Tag Archives: paul verhoeven

Paul Verhoeven Ruined Elizabeth Berkley’s Career & Saved Charlize Theron’s

Paul Verhoeven ‘s 20th Anniversary Showgirls apology tour continues! Following remarks he made about the film last month , he’s now taking all of the blame for the implosion of Elizabeth Berkley ‘s career. Hit the jump for more info…

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Paul Verhoeven Ruined Elizabeth Berkley’s Career & Saved Charlize Theron’s

Paul Verhoeven Talks All Things Showgirls in Rolling Stone

It seems like only yesterday Showgirls was released in theaters, but it was actually 20 years ago yesterday that this legendary NC-17 flick hit theaters! Now the film’s director, Paul Verhoeven , is looking back on the cult phenomenon in the new issue of Rolling Stone and we’ve got some of the best bits from the interview! Hit the jump for more pics and info…

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Paul Verhoeven Talks All Things Showgirls in Rolling Stone

Colin Farrell’s Total Recall Remake ‘Was Not Good’ And 8 Other Revelations From Paul Verhoeven

Having labeled the 1990 sci-fi Total Recall “ cheesy ,” it was only a matter of time before the makers of this summer’s lackluster Colin Farrell-starring remake had the tables turned on them by Paul Verhoeven , the original film’s director. And so, Friday at a sold-out screening of the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, Verhoeven seized the opportunity for a little payback, a good-natured gleam in his eye. “Colin Farrell called it in an interview ‘kitschy,’” he declared with a smile. “So I dare to say that his version was not good.” Verhoeven revisited the making of the film over 22 years ago over the course of an hourlong Q&A, joined by screenwriters Ron Shusett, who first optioned Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” and co-scripted Total Recall and Alien with the late Dan O’Bannon, and Gary Goldman, who came on to help flesh out a third act and penned many of the film’s memorable one-liners. The trio shared memories of the film’s long journey to the screen, the difficulty in adapting a writer as brilliant as Philip K. Dick, and the unique challenges and benefits of writing for a star like Schwarzenegger. Scroll down for these and more highlights from the evening, including Verhoeven’s favorite scene! Why he cast Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct ! The connection between Total Recall and Alien ! (Plus: an update on his Winter Queen adaptation, which was to star Milla Jovovich but, he says, “fell into the wrong hands.”) 1. VERHOEVEN ON THE TOTAL RECALL REMAKE “Arnold being there made the movie a little light, and I think that’s very important for these Philip Dick stories,” he said. “I think if it would have been done in a straight way, I’m not so sure that it would have worked – at least, not at that time. And recently [in the Total Recall remake], it did not. I get to say that because the producer of the new one said that this was cheesy or something. And Colin Farrell called it in an interview ‘kitschy.’ So I dare to say that his version was not good.” 2. THE LONG ROAD TO TOTAL RECALL A notoriously long and troubled development saw Total Recall nearly derailed many times, as Shusett recalled. “Sets were being built in Germany, in Australia, and Mexico City — all over the world — and being cancelled. At that time it was the most expensive movie ever made… it was cancelled so many times that when I asked if they would save it, they said the only way we could do this was if we called it Partial Recall .” Once Schwarzenegger signed on, he lent his star power to supporting collaborators behind the scenes. Shusett, who’d written and was producing the project, was nearly removed from the film until Schwarzenegger stepped in on his behalf; the actor also handpicked Verhoeven to direct, as the filmmaker remembered. “Arnold picked me,” said Verhoeven. “Arnold was after this project for a long time… they had started to shoot in Australia and then [Dino De Laurentiis’] company fell apart and went bankrupt. Then Arnold convinced Mario Kassar of Carolco to buy the script out of the bankruptcy. And at the same time he said to Mario, ‘I want Paul Verhoeven because I have seen RoboCop .'” Even with Verhoeven onboard, the script was missing a conclusion. “I felt that something had to happen in the third act that would also be also a little bit philosophical or ambiguous or something, but that was not there,” he said. “And I really got scared – there were like 40 drafts where it was not solved. I thought, it’s unsolvable! It can’t be done! But I had signed already.” 3. THE PHILIP K. DICK CHALLENGE “The other Philip Dick movies all failed for one reason,” declared Shusett. “He’s so brilliant with his set up, he paints you into a corner, he has no ending, there’s barely a second act, and if you don’t match his brilliance with a third act the audience is disappointed. You have to go to extreme length, talent and luck, and come up with an ending that’s worthy of his brilliant set up. That’s why it took six years to get a third act!” Verhoeven’s ambiguous ending leaves open both possibilities that Quaid is either experiencing real life or a fantasy. “I felt that it should be both. I thought in retrospect this is probably the first post-modern film,” said Verhoeven, adding that “the producer of the new one asked me [if it’s real or not]. I said no it’s both, and he said, ‘That’s nonsense.’” 