Paul Verhoeven: Playing with Fire

"You know, Paul, I can understand why you and I would get turned on watching babes bump and grind and lap dance, but what about the female members of the audience? Are they going to plunk down seven bucks to watch this stuff?"

"I'm a male. I made this movie for myself," he says. "I can't put myself in a position to find out if it would be OK for the females. If females don't like Showgirls, maybe the movie won't succeed, but that shouldn't be a consideration when you do it."

"Maybe not for you, but it has to be a concern of the studio executives who are worried about their $35 million investment."

"Then they shouldn't have done it," Verhoeven replies. "An artist cannot do something he thinks other people might like. I think that's blasphemy in artistic terms." I can't argue with those sentiments, and I certainly admire Verhoeven's passionate defense of art and artists, but the following questions arise. Is a movie about lap dancing art? Is a man who makes a movie about lap dancing an artist? There are, of course, myriad definitions about art, but two of my favorites are Saul Bellow's ("Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos") and Walter Pater's ("Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass"). Obviously, Verhoeven is using a different dictionary.

Artist or not, I wonder if this most headstrong of directors tests his movies with preview audiences.

"No," he says. "The test cards are extremely dangerous, because, to a large degree, people don't know what they think or feel when they start to fill in the cards, and they start thinking in conventional terms. That doesn't mean they haven't been touched by something they can't express at all on these cards."

"But what's wrong with the studio executives wanting some idea of the film's chances for success?"

"[Most studio executives] want to be safe. And I'm saying that's corrupt. Because in essence, you don't create for others. Creation is what you fee! inside and then put outside. It might be condemned, but that's the challenge. If you compromise after your first thought, then the compromise is throughout. If they'd had test cards on Basic instinct, the studio would have changed the ending."

"I would have too," I say. "I still don't know what happened at the end."

"The essence of the ending of the movie is that it is unclear," he insists. "That was one big thing about the movie--that was the newness of the movie. It doesn't say it's exactly this or that. There are people walking around who still think Jeanne Tripplehorn did it."

"Did she?" I ask.

"No. Sharon Stone did."

"Did the studio test Basic Instinct? Did you have final cut then?"

Verhoeven smiles and says, "I turned it in so late they couldn't test it."

"Can you take this opportunity to give me the definitive story on the movie's famous crotch shot? You know, Sharon Stone has told some interviewers that you betrayed her."

"Sharon Stone's a fucking liar. Right before the shot, she gave me her panties and said, 'These are a present for you. I don't need them.' Then she shot the scene and afterwards she checked it out on video and said, 'Looks good.' We left and never talked about it until she saw it in the movie. Then she got upset, because we were sitting there with her manager and her agent and everybody was saying, 'What?! What did you do?!' Then she came after me, and the rest is media history."

"Did she know you were going to cut it in such a way so that she'd be flashing a group of men?"

"Yes, of course. She asked me not to shoot it while the men were there, because she didn't want all those guys looking up her crotch, so I delayed that shot until the end of the day. Now she says I betrayed her. I mean, that's how she is. She knows it's not true."

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