Tax breaks and tedium: Why the worst director in history continues to make awful movies
In most walks of life, being consistently terrible at any given job over an extended period of years while showing absolutely no signs of improvement along the way would cause the offender to be exiled into the wilderness. However, being a director isn’t exactly the average vocation.
As a result, Uwe Boll continues to helm new features on a regular basis, having unfortunately decided that the time was right to end his self-imposed retirement. The German filmmaker’s very best work could generously be described as passable, but he built his reputation on the back of making some of the worst films in the history of cinema.
While Ed Wood tends to come up more often than not whenever the conversation turns to naming the worst megaphone-wielder there’s ever been, it was at least clear in his work that the legendarily terrible auteur had passion. Sure, he had no technical proficiency, and his filmography was so bad that he became beloved as a result, but Boll has spent his decades in the business churning out nothing but dreck.
Video game adaptations House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne, and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale give the subgenre a bad name when it was plenty inconsistent in and of itself, while he used 9/11 as the backdrop to the ‘comedic’ opening of Postal, with his segue into more standard action-packed fare never managing to come anywhere close to scraping itself off the bottom of the barrel.
He can’t be faulted for his self-confidence, anyway, with Boll telling Vanity Fair that many of his movies are, in fact, “underrated masterpieces,” where he also described his status as being dubbed the nadir of the directorial profession as “the biggest failure of movie critics in the history of films.” Of course, the fact he titled the video where he announced his retirement as ‘Fuck You All’ should give some indication of how he views himself as both an unsung auteur and a filmic pariah.
Naturally, the question is how the hell he keeps making them when they’re all so terrible, and the answer is a combination of tax loopholes and savvy business deals. Up until it was closed in 2006, it was entirely fine for Germans who invested their own money into productions to turn their entire investment into a tax write-off. Boll openly admitted that he had a “tax shelter fund” in Germany where “you’d basically get 50% back from the government,” ensuring that he’d get paid once distribution deals were in place.
Speaking of those distribution deals, Boll finances his own filmography through his Boll KG and Event Film Production banners, and the sheer shoddiness of them turned it into a lucrative enterprise. Due to pre-sales, DVD agreements, and international television rights, even his movies that tank thunderously at the box office have effectively turned a profit before they’ve released, with the shoestring budgets and woeful production values encouraging him to continue down such a shitty path.
Boll claimed that he would quit filmmaking if a petition for his retirement cleared a million signatures. It did, but he didn’t retire. Instead, he exited stage left of his own accord to become a restauranteur, until the announcement everyone was dreading came when it was revealed in February 2023 that First Shift was in production, which released the following year to become his first release since 2016.
It’s a simple question with an equally simple answer: how does Uwe Boll keep making movies despite being so irredeemably awful at it? Because at the end of the day, no matter how bad they are or how poorly they perform in terms of tickets or physical media sales, he’s getting paid either way.