4. SHARON STONE: FROM LORI TO BASIC INSTINCT “For me, casting Sharon was very handy because I started to realize during the shoot what she could do,” revealed Verhoeven. “There’s this beautiful moment when they kick the shit out of [Schwarzenegger] and Rachel [Ticotin] comes out of the elevator and starts shooting. Sharon is on the ground and looks at Arnold … and it was exactly these 5, 6 seconds that made me decide to take Sharon Stone for Basic Instinct . It was based on the fact that she could do that so fast and so believable and she is so mean and so nice and charming, one after the other, that I thought she would be perfect for Basic Instinct .” 5. THE REAL LIFE INSPIRATION FOR RICHTER’S DEATH As a child, Verhoeven played in an elevator that he briefly thought might cut off his legs as he dangled them over the side. He exorcised his lingering horror at the thought by condemning Michael Ironside’s Richter to death by elevator amputation. “I often think about it; I would have been without legs.” 6. VERHOEVEN’S FAVORITE SCENE “I came to the scene that is still one of my favorite scenes, the Dr. Edgemar scene with Roy Brocksmith, who comes to Arnold on Mars and says what we see in him, ‘You are not here.’ I thought that was such a fascinating scene to dare to do that, to say something to the audience that they have been looking at something that is completely not true, and then prove to them that it’s true again.” 7. PAUL VERHOEVEN’S CRUSADE , STARRING ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER Verhoeven spoke fondly of Crusade , the famously never-produced period epic that would have reunited Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger in 1993. “We tried very hard when we were setting up The Crusades. The script was written by Walon Green, and we were supposed to shoot it then Carolco went into Chapter 11 and the movie was never made. Certainly Ridley Scott did Kingdom of Heaven but it was, again, with Arnold, a lighter version of The Crusades but very critical of the Christians.” 8. ABOUT WRITING FOR/DIRECTING ARNOLD… The Quaid character was originally written as an accountant, but that idea (not to mention the suggestion that he could pass as an everyman) went out the window when Schwarzenegger was cast. “It seemed completely ridiculous,” Verhoeven said. “We realized we had to give him a completely different job. Jackhammer worker. We adapted everything to Arnold because I felt that you could not go around Arnold!” “We wrote it like he was just an ordinary Joe, like Jeff Bridges, one of the earlier persons who was going to do it,” said Shusett. “And you don’t know he’s a super agent but Suddenly he’s believable – so he could be a nerd, and not. But we realized everybody knows Arnold’s going to be the real secret agent … but if you can get it made, it turns your mind around.” “In retrospect,” Verhoeven added, “I’m very happy that Arnold was forced upon me.” 9. TOTAL RECALL AND ALIEN Schusett took the audience back a few decades to tell the story of how Total Recall and Alien sprang from a moment of mutual writer’s block between him and Dan O’Bannon. “He said a lot of people want to be writers – he was very blunt and could cut you down in a minute, but he was always truthful,” Schusett laughed, remembering his initial meeting with O’Bannon. “‘Can you show me something you’ve written?’ I went home and gave him something I wrote, a spec script. He said, ‘You’re good – come on over, I have a proposition for you: I can help you finish this if you can help me finish this .’ And he pulled out this thing, he had 29 pages written. He said, ‘You can’t take it with you because I don’t know you and I don’t trust you yet, sit down here and read it.’ And I sat down and read it, and it was the first 29 pages of Alien . I said ‘This is brilliant.’ He said, ‘Yeah – and I’m stuck. What I see in you, I think you’ve got a good enough mind to help me make it work. So I’ll help you fix Total Recall and make it a reality, at least the script, and you help me fix Alien .’ And that day, both movies were born.” BONUS: THE WINTER QUEEN IS DEAD Verhoeven explained why the adaptation of Boris Akunin’s Russian novel he was producing is no longer happening. ” The Winter Queen fell into the wrong hands, so it will not be made,” he said. “I think the time might have passed for this kind of lightness that was in the movie – nowadays everything is so hard and serious. It would have been a very light adventure story at the end of the 19th century, Russians – I mean, played by Americans or English [laughs] but I don’t think that’s going to be made, no. I would have loved to do that five years ago.” Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .

