RoboCop and Total Recall director Paul Verhoeven says he’d make another sci-fi film in the vein of those classics if it were offered. “I haven’t seen it,” he said.
RoboCop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers, released in 1987, 1990 and 1997 respectively, are among the greatest sci-fi films ever made. Darkly, violently satirical and loaded with sly humour, they carry all the manic energy of the director behind them – Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven.
By the millennium, however, the independent studio system that gave Verhoeven the latitude to make those films had gone, and 2000’s Hollow Man – an invisible Kevin Bacon thriller even Verhoeven admitted he was disappointed with – marked the end of his movie-making period in America. After that, Verhoeven made smaller-scale but no less edgy films like Black Book, Elle and the saucy nun drama, Benedetta.
In a new interview with Metrograph's Eric Kohn (as picked up by IndieWire), Verhoeven talks in detail about those earlier sci-fi films and the upbringing that led to them. It’s a terrific interview, but there’s one particularly eye-catching line worth highlighting: when asked whether he missed making studio films, Verhoeven replied, “If someone were to give me a script like RoboCop or Total Recall, I wouldn’t hesitate to do that.”
Unfortunately, it sounds as though a genre script that matches those earlier films’ calibre simply hasn’t landed on the filmmakers desk. “I haven’t seen it,” he added.
Verhoeven’s latest project does have one significant connection to his sci-fi era, however: Young Sinner is not only his first American film in almost a quarter of a century, but it also reunites him with Ed Neumeir, the co-writer of RoboCop and Starship Troopers. Verhoeven describes it as a political thriller set in Washington, and interesting enough that it prompted him to return to the US to make it.
Although it isn’t futuristic, like RoboCop, Verhoeven describes Young Sinner as “set more like perhaps next year… This will be a brutal film. The main character is an evangelical woman. There are so many wonderful scenes in it.”
It also sounds as though it’ll be as sexually frank as his other films of recent years (“Perhaps the sex will be a problem,” he says) and when asked whether it’d likely be ‘too controversial’ to be nominated for an Oscar, he replied, “I’m sure.”
A synopsis for Young Sinner on IMDb currently reads: “A young staffer in Washington DC working for a powerful senator is drawn into a web of international intrigue and danger.”
Going by Verhoeven’s description, it sounds like we’re in for a more bracing take on the political thriller than we got in say, Tony Scott’s Enemy Of The State.
More on Young Sinner and Paul Verhoeven’s other filmmaking antics as we get it.
