Uwe Boll Goes Postal

Did you have ratings issues with Postal?

Everybody was expecting an NC-17. Vivendi Universal were shocked, because they tried to make me cut stuff out the whole time, and I said, “I’ll wait for the rating.” And now, boom! I get the R rating! With the full-frontal nudity, with the shooting the children — all that stuff — I said, “This is it! I keep it how it is, I don’t cut it.” And they were like, “Oh, my God,” because they saw the political backlash with it. What we face now is we have problems to get screens. The big exhibitors don’t like the political content of the movie, so we waited for the Speed Racer bump. Let’s put it this way: If this weekend, the Cameron Diaz movie and Speed Racer movie will not be strong, and hopefully both are clearly less than $30 million on the weekend, then I think we will get more screens booked. Of course, it’s not so comfortable to wait so long to get screens, but the reality is that they don’t want to play the movie, and in the end they [will] play the movie only because they have free space.

Kevin Scanlon

Trust us: You don't wanna mess with Uwe.

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Aren’t you opening opposite Indiana Jones?

To be honest, I felt like with a movie like Postal, why not go against the biggest movie of the year? 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. On the other hand, I think Postal’s so unusual that it’s not necessarily a movie where you make all your money on the first week. It’s a movie that actually could run for a few weeks and could grow with word of mouth. I’m kind of sure that no matter what will happen in the theaters with Postal, it will be a cult classic 10 years from now, and I think 10 years from now [if] everybody saw that movie on DVD or on TV, this is what I want — that the people see it, and in the end, if it’s on DVD or in the theaters doesn’t matter.

What are your influences?

Postal is not really influenced by anything else [except] this kind of really more American [parody movie] like Naked Gun, Airplane!, BluesBrothers, and overall it is a little different. I have made now a lot of movies, and in the beginning, when you make your first movies, you are influenced directly by the directors you love, and you try to be similar, to copy, to get in the footsteps of the masters. Martin Scorsese, John Carpenter — these were the people I grew up with, and in a way older [directors like] John Ford, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick. But then you recognize it’s not working! So forget it; it’s better to create my own style or my own ideas how to make a movie, and then follow my own instincts. I felt after a few movies, because I did so many different genres also, that I’m not a guy who has his style, where you know this is an Uwe Boll movie. I like violence, I like sex, I like this harsher, edgier stuff, I’m not a fan of big happy ends. I like the ending of BloodRayne, for example, a lot. Even in Alone in theDark, they turn around and the creatures are coming, so you know maybe they’re dead. But I don’t, say, shoot all my movies only with a 21 lens, or whatever. I use all different lenses, I use different lighting styles and different camera styles depending on the movie. Seed is made with hand-held cameras the whole movie, and a lot of shots with shutter to have this rougher effect in it. But Postal is story- and character-driven, so the camera in a way disappears. Sometimes we have a camera on a dolly track, sometimes we have Steadicam, sometimes we do it hand-held. So I don’t follow a special style, I try to tell the story and disappear behind the story.

Do you mind being labeled as a video-game guy?

I definitely want to break out of it, and I want to get back to more original movies. Even if Postal’s based on a video game, I think it’s a very original movie, different to everything I did before.

I read that Hitman is one of your favorite games. Did you try to get the movie rights?

I tried it! Vin Diesel had the rights at one point, and then Eidos, it looked like I could get the rights, and they made me buy Fear Effect, and I said, “Look, I don’t want to make Fear Effect, I want to make Hitman. Then it ended up that the rights went to Fox, in a way, and then Metropolitan ended up doing the movie together with Fox. I was disappointed because I had Jason Statham ready to play Hitman, and I thought, Statham as Hitman, why not? That could be good movie, but they did it different. It was disappointing for me.