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Colin Farrell’s Total Recall Remake ‘Was Not Good’ And 8 Other Revelations From Paul Verhoeven

RoboCop Remake Gets Fan Service Out of the Way Early in Viral Video

Paul Verhoeven and Ed Neumeier’s dystopian action-adventure flick RoboCop (which I was too young to realize was a satire upon release) rolled off the assembly line before viral videos had been invented. Just imagine if these. . .marginally clever distractions had existed back in 1987. Heck, I’m sure we’d all be offering bids on lots in Delta City “for a dollar!” The forthcoming remake of RoboCop (here you can take a pause to sigh, wonder why you are surprised that there’s a RoboCop remake coming, then continue on) launched its fake corporate site recently, hawking the wares from Omni Corp. Omni Corp – called Omni Consumer Products in the original – is the privatized company contracted with cleaning up the streets of Detroit using whatever bloody, brutal means necessary. RoboCop’s most famous scene is the presentation of the robot ED-209 in the OCP board room, wherein a computer glitch makes swiss cheese out of a poor schnook named Mr. Kinney. The producers of the new RoboCop , who’d’ve had nerds with pitchforks at the studio gate if ED-209 wasn’t in the pic, have included a version in the new continuity and are wisely revealing him now so we won’t have to sit and wonder when it will happen during the film. (Oh, if only Rise of the Planet of the Apes had thought of this before Draco Malfoy nearly gaffed-up the film with is “madhouse” and “damned dirty” line readings.) The design of the new ED-209 looks like a sleeker, pointier version of the original – like ED Senior mated with a Lamborghini. The video itself is on par with what we have come to expect from fanboy movies’ viral vids, but only teases what RoboCop himself will look like. All said, whoever came up with the line “we’ve got the future under control” definitely earned their pay that day. Previously: New RoboCop Joel Kinnaman discussed the “gritty” reboot with Movieline . Follow Movieline on Twitter .

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RoboCop Remake Gets Fan Service Out of the Way Early in Viral Video

