Uwe Boll Goes Postal
Notorious German director spars with his critics, makes an intentional comedy
How have German audiences reacted to the Nazi jokes?
Very negative. They were flipping out on me, and said, like, “How can you present Germany like this?” If you believe the German subsidized movies and the movies that are getting the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film and this kind of stuff, you’d think all of what Germany is are good people, and liberal, and they almost tried to kill Hitler, and Hitler was a dark element, a dark part of history. But if you go right now to eastern Germany on the streets, and you are like East Indian and you go out at 11 p.m., there’s a big chance that they’ll beat you up. It’s a 20 percent vote in east Germany for the Nazi party right now. Twenty-five percent of the people are employer-less, and they think that the foreign workers are the reason why they are employer-less, so there is an explosive thing in Germany existing. I show the ugly side of Germany, and I’m not scared to show myself as an ugly German, so this was the reason I had to do the mini-Auschwitz theme park in the movie, where they’re all eating sausage and drinking beer and running around in lederhosen, and having fun in the gas chamber.
Was this your first acting role?
I had a cameo in German Fried Movie also, where I played the Danger Seeker — I didn’t find another actor willing to do it, because we, like, ran into a Wal-Mart and stole stuff, we ran into a German prize ceremony and grabbed the prize from the stage, and no actor wanted to do it. So I did it on my own. In Seed, I did it again with the producer, Sean Williamson, playing cops, but we say nothing; we are only in the background standing there, like an Alfred Hitchcock cameo because we felt like it was funny to put us in the background.
In Postal, it was fun to do because it was so ridiculous, and I had fun to play myself as a pervert. If there is something funny, I would be happy to do another small cameo, but I couldn’t make a bigger part. I have to get in and out of a movie quickly.
Were the boxing matches with your critics used in the movie?
We did the boxing matches during the Postal shoot, and the contenders are playing trailer trash in the trailer scenes as extras. The boxing matches will be a bonus on the DVD. The point was, for me, [that] I was loaded against these guys, and I wanted a reason to hate them. I didn’t want reviewers that did a positive review, or people that never wrote about me. I got tons of applications from people who never wrote anything about me, and I said, “Forget it, this is not the purpose of it.”
What about the reviews?
If you compare BloodRayne to movies like Elektra or Daredevil or Catwoman, I think the movie’s way better. And a lot of people don’t see that. They compare BloodRayne only with Dracula, or with Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise [in Interview with the Vampire]. If you compare my movies always only with the best movies of the genre, of course, In the Name of the King is not Lord of the Rings. But if you compare it with Golden Compass, I would prefer to see In the Name of the King. This is the thing: What gets a little lost is they don’t compare the movies with the right movies.
What do you think about people who say your movies are “so bad they’re good”?
It depends what movie. If you have House of the Dead, 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, and whatever. But if you say this about In the Name of the King, for example, I would say you’re wrong. Of course, there are some weak parts in In the Name of the King, but overall I think it’s a solid story with good actors in a big movie, and it’s an enjoyable movie. 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, for example.
You tend to cast big-name actors against type, like Tara Reid as an academic in Alone in the Dark or Burt Reynolds as a medieval king in In the Name of the King. Is this a deliberate strategy?
Tara Reid was a mistake. I hired her based on her name, basically, and I thought she could pull it off, and it was a mistake. But I think Burt Reynolds is actually good in that part. If people are not used to having a Burt Reynolds or Ray Liotta in a movie like this, why not? Why [do] you have to have Jeremy Irons as the evil guy, or John Malkovich in a medieval thing? Why not Ray Liotta? I still think that In the Name of the King has a very good cast, and there is not one actor [who] breaks out there in a so negative way, like Tara Reid did in Alone in the Dark.
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