation, and in a way I think was time to go away from all that patriotic stuff that happened after Sept. 11, to show how corrupt and absurd all political sides are. It’s not only the Taliban that are crazy, there are also other groups that are crazy.
Can we extrapolate that the movie represents the way you see American pop culture?
Not the pop culture, but I think it was important to have the story of a loser, a trailer-trash flack, [who] has no work and tries to make a living and is an honest guy, but he’s not having a chance to do it; he gets fucked over everywhere. And then he sees his corrupt uncle, who got the money and the girls because he fakes [being] a sex guru, basically. It’s kind of a reflection of the film industry and industry in total, where you see people getting away with major crimes. But if you are a gang member in South Central and even have a car crash, you get like 65 years of prison [time] as a 15-year-old kid, and people like Bush and Cheney are walking away with billions of dollars, and did basically major crimes, and will have a good life for the rest of their lives.
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