Uwe Boll Goes Postal

How do you get the rights to so many video games?

House of the Dead was [producer] Mark Altman — he came with the rights from Sega, and then [for] Alone in the Dark, I approached Atari [through] a friend who worked as a developer, and I approached Majesco for BloodRayne. But, for example, Gas Powered Games [who own Dungeon Siege] came to me, and the same with Zombie Massacre and Sabotage 1943. With Postal, the Postal fan club came to me. I had never heard about the game before, to be honest; I played the game after they approached me with it. It’s a mix: I think half of the video-game companies stay away from me; they say, “Oh, my God, not Uwe Boll!” because of that Internet stuff. But the other half likes me, and they’re saying, “Look, he at least is interested and tries to make the best out of it, and if he makes a movie, we gain sales from it.”

Kevin Scanlon

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

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Do your movies make money on DVD?

Not In the Name of the King. It is now more than $20 million on DVD returns, but it’s a $60 million movie, so it was too expensive to recover from a theatrical disaster. It helps that it’s a big hit in a lot of other territories, but it’s not making the money back. If you do $20 million, $15 million movies, and they make only $5 million box office, there is still a good chance to make the money back after the DVD. But on In the Name of the King, it didn’t work, so this was a hard hit.

Was Vince Desiderio, the creator of Postal, really mad at you?

We had a huge dispute about what direction the movie should go. They saw it more as a real rampage movie, like a super-brutal Taxi Driver, and I said, “I don’t want to do it. I want to make a comedy, and I have to do my thing here.” I was really driven, I didn’t compromise. The Canadian producers were against me, the agencies in L.A., with the actors, were against me, but I really stuck to the plan. I said, “I’ll make that movie, and I’ll do casting on my own and everything,” and I was happy to get all that B-level supporting actors in Postal. It’s not In the Name of the King or BloodRayne [in terms of] cast, but it is very good, solid actors who had a blast doing it, and when Vince saw what I was doing, he liked the idea of a comedy. I said, “It will be violent, it won’t be a PG-13 comedy, it will be completely brutal, but it’s important that it has that satire tone,” and I think this was very good to do it this way.

How did you get Dave Foley to do that nude scene?

He got up from the bed and was naked. And then I told him, “You’re naked, right?” and he says, “Yeah, yeah, it’s all good,” so he played it this way. You cannot really ask an actor to do something like this. If he’s doing it, good; but if not, you have to accept it. If he had gotten up and put the bathrobe together, I would have [gone] with that, but he had to go to the toilet also, so he had to open the bathrobe! I was really happy that he did that.

Are you a big gamer?

What is a big gamer? Is a big gamer a guy who plays six hours a day? Then I’m not a big gamer. I like games, I play a lot with the Xbox. The only game I was ever addicted to was Asteroids — oh, God, it was killing me when I was 12, I played it every day, five hours. I really had to stop that. For movies, I think video games are a good inspiration; you get good ideas about wardrobe, production design, fighting style. Sometimes you have a good story in a video game, like Far Cry — we followed exactly the game story because it was a great story. But you have other games like Dungeon Siege — tell me what the story is! So the thing is, sometimes you cannot fulfill the dream of that guy who played that game five months in a row, because he created something in his brain that is not existing for everybody else. If you a play a game, you develop your own ideas, it’s very clear. But on the other hand, I have to make also the movies that the nongamer has no problem to follow.

Do the recent changes in German tax law affect your funding?

Since 2006, we cannot write off any losses. So you have to recoup your money, and a movie like In the Name of the King I couldn’t do any more, basically, because [at that time] if you lost your money, you lost only half of your money in reality, because the rest you got from the taxes back, so the $60 million risk was in the end a $30 million risk. But now we have to recoup the full budget, and this is the reason now we have to play it safe. But there is still no Nazi gold necessary to finance the movie, so we still are able to make movies, but we really have to look into more risk-free possibilities.