The only movies Paul Verhoeven rewatches on an annual basis
For a director who hit the greatest heights of their career dealing with salaciousness and social satire drenched in the excesses of their time period, Paul Verhoeven has a surprising affinity for the classics and the legends who made them.
Of course, there’s no rule that says a filmmaker who specialised in gun-toting action flicks, gratuitous erotic thrillers, and effects-heavy genre fare isn’t allowed to spend their free time revisiting some of the finest work created during Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’, but that doesn’t make it any easier to imagine Verhoeven winding down after a hard day’s shooting on Showgirls with a David Lean masterpiece.
The Dutch troublemaker’s first foray into American cinema couldn’t have gone much better when the subversive sci-fi stylings of RoboCop and Total Recall led him into Basic Instinct, a controversial thriller that seized the zeitgeist and dominated the box office to establish Verhoeven as one of the biggest and most bankable directors in Tinseltown.
All three were vastly different pictures, but they all carried the same ethos in the broadest sense: in Verhoeven’s world, more is always more, whether that’s the amount of bodies being dropped onscreen, the volume of blood being splashed across the frame, the close-ups of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bulging biceps, or the scene from Basic Instinct everybody knows even if they’ve never seen it.
Alfred Hitchcock was the single biggest influence on Verhoeven when he was first making headway as a director, which is ironic in itself considering the ‘Master of Suspense’ was famously prudish when it came to the prospect of capturing on-camera titillation, and he’d have been red in the cheeks were he around to have the plot of Showgirls relayed directly to his ears.
Verhoeven has done epic in terms of budgets and expense, but he’s never crafted a genuine cinematic spectacle of the kind Hollywood used to love so much. The days of Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis, Spartacus and the like threatened to make a comeback when every major studio jumped on the post-Gladiator bandwagon at the turn of the millennium, but he never felt compelled to scratch that itch.
Despite that, he revealed to Screen Daily that Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago are the only films he’ll rewatch at least once a year. As far as epics go, they don’t come much more epic in every sense of the word than the former, with Verhoeven far from the only world-renowned director to worship at the altar of Lean’s mesmerising desert-set masterpiece.
The latter was along similar lines but with an added dash of romance thrown in for good measure, and it would seem he still can’t get enough. The pair released three years apart in the early 1960s and have stood the test of time, so much so that Verhoeven can’t contemplate the concept of going an entire calendar year without checking in to see if they still hold up as well as ever.
