Paul Verhoeven
BY
Eric Kohn
The 85-year-old Dutch maverick looks back on his two most prescient dystopian visions.
RoboCop: Director’s Cut opens Friday, January 5, and Total Recall opens Friday, February 2, as part of The Future Looks Bright From Afar.
After decades of sanitized superhero movies dominating popular culture, it can be easy to forget that there was once a time when brazenly cynical, dystopian popcorn blockbusters were cleaning up at the box office. Three decades ago, though, the veteran Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven was doing exactly that, with the one-two punch of RoboCop (1987) and Total Recall (1990), and their scathing critiques of American supremacy still sting today.
A dark vision of a decrepit Detroit and the technologically armed police force tasked with controlling the populace, RoboCop leans hard on the idea of militarization under the guise of civic responsibility. Total Recall brings similar instincts to the fore in its gleefully bleak tale, drawn from a Philip K. Dick short story, of a Martian colony overseen by a crushing hierarchy and dictatorial rule. Both movies satirize the media for playing ball, and revolve around characters at the mercy of the social order who gradually wake up to their true selves. Viewed together, these mega-hits grossed more than half a billion dollars worldwide without an iota of visible compromise.
Verhoeven’s Trojan Horse approach to injecting large-scale American spectacles with complex and provocative ideas continued into Starship Troopers (1997), but in recent years, he has narrowed his focus with more grounded (yet no less subversive) international productions: the wartime romance Black Book (2006), the twisted rape-revenge comedy Elle (2016), and the lesbian nun romp Benedetta (2021) each took Verhoeven back to his European roots while liberating him from the constraints of the American system. That looks to change in the coming year as the 85-year-old filmmaker prepares to make the D.C. satire Young Sinner, his first US production since Hollow Man in 2000.
I spoke to Verhoeven from his house in Los Angeles about the genesis of RoboCop and Total Recall, his thoughts on the future of both franchises, and how the climate for boundary-pushing filmmaking has changed since he got into the game.—Eric Kohn
Total Recall (1990)
ERIC KOHN: Both RoboCop and Total Recall engage with the idea that American fascism is hiding in plain sight. That’s a theme you explored in more explicit terms with your earlier Dutch films, and later continued to smuggle into a blockbuster context with Starship Troopers. Given that you were a child during WWII, when did you start thinking more deeply about this idea, and incorporating it into your work?
PAUL VERHOEVEN: I was between the ages of five and seven when I was living in Occupied Holland. I saw horrible things there. It wasn’t Gaza, but in the last couple of years, people were executed left and right. I remember the bodies of people who were killed on the streets. I was with my father and we were forced to walk past them, to see that you shouldn’t shoot at German soldiers. They took 10 people out of prison a day who were politically engaged—but not really Resistance Fighters—put them there, and shot them. We had to walk around them. Later in life, I remembered that I walked past them as a child and wondered what was at stake there. How did that happen? As a child, I thought it was normal that my house or the neighbor’s house could be bombed. That’s what life was about! After April ’45, I found out that this was not real. But it took time to find out about liberty and freedom—just through the last years of the war. That was an exceptional time in Holland. It helps if you look at the politics of now to know what human beings are about. Like with Ukraine, it’s clear that the situation is not so different from what happened in 1940 when the Germans took over the government of Holland.
EK: The near-future setting in your movies—2028 in RoboCop, 2084 in Total Recall—is a template that allows you to explore both the past and present at the same time. Do you feel that any aspects of the worlds these movies predicted have come to pass?
PV: Yes. How is it that, let’s say, even now with the situation in the United States there is always a fear that the ultra-right-wing could ultimately achieve horrible things? I wanted to be clear about that, so I read a couple hundred books about it and used that for my films. But of course the movies that I made about that were Dutch. RoboCop and Total Recall were pretty alien to me. The Dutch movies were built on reality, people that lived and wrote it down. But I had the feeling that I could do RoboCop and then Total Recall in a certain innovative way because I was reminded of comic books I read when I was 11 or 12. I could show you the main character of a Dutch comic book where the main character was a cat and walked around like a robot. For both of those movies I went back to the narratives I saw when I was young. I also looked at Superman as one of the figures who had been translated into Dutch.
EK: That all helps explain the secret sauce of those movies—this sense that you’re creating escapism on the surface, and burying deeper meanings within the material, much like how you came to understand the world around you as a child.
