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Will Black Book reopen some doors back in Hollywood?
“Hope so. I live here. I live in the United States. In some way I thought perhaps it's good or handy and will change the perception of my work that I'm only doing big science fiction/action movies and that I can work with actors, and basically it's not all bang-bang shoot-shoot. And that I can also work let's say with a budget like this, about $21 million, instead of the $100 million of Hollow Man and Starship Troopers, which gave me partly a bad name I would say. I was typecast also in it. I tried to get out of that with Basic Instinct but then closed the door with Showgirls. So then the only possibilities left for me were science fiction. They didn't trust me with anything else anymore but they still trusted me with science fiction.
I hope that this will make clear to the Hollywood community that basically I can do other things than they thought. Yes, sure. On the other hand, of course I want to make the movie. An additional value might be that. But on the other hand, I don't want to wait to see if that works or doesn't work. I started already setting up this other project, the Azazel script - The Winter Queen - which we're supposed to shoot in July in Petersberg. So I continue, but that will be in English. That will be an English-American coproduction.”
And it will be starring Milla Jovovich?
“Yes.”
What did you like about making films in America compared to Europe?
“I learned from the United States the importance of narrative I would say. If you look at my Dutch movies, you will see that they are not driven very much by narrative. It's scenes that are correlated. If you look at one of the best, interesting European movies of the last 50 years, which I think is Dolce Vita by Fellini or even 8 ½, it's all big scenes that have something to do with each other. Yes there is a journalist that wants to be an artist but he ends up in the gutter, but the scenes are much more important than the story. I think American movies are driven by narrative. Sometimes overdriven, of course, by narrative.
Sometimes in the last couple of years, the narrative also has disappeared a little bit but I have always admired that, always thought it would be great to have a movie that you don't have to make a brilliant cut or a shocking cut to go to the next scene. If you look at Turkish Delight or whatever, you see that I make many cuts basically because there is no narrative and I have to make the audience wake up again. I think if you have a narrative like in Black Book, I think that interest in me for narrative comes from the American cinema really, that I learned in these 20 years. There is something to say about not putting scenes together in a certain way, but also having something underneath that makes the audience want to see more, to put question marks. What's going to happen to these two people? Is there a plot? Is there something behind this? Is there a mystery? Are they going to get…? It's very silly but they are dramatic questions.
I think that has always been a strong point of American cinema, I feel. That is nice. I imported that in this movie and I asked my script writer to follow me there. I pushed it towards thriller and detective story so that there would be a thing like that. Then of course there is this whole industry that is absolutely magnificent. I mean, yeah, the industry is fantastic. There is so much talent in the United States. I'm not even talking about actors, of course that's clear too, but the crews are so specifically detailed. They can do everything you want basically and nothing is impossible. There is certainly something to say that there is money. I mean, that makes life a lot easier than going through the nightmare I had to go through with this movie. I was never sure that I would shoot the next week because the money would not come in. You're working with a crew that has not been paid for months. They do it because they like that I did this movie and that it was a big movie and a European movie so they stayed. Otherwise they would have left. Now that is not a pleasant feeling, to work with a crew that is partially not paid and to go do it. I felt that was a bit nightmarish and I feel it's the case with every independent movie. There are many of them that you start and they fall apart. It's very even difficult to get American actors for independent movies nowadays because there have been so many failures that they put the time aside and one week before shooting, the money's not there.
We shot the exteriors in Holland and the interiors in Babelsberg in Berlin. Post-production was in England so basically it was hopping countries all the time. There are many advantages to be in one location where the industry is together and all the people are there and there's enormous talent. There's also a pleasure, of course, in the multiple ethnicities that are in the United States actor-wise, that it's not all white. There are many, many shades, so I really like that from the beginning. I thought it was great to have all kinds of different actors from Asian or African-American or whatever, that you could use that and change the appearance. That's all great and Los Angeles is a wonderful mixture of all kind of cultures and faces and all that stuff, so I think that's all great.
But I felt that I was driven in a corner, yes. Not that anybody did that by purpose or something. I did it myself and basically I know that I closed a lot of doors by doing Showgirls. People basically got very disgusted. I felt a little bit that I was also in a Hollywood prison. It was okay because I could do the sequel to Basic Instinct 2… I could have done and I could have done the sequel to Starship Troopers and whatever and many other science fiction movies that in my opinion were not very different from what I had done already. I could do that but I felt that was also wrong. So ultimately it seems to be the right decision to say, ‘Okay, let me go and do something else which I believe in and that's really mine and do it for a reasonable price and reasonable salary and make a personal movie.’"
