Paul Verhoeven goes to war

WHEN asked why there is so much moral ambiguity in his films, notably in “Black Book,” the World War II thriller that opened here last week, Paul Verhoeven volunteers a story from his boyhood in Holland. During the last winter of the war, everyone in Holland was starving -- it was known as the Hunger Winter. Battered by Allied attacks, the occupying Germans took any available food for themselves.

The 68-year-old filmmaker recalls his father going on bicycle trips with tires made out of slats of wood, since there was no rubber to be found. When his father would return with a piece of cheese and a slip of bread, the family would dance with joy. Everyone was too hungry to brood over the fact that the family’s benefactor was a grocer who was a Nazi collaborator.

“He gave the food to us because my father, a schoolteacher, had given his son a good education,” Verhoeven recalls. “So even as a young boy I felt that people who did terrible things were still human enough to care about their neighbors.”

Made by the man behind such rude, revenge-filled Hollywood fare as “RoboCop” and “Basic Instinct,” “Black Book” teems with deception and betrayal, offering a far more mordant view of the Dutch underground than “Soldier of Orange,” Verhoeven’s celebrated 1977 film that casts the Resistance in a heroic light. “Black Book” has a heroine, played by Carice van Houten, but she’s a Verhoeven-esque heroine, a wily survivor who uses sex as a weapon.

A Jewish cabaret singer in hiding on a Dutch farm, she joins the Resistance when her family is slaughtered by the Nazis, taking on the assignment of seducing the local Gestapo chief, played by Sebastian Koch, costar of “The Lives of Others.” She not only carries off the seduction but falls in love as well. The plot takes many turns from there, but Verhoeven manages to keep us morally off balance on almost every front, first presenting a lovely Jew in the arms of a handsome Nazi, then portraying a Nazi officer as far more sympathetic than the Dutch Resistance fighters who barely disguise their contempt for Jews.

At breakfast one morning near his home in Pacific Palisades, Verhoeven is full of charm and bluff candor, especially when discussing his homeland. “The Dutch have been saved from disgrace by Anne Frank, because that one example made people think the Dutch were all good,” Verhoeven says. “But the reality was that there was lots of latent anti-Semitism. If you say a ‘Jewish tip’ in Dutch, it means no tip at all. These things have been pushed under the carpet, which of course only made me want to use them in a story.”

For those of us who are accustomed to seeing World War II treated in good-versus-evil or us-versus-them terms, it can be a disorienting experience -- it certainly was for many “Black Book” reviewers -- to be faced with so much moral complexity in a drama about the Nazis and those who opposed them. Maybe you need to have grown up in Europe to appreciate the gray areas.

Most of the events in “Black Book,” written by Gerard Soeteman, Verhoeven’s longtime collaborator, are based in reality, including the story of a lawyer in The Hague who had a black book filled with the names of traitors and collaborators. “The biggest thing we learned [doing research] was that during the war, it wasn’t all heroism,” he says. “There were a lot of people collaborating and sleeping with the Germans. It was only after Stalingrad, when the Germans looked as if they were going to lose, that the Resistance started booming.”

Clearly, for Dutch filmmakers, the period continues to hold great drama. “If you’re me and you look for powerful stories where life is always on the line, you look to World War II,” he explains. “For nearly 200 years, Holland had been a peaceful, neutral country. Even in World War I, we weren’t occupied. We didn’t suffer. Then suddenly, in 1940, the war came to us and people had to show their true character. That’s drama, when people’s real soul has to show itself.”

The status of Verhoeven’s own soul has often been in question. Conventional wisdom views him as a Hollywood whore, the celebrated foreign filmmaker who sold his soul to make venal thrillers with Sharon Stone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The truth is more complicated. To hear Verhoeven tell it, he was driven out of Holland when Dutch film funding was taken over by prudish left-wing zealots.

In the 1980s, the newly politicized Dutch film committees took umbrage at the blatant sex and subversion in films like Verhoeven’s “Spetters” and “The Fourth Man.” “They started looking at the values of the films -- their values, of course, not mine,” Verhoeven says. “They were very offended by ‘Spetters,’ especially the sex and drugs and gang rape. They said I was perverted and decadent and wouldn’t give me any more money.”

Verhoeven took the criticism personally. “I call it left-wing fascism. They were completely dogmatic. If something didn’t fit their ideology, it must be wrong. It’s very much like the Christian right-wing thinking in this country. The only difference was that at least the Marxists only say the economy is on their side. With the fundamentalists, it’s God who’s on their side, which is even worse.”

Amid the turmoil, Verhoeven was jolted awake in the middle of the night by a phone call from none other than Steven Spielberg, who’d seen “Soldier of Orange.” “He said, ‘You have to come to America,’ ” he recalls. “He said he’d introduce me to the studio people and that I could make interesting, bigger movies here.”

Verhoeven sought the advice of his wife. “She told me, ‘You have to do it; take a risk. Enough’s enough.’ I couldn’t stand going to people who were inferior to me in filmmaking but who had the ability to say no to my projects.”

Apparently no one told Verhoeven that if you are offended by the idea of artistic half-wits passing judgment on your film projects, the last place you should go is Hollywood. For a time, Verhoeven survived as a director-for-hire on commercial projects. Though he had almost no interest in science fiction, he did good work on “RoboCop,” a sci-fi revenge fantasy, aided immeasurably by the presence of producer Jon Davison and writer-producer Edward Neumeier.

“They protected me against [my] stupid European thinking,” he says. As an example, Verhoeven says that after reading the script, he decided that “RoboCop” costars Peter Weller and Nancy Allen should be lovers in the film. “I thought it would make the film more interesting, but then I realized I’d made the hero of an action movie into Francois Mitterrand. I learned you can’t be so European. Whenever I’ve tried to be more personal, it hasn’t worked.”

After “RoboCop,” he had hits with “Total Recall” and “Basic Instinct.” But his career came to a crashing halt with “Showgirls,” a 1995 fiasco that seemed to encapsulate all of Verhoeven’s worst excesses. “There was so much outrage that I was morally blacklisted,” he says. “People were shocked by the nudity and bare breasts, especially the critics, who of course couldn’t admit they were shocked, so they wrote, ‘Oh, it’s so awful and badly done.’ ”

Verhoeven shrugs. “I didn’t think it was so bad. But ultimately the biggest problem with ‘Showgirls’ is that there was too much of me, right?”

Verhoeven’s dilemma is that in Hollywood the era of personal filmmaking is over. The directors who are valued are pragmatic craftsmen, not provocateurs. He admits that his last American film, “Hollow Man,” was so impersonal that “you could’ve given it to any competent American director and it wouldn’t have been so different.”

Though it has received a mixed reception from critics here, “Black Book” was a big hit in Holland and has led to more work for Verhoeven, who’d been spinning his wheels. “I needed to do something that led me back to my passion, and it turned out that it led me back to Holland,” he says quietly. “I have to do what I feel. I’m only good when I read a script and I can find myself inside the story.”

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. Questions or criticism can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.