PV: On top of that, I didn’t set it up. If you look at RoboCop, we had a really good producer, editor, DP, and Phil Tippett for the special effects—all people with these enormous qualities that I didn’t have when I came over to the United States. Jon Davison, my producer, could tell me about the people we needed. I was too European to know how to make that movie without him. But being European did help to make the movie more extraordinary.
RoboCop, 1987
EK: Or more radical. It’s hard to imagine a movie about a cyborg hero with so much violence and corruption at its center.
PV: I didn’t invent that. [Co-writers] Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner did. I gave it a European touch. If we had not had all these other people working on the movie, it would not have worked. Ed Neumeier was always on the set so I could always ask him if I didn’t understand something because it too American.
EK: Why do you think the character of RoboCop has had such staying power of the years?
PV: He isn’t crucified, but close to it. Not for nothing does he walk on water at the end. And of course there is a resurrection. But the most powerful thing I ever felt with one of my movies was at a New York screening for RoboCop. I will never forget at the end when Dan O’Herlihy asks, “What’s your name, son?” Before Peter Weller replies, the audience screamed, “Murphy!” It was so explosive.
EK: Murphy is not your average action hero, since he was played by scrawny Peter Weller. With Total Recall, you had Arnold Schwarzenegger.
PV: Arnold wanted that part. Dino De Laurentiis didn’t want him. The character was supposed to be an account, not muscular like Arnold. Then it didn’t come to fruition with this Australian director [Bruce Beresford]. Arnold went to Carolco Pictures and told them to buy the script. [Co-founder] Mario Kassar did it immediately. Arnold told him that he wanted the director of RoboCop. Mario called me and said, “I’ll send this script over to your house. Can you read it as soon as possible? I want to talk about it this evening.” I read it and said, “There is a problem with the third act,” but immediately I found a lot that was funny, good, and innovative about it. We were sitting at the table at this restaurant. There were five or six of us. Mario said, “Well, do you think you can work with Arnold?” I had met Arnold before by coincidence because he was friends with my editor Frank Urioste. I said “Yeah,” because it was much more interesting if it was Arnold than an accountant. He said, “Let’s shake hands, you’re going to start tomorrow.” There was no talk about money. It was just, “Let’s go do that.”
EK: What did you like about the project?
PV: It was overall a very clever script. I found out there were about 30 or 40 scripts leading up to this one. My assistant, Lynn, and I went through all of these versions to find everything interesting that had been lost from them. We used it all. But it was clear to me from the very beginning that the script was too normal, too American, too much like other movies that had already been done. It needed something else. Gary L. Goldman came to the team and we corrected that.
EK: In Dan O’Bannon’s original ending, Arnold’s character finds out that he’s actually a Martian created by an extinct species. That was changed for a more upbeat finale.
PV: That was still there in the script they sent me. It was clear to me and Goldman than the strangeness of the film shouldn’t be left to the third act. You could still include the idea of not knowing what was real throughout the film. Earlier on, when the doctor tells him that you will lose your brain if you don’t take this pill—this is a great scene. We took that to the rest of the movie.
EK: You were all ahead of The Matrix (1999) with that scene.
PV: Philip K. Dick was ahead of that. The original writers of the script were gifted because they kept it. They had done a great job on the first and the second act. I was only concentrating on solving the third act, and I think we did.
Total Recall (2012)
EK: Your work on Total Recall meant you were unavailable to direct RoboCop 2 (1990), but how much did you even seriously consider that opportunity?
PV: I didn’t, really. I think Michael Miner and Ed Neumeier in the beginning asked to do the sequel to RoboCop. They took it very seriously and then the studios decided they took too much time. I was working on Total Recall; then, Total Recall 2 had a plan and an outline, but Carolco exploded as a company. They tried it anyway later but I had lost interest and was doing other films.
EK: What did you make of the 2012 remake with Colin Farrell?
PV: I felt it had a lot of special effects, but this mystery—is it true or is it not true?—I just didn’t feel that anymore. The interesting thing about the original movie is that at the end, when Rachel Ticotin says, “Well, kiss me quick before you wake up,” you still don’t really know if it’s real. Also, we had a wonderful composer, Jerry Goldsmith. I was so pleased with the piano motifs. Without all that, what do you have?