RoboCop Remake Gets Fan Service Out of the Way Early in Viral Video

Paul Verhoeven and Ed Neumeier’s dystopian action-adventure flick RoboCop (which I was too young to realize was a satire upon release) rolled off the assembly line before viral videos had been invented. Just imagine if these. . .marginally clever distractions had existed back in 1987. Heck, I’m sure we’d all be offering bids on lots in Delta City “for a dollar!” The forthcoming remake of RoboCop (here you can take a pause to sigh, wonder why you are surprised that there’s a RoboCop remake coming, then continue on) launched its fake corporate site recently, hawking the wares from Omni Corp. Omni Corp – called Omni Consumer Products in the original – is the privatized company contracted with cleaning up the streets of Detroit using whatever bloody, brutal means necessary. RoboCop’s most famous scene is the presentation of the robot ED-209 in the OCP board room, wherein a computer glitch makes swiss cheese out of a poor schnook named Mr. Kinney. The producers of the new RoboCop , who’d’ve had nerds with pitchforks at the studio gate if ED-209 wasn’t in the pic, have included a version in the new continuity and are wisely revealing him now so we won’t have to sit and wonder when it will happen during the film. (Oh, if only Rise of the Planet of the Apes had thought of this before Draco Malfoy nearly gaffed-up the film with is “madhouse” and “damned dirty” line readings.) The design of the new ED-209 looks like a sleeker, pointier version of the original – like ED Senior mated with a Lamborghini. The video itself is on par with what we have come to expect from fanboy movies’ viral vids, but only teases what RoboCop himself will look like. All said, whoever came up with the line “we’ve got the future under control” definitely earned their pay that day. Previously: New RoboCop Joel Kinnaman discussed the “gritty” reboot with Movieline . Follow Movieline on Twitter .

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RoboCop Remake Gets Fan Service Out of the Way Early in Viral Video

Jeremiah Johnson Blu-ray: Robert Redford’s Unforgiving Western Adventure Turns 40

The film : Jeremiah Johnson (1972), newly available on Blu-ray via Warner Home Video. Why it’s an Inessential Essential : The audio commentary on the new Blu-ray of Jeremiah Johnson suggests that director Sydney Pollack’s time helming the serio-comic 1972 Western mirrored his inexperienced protagonist’s uphill struggle to survive in pioneer America. Before making Jeremiah Johnson, Pollack directed episodes of such western tv shows as Frontier Circus and The Tall Man and even a feature-length western called The Scalphunters (1968). Still, Pollack is not normally associated with Westerns. And after hearing him talk about some of the travails he had filming Jeremiah Johnson , it’s easy to see why the film was the late filmmaker’s only Western. On the commentary track (originally recorded for the film’s DVD issue) featuring Pollack, Redford and co-writer John Milius, Redford describes Johnson as a “novice tenderfoot” who’s just getting the lay of uncharted Western territory. He has no idea how to survive in the American wilderness as a trapper. In fact, Johnson’s naïveté is often a great source of humor, as when Johnson is attacked by a grizzly bear that fellow trapper Chris “Bear Claw” Lapp (Will Geer) steers into Johnson’s path. Johnson’s story, which is roughly based on Raymond Thorp and Robert Bunker’s non-fiction book Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson , is about how an inexperienced man learned to adapt in order to survive. His dreams of frontier life are almost never realized in the way he imagines they will be; forces beyond Johnson’s control always ultimately determine the circumstances by which he’s able to blaze his own trail. For example, Johnson adopts a young boy for a ward after the boy’s family family is massacred by Blackfoot Indians. But Johnson does this partly out of indecision; he doesn’t have the heart to say “No” to the boy’s distraught biological mother. Johnson also marries a Flathead Indian — not entirely by choice. He soon learns to see his wife as the remarkable woman she is but again, Johnson has to adjust his expectations to get even that far. How the DVD/Blu Ray Makes the Case for the Film : Pollack’s stories about the making of Jeremiah Johnson are easily the highlight of the film’s audio commentary track, including such tales as when he had to lay down chain-link fence in the snow to help the film’s trained horses cross treacherously snowy, mountainous terrain, or when he got a live grizzly to chase Redford, saying that the bear had to be teased as if it were a domesticated dog. Pollack was such a gifted raconteur that many of the minor details he relates on the audio commentary prove how effortless his total recollection of shooting Jeremiah Johnson was, like when he anticipates the moment in a scene where Redford trips while wading around in freezing water. Redford’s fall that isn’t particularly impressive, but the breezy way that Pollack anticipates the minor event certainly is. Other Interesting Trivia : Pollack’s mentality of having to get “everything done on take one” is not at all self-evident from the film’s footage, but it’s interesting hearing him talk about how, like Johnson, he made due with the resources available to him. This includes working with an “absolute minimum crew,” a number of whom were not Pollack’s first choices. He describes the film’s composers, John Rubinstein and Tim McIntire, as “kids that just auditioned with a tape.” He also matter-of-factly recalls that he “didn’t even have time to go out and get a known cinematographer,” settling for Duke Callaghan, with whom Pollack had previously collaborated on some TV projects. So when Pollack remarks, “If you see how deep the snow is, you see there’s no such thing as take two,” and you see how beautiful Jeremiah Johnson turned out, you know that Pollack didn’t just do the best job he could with the limited resources available to him. Jeremiah Johnson is in fact a testament to Pollack’s consummate ability to roll with whatever punches rained down on him. PREVIOUS INESSENTIAL ESSENTIALS The Last Temptation of Christ The Sitter Citizen Ruth The Broken Tower Dogville Night Call Nurses Strange Fruit: The Beatles’ Apple Records Simon Abrams is a NY-based freelance film critic whose work has been featured in outlets like The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Vulture and Esquire. Additionally, some people like his writing, which he collects at Extended Cut .

