Paul Verhoeven

[final_cut]

Jag har samma problem - fast jag bränner halva min lön på udda filmer och inte mainstream. Alltså sånt som är svårare att få tag på (se subdvd.com)

[_nemo_]

Jag köper sånt ja gillar :)

[final_cut]

[citat=_nemo_]Jag köper sånt ja gillar :)[/citat]

 

Det gör jag med. Men får räkna med en hel mängd bakslag som bränner hål i plånboken. Däremot får man bättre självförtroende som filmare.

[final_cut]

TOTAL RECALL 3-DISC EDITION är tillfälligt slut...DAMMIT!

[final_cut]

...och på tal om den nya utgåvan på discshop; ni som har köpt den - är det inte samma sak som den tidigare utgåvan med extramaterial, fast här får man en cd-rom/dvd -skiva på köpet...? Plus ett kommentarspår av Jost Vacano...

[final_cut]

Fick åter tag på Verhoevens biografi; nedan följer lite utdrag om relationen mellan Verhoeven och Joe Eszterhas, som tidigare kommenterats i denna tråd, men även arbetet kring Basic Instinct i allmänhet. Ha överseende med att jag förkortat texten något avsevärt, om ni skulle undra var själen har tagit vägen.

 

(Joe Eszterhas hade hoppats på att Milos Forman skulle regissera Basic Instinct, eftersom de jobbat ihop tidigare. Och där kommer vi in i texten)

 

The news about Paul Verhoeven´s involvement caused confusion to Joe Eszterhas: "I had never met Paul; I liked RoboCop, but hated Total Recall. - - This was the beginning of what was to be a long struggle. Paul Verhoeven proposed some amendments to the script which did not go down well

with Eszterhas. "Prudish and moralistic" was Verhoeven´s judgement, and without hesitation he proposed a lesbian love scene. Joe Eszterhas was not enthusiastic: "No way, Paul, that´s sensationalism". Eszterhas: "It was the first time I had met the man and we got into a very, very heated argument. He saw that I was really pissed off and at one point said, `Look, I am the director, ja? And you are the writer. So I am right and you are wrong, ja?´. He said it with a very aggressive tone of voice, so I yelled, ´If you say that to me one more fucking time I will come across the table and hit you!´.

 

- - At the end of February 1991 Joe Eszterhas received a telephone call. The slightly rewritten version of Basic Instinct was on its way to him. I called Paul and said: "Listen, I got the script - what is going on?" Verhoeven cheerfully mentioned his way of working with Gerard Soetman, the scriptwriter on his Dutch films, where they sent each other versions they had rewritten seperately, in the hope of meeting somewhere in the middle. Verhoeven was very familiar with this way of working, but in Hollywood, that city of large egos, it seemed impossible. He [Verhoeven] simply said: "Gary Goldman and I tried different things and none of them worked. I was wrong - how would you feel about coming back on the movie, Joe?" Eszterhas: "Now that´s a very rare, ego-less thing to do in Hollywood - and I really admire the man for it".

 

- - - A month later panic broke out again. Somehow a copy of the script had got into the hands of some American groups campaigning for homosexual rights. Shocked, they concluded that the story portrayed bisexual women as psychotic murderers - and that, in their view, had been done deliberately. They demanded a full explanation. During preperation for shooting in San Francisco´s Bay Area, the epicentre of gay America, the Queer Nation group staged a demonstration on 10 April 1991. GLAAD(Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation): "The film industry bears a grave responsibility for the perpertuation of stereotypes and the dramatic increase in homophobic violence over the past few years". This charged language gave Paul Verhoeven the feeling he was back in the Netherlands for a moment. His work had become the target of campaiging groups as early as 1973, when the feminist-inspired Vrouwen Bevrijdings Front had organized a picketline at theatres showing Turkish Delight. He explained that he was in no way hostile towards any form of sexual orientation, pointing to the fact that in his film The Fourth Man he had portrayed the homosexuality of the main character

as completely natural. This achieved little. In an attempt to make peace, the film-makers and activists met on neutral ground. On the evening of 24 April 1992, in the conference hall of San Francisco Hyatt Hotel, director Verhoeven, scriptwriter Eszterhas and producer Alan Marshall sat around the table with representatives of GLAAD, Queer Nation and ACT UP. The proposals put forward by the activists included, among other things, that the leading role played by Michael Douglas should be rewritten for Kathleen Turner as a lesbian police inspector. In addition, Catherine Tramell and her girlfriend Roxy should murder not only men but women, to prevent the public from viewing them as archetypical man-haters. Paul Verhoeven shook his head as he listened to these suggestions, but Joe Eszterhas said that he was sympathetic to the arguments. Thus Eszterhas suddenly found himself in a painful as well as ironic position. "I was arguing to make changes to my own script and it was the director who was saying, `No, your script is fine, we won´t make any changes´". Again the writer retired. Again with doors slamming. Michael Douglas: "With Joe chickening out, Paul got really excited. He loves debate, he loves controversy".

 

(Efter premiären)

Verhoeven recieved support from the viewers. It seemed to Verhoeven that all these criticisms came from outsiders who in their hankering after politically correct action had lost all sight of reality. "But what I was

most disappointed by is that, after seeing the film, the activists did not even take the trouble to write a note, as if to say ´Sorry, we were wrong´". The troubled relationship between Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas had a happier ending. Both value their relationship. Eszterhas: "I am happy that he had the wisdom to turn down my changes. It is a dazzling piece of entertainment, with many great layers and I think that ultimatly the movie will be judged as a classic of the genre".

 

- - - The ambiguity of the ending went to far for reviewer David Hansen, as is obvious from his remarks in Newsweek: "It is hard to believe the man who made The Fourth Man found a shred of psychological plausibility in the Eszterhas-script ... Funniest of all is that this whodunnit gets so tangled up in its twists that half the audience can´t figure out who did dunit when it´s over".

 

- - - To put Sharon Stone in a hostile enviroment without underwear was a decidedly Paul Verhoeven-type stunt. Joe Eszterhas: "What he did som brilliantly - because this whole scene is about using her sexuality to beat these guys up - is that he made it much more direct with that flash. When I saw the movie for the first time , the entire theatre went ´Oooooooh, my God!´ when that happened. They couldn´t believe what they were seeing - including my sixteen-year-old son who was sitting next to me. After the show, we walked out of the theatre and my son, who had really loved the movie, said: ´God, dad, God - that scene - how did you come up with the idea of doing that scene where she flashes´ ? And I said, ´Sorry son, it was all Paul Verhoeven´s idea´ ". It was Sharon Stone who most objected to it. During the publicizing of Basic Instinct at the Cannes Festival in May 1992, Stone said that she had been misled by Verhoeven. He had promised her that the shot would be taken in semi-darkness. He had proved to be a liar. The reporters wanted to know whether this was one of thos typical love-hate relationships between star and director. "Yes", Stone had answered, "Paul loves me and I hate him".

 

 

(Ur samma bok, angående mötet med Francis For Coppola som jag tidigare nämnt i en annan tråd)

 

The tour also led to Francis Ford Coppola´s American Zoetrope studio in Hollywood. There Paul made a typical Verhoeven joke: he pointed out to his famous American colleague that it is not such achievement to make a film

like Apocalypse Now with such an enormous budget - no, what was really difficult was to make a quality film like Soldier of Orange with a small budget, as he had done. It did not result in collaboration between Coppola and Verhoeven.