EK: And how about the 2014 RoboCop remake?
PV: The problem there, I felt, was that he was really aware that he lost all his legs and arms. He knows it from the very beginning. The beautiful thing about the original RoboCop, what makes it not just pure tragedy or whatever, is that he really does not know anymore. He gets a couple of vague flashes of memory when he goes to his old house, but RoboCop is not a tragic figure. Yes, he’s killed in the most horrible way in the beginning. But when we see him again as a robot, he doesn’t feel that. In the new one, because he remembers everything, he’s much more tragic. We wanted you to accept him at the beginning as a robotic cop. That’s what they did to him. In my opinion, I thought it was a problem to make him more tragic.
EK: These days, there is so much debate about the impact of artificial intelligence on human life. How do you relate to that?
PV: Let’s say the fear over AI is a bit exaggerated. I would say that. Personally, I’m not scared of it. We’ve been doing it already in a way for almost 30 years. We’re using AI all the time on our computer or our phones. Mathematics itself has been exploring this for a long time—figuring out how to do things that you can’t do yourself. I think it gets difficult when it’s about decision-making. Artificial intelligence can be faster than us, but I haven’t seen it find something out as complicated as energy being equal to mass times the speed of light squared. I doubt that artificial intelligence can do something like that.
EK: Since you’ve stopped making studio blockbusters, do you miss anything about working with those tropes?
PV: If someone were to give me a script like RoboCop or Total Recall, I wouldn’t hesitate to do that. I haven’t seen it.
EK: Your next project, Young Sinner, is your first American one since Hollow Man. How did that happen after all these years?
PV: I’m working with Ed Neumeier, who wrote RoboCop. You could say it’s a political thriller, if you want, situated in Washington. The last couple of years I’ve been working in France because I couldn’t find something interesting here at that time. But Ed came up with a really interesting proposal. For two years we have been working on the screenplay. It should be done in two months and then we can find out if someone can finance it.
EK: How much is Young Sinner rooted in today’s political climate? Is it another dystopian concept?
PV: It is set more like perhaps next year, so we don’t have to invent new cars and all that stuff. This will be a brutal film. The main character is an Evangelical woman. There are so many wonderful scenes in it.
EK: It’s an erotic thriller, right? You haven’t compromised on your approach to sexuality over the years, but you’ve been making movies outside of the US like Benedetta, which gives you more leeway.
PV: Perhaps the sex will be a problem. We now have all these intimacy coordinators working between the directors and the actors. I always felt that the director should do that himself, not on the day of shooting but long before that. Use storyboards, show the actors the shots you want to make, talk about it. You have to be straight when talking about breasts, nipples, and vaginas—that all has to be said when you’re sitting there with the actors. I discern a little bit that directors aren’t doing that now. From the moment I started making films, we would discuss all that months before, talk to the actors with the storyboards. Once you’re on the set, there’s no discussion at all anymore. Everything has been said before. Anything they wouldn’t like has been eliminated. You don’t come to the set and say, “Do this the way you’d do it with your boyfriend.” That’s not the way. They have to know where the camera is.
EK: Some of the other filmmakers from your generation are still working on large scales: Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese. Your own approach has contracted. What do you make of their impulses compared to your own?
PV: I haven’t been able to see Napoleon (2023). I think Scorsese’s last film [Killers of the Flower Moon, 2023] is very much about him going underground to figure out what happened at that time. He wanted to tell a story that had to be told. He wrote another script from the point of view of the FBI then threw it away and decided to make it more about the American Indian characters. It’s very long, though. I would hope to keep my next movie at least 30 minutes shorter.
EK: You’re an Oscar voter. Are you caught up on the nominees this year?
PV: I sometimes vote. I don’t vote when I haven’t seen all the American movies. This year, I have seen a lot, at least 20 films.
EK: How much do awards matter to you?
PV: They don’t. When we were invited for Turkish Delight (1973), I didn’t even know what the Oscars were. Total Recall and RoboCop had special effects nominated. Now…well, I doubt that Young Sinner will be nominated.
EK: Too controversial?
PV: I’m sure.
Eric Kohn is the head of development and strategy at EDGLRD, Harmony Korine’s multimedia collective, and an adjunct professor of cinema studies at NYU. He previously served as vice president of editorial strategy at IndieWire.
Paul Verhoeven on the set of RoboCop, 1987
