Uwe Boll Goes Postal
Notorious German director spars with his critics, makes an intentional comedy
What’s your filmmaking background?
I went to Vienna and Munich for the film school, but at this time, 1983, these film schools had no equipment, so it was [im]practical, and I felt after a few months, This brings me nothing. I wanted to make movies, not talk about movies. I was talking about movies in my free time with my buddies nonstop, so the thing was like, what am I doing here? Then I went back to Cologne, where I originally come from, and studied economy and literature, and during the university thing, with my friend Frank Lustig, we raised $30,000 — 60,000 marks at this point — and we started shooting German Fried Movie as a compilation movie with a lot of different scenes and a lot of different actors. We got equipment on deferral and film from AGFA for free. Part of it is 16mm because we got free stock, and some is 35mm, so we had to blow up the 16mm stuff. This was the way we started, and I toured with the movie for six months from theater to theater, and we made the money back. And then Bertelsmann (BMG) bought the DVD rights, so I kept going, basically. They gave me 150,000 marks up front for my next movie, Murder in Geneva, before I started shooting. So, slowly I came into the film business, but it was year after year where you couldn’t live on it — it was a disaster, and I worked in factories and everywhere to survive and to keep making movies. Then in 1995, I got hired by a bigger production company as a producer, and I produced TV shows, even country music shows!
German country music?
Yeah, yeah, it’s crazy. Then for four or five years, I made no movies on my own, and I felt so empty, like, “Is it over already? What should I do?” And then I created this thing of going to investors, dentists, whomever [asking them to] give me $50,000 and you can write it off on the taxes, and I started collecting money for Sanctimony, my first American movie, in 1999. It was a long process. I was already 34 when I could say this was my first real paycheck as a director/producer, where I think I got $120,000. And then I kept going, making movies, returning money, collecting new money. It was a lot of work.
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