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Jeremiah Johnson Blu-ray: Robert Redford’s Unforgiving Western Adventure Turns 40

Elizabeth Berkley’s Showgirls Dream Revisited

When you get a chance, go read Dennis Hensley’s interviews with Elizabeth Berkley and Paul Verhoeven from the days before Showgirls was a cult cause célèbre. It’s worth every minute: “Oh my God, I just saw it like a week ago. You have to understand, I’ve been working at this since I was like 5 years old so it was pretty overwhelming. I sat in the screening room by myself. The lights went down and I started to cry because it was just overwhelming at first. I’m such a perfectionist, but a certain point, was able to get lost in the story, which was a good sign to me. I really thought that I was watching another girl.” Oh, you wish , honey. [ Dennis Hensley via The Hairpin ]

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Elizabeth Berkley’s Showgirls Dream Revisited

Starship Troopers Is Being Rebooted

After devolving into a series of direct-to-video sequels (with a 2012 anime film on the way), Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi action farce Starship Troopers , based on Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel, is reportedly getting rebooted at Sony under producer Neal Moritz. Onboard for scripting duties are writing partners Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz, who most recently earned credits on Thor , X-Men: First Class , Fringe , and Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles . (They also wrote Agent Cody Banks . Yep.) There’s just one question: Who could possibly fill Casper van Dien’s bug-stomping boots? [ Vulture ]

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Starship Troopers Is Being Rebooted

Don’t Worry, the Best Part of Total Recall Will Show Up in Len Wiseman’s Remake

Director Len Wiseman may not be taking Colin Farrell ‘s Doug Quaid to Mars in his “realistic,” more Philip K. Dicksian Total Recall remake, and his version may be “a hard PG-13” instead of the original film’s R-rating. But rest assured, he’s staying true to the best part of Paul Verhoeven’s Arnie -starring 1990 classic: The three-breasted woman. “You can’t make a Total Recall without certain things,” Wiseman told Collider at Comic-Con . Indeed. [ Collider ]

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Don’t Worry, the Best Part of Total Recall Will Show Up in Len Wiseman’s Remake

Losing My Religion: Four New Movies That Could Tick Off The Faithful

As Easter is celebrated the world over, what better way to mark the holiest holiday in Christianity than to note four new in-the-works movies that are sure to cause dissent and controversy amongst the faithful? Soul sister site Deadline examined the increasing power of the religious filmgoer and picked out a quartet of flicks that are sure to be dubbed sacrilegious by some. Throw another crucifix in the urine bucket and take a look!

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Losing My Religion: Four New Movies That Could Tick Off The Faithful