Paul Verhoeven’s 10 favourite movies
Just a few short years after making his Hollywood directorial debut with 1985’s Flesh and Blood, Paul Verhoeven was firmly entrenched as one of the most bankable and often controversial filmmakers in Hollywood, one that sought to push the envelope by tackling familiar genres with style, verve, violence, and eroticism.
The smash hit trio of RoboCop, Total Recall and Basic Instinct combined to deliver excitement and excess on the grandest scale, but the director’s own favourite movies don’t have a massive amount in common with the signatures, flourishes, and penchant for grabbing headlines that would go on to define his own work.
In fact, as he revealed in a BFI Sight & Sound poll, the regularly incendiary and often inflammatory Verhoeven was a lot more indebted to the classics than one might think, given the scantily-clad and bullet-riddled oeuvre that defined him at the peak of his mainstream powers.
There are three that stand out in particular, with Verhoeven coming right out and confirming that “my favourite films are Ivan the Terrible, La Dolce Vita, and Lawrence of Arabia“. Of course, there are seven more spots to fill, and they involve some of the greatest talents to have ever stepped behind a camera, including Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder.
Focusing on his own back catalogue, Verhoeven compares the nail-biting exercises in tension that became hallmarks of Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography as the inspiration behind Basic Instinct, even if only one of the two films he mentioned made it onto his top ten: “If you are looking for influences for Basic Instinct specifically,” he said. “I was mostly influenced by my admiration for Hitchcock and my study of the director’s work, notably Vertigo and Rear Window.”
That’s about as much explanation and justification as Verhoeven offers for the entirety of his top ten, although a student of cinema with over a half-century of experience under their belt naming such classics as Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, Lang’s Metropolis, and Bergman’s The Seventh Seal among those he holds nearest and dearest doesn’t require much unpacking as to why.
Surrealist maestro Luis Buñuel also makes the cut through Los Olvidados alongside Jean Renoir’s supremely influential satire The Rules of the Game, with satirical undercurrents having been a recurring motif of Verhoeven’s output since long before he was handed a blockbuster-sized canvas on which to paint his stories.
Paul Verhoeven’s favourite movies:
- La Dolce Vita (1960, Federico Fellini)
- Ivan the Terrible Part II (1946, Sergei Eisenstein)
- Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean)
- Rashomon (1950, Akira Kurosawa)
- Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)
- The Seventh Seal (1956, Ingmar Bergman)
- The Rules of the Game (1939, Jean Renoir)
- Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang)
- Los Olvidados (1950, Luis Buñuel)
- Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder)
