The only Paul Verhoeven movie he admits he can’t defend: “It really is not me anymore”
In the late 1990s, Paul Verhoeven was pondering his next move. Critics had torn apart his controversial 1997 sci-fi masterpiece Starship Troopers, dubbing the movie fascist and complaining about its ultraviolence and sexual content. In later years, the movie would be critically reevaluated as it became clear its satirical elements went over the heads of most of the reviewers.
However, at the time, Verhoeven felt he needed to play it a little safer with his next film – but when he did just that, it wound up being the only one of his movies that he couldn’t defend. In fact, it chased him away from Hollywood for two decades.
When the Hollow Man script came across Verhoeven’s desk, he immediately recognised it as a more conventionally commercial prospect than Starship Troopers. The movie, written by Air Force One and End of Days scribe Andrew W Marlowe, updated the classic “Invisible Man” story to tell the tale of a scientist driven insane when an experimental serum renders him invisible. Verhoeven knew the movie would live and die by its visual effects, so he personally storyboarded it to within an inch of its life. After all, if he decided to alter a camera movement or change the blocking of actors on the day, it could cost the production up to $300,000 to change the effects accordingly.
The first bad omen for Hollow Man came when screenwriting legend William Goldman was asked to rewrite the script. In 2000, the All the President’s Men writer told a Cornell University screenwriting seminar that he thought Marlowe’s script was terrible. Still, he was enthused by the prospect of working on a movie with such pioneering special effects, so he met with Verhoeven.
To Goldman’s surprise, the Dutch maverick told him in no uncertain terms that he, in fact, liked Marlowe’s script and would ignore any rewrites he attempted to push through. A wry Goldman said, “So, basically, I started rewriting for a director, knowing he wouldn’t like anything that I was rewriting. I haven’t seen the movie, but I gather it sucks, although the special effects are terrific. I’ll never know if it could have been saved.”
Ultimately, Verhoeven would probably believe that the movie couldn’t have been saved – because he hated what he created. Even though the film was a hit at the box office, making the most money of any of his films since Basic Instinct in 1992, he was deeply dissatisfied with the final product and his part in it. He once told Empire magazine, “It is very boring. I felt that I failed to transform it. What I had made was an on-demand studio movie.”
Even though making a commercial Hollywood programmer was exactly what Verhoeven set out to do, in practice, he realised it went against all his instincts as an artist. Indeed, by trying to fit himself within the confines of what Hollywood expects from a “hired gun” studio director, it struck Verhoeven that there were 20 other directors who would have been perfectly capable of making the same film.
In 2013, he confessed that Hollow Man was “the first movie that I made that I thought I should not have made. It made money and this and that, but it really is not me anymore. I think many other people could have done that. I don’t think many people could have made Robocop that way, or either Starship Troopers.” In 2016, he added, “I’ve never done a movie that, in retrospect, I cannot defend. I can defend Showgirls, but not Hollow Man.”
Sadly, Verhoeven felt so depressed about the $190million hit he despised that he decided to call it a day in Hollywood for two decades. The three feature films he has directed since have all been European productions. However, in 2022, it was announced that he would finally return to American film with the as-yet-unreleased erotic thriller Young Sinner. Hopefully, it is a film Verhoeven can stand behind, unlike the last one he made in Tinseltown.
