Paul Verhoeven’s favourite Alfred Hitchcock movie: “He is able to seduce you”
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(Credits: Georges Biard)
Paul Verhoeven is a man who knows how fickle the movie business can be. In the space of five years, he made RoboCop, Total Recall and Basic Instinct, three highly acclaimed films in different genres that have since become icons of their respective eras. Then, three years on from that, he turned out Showgirls, widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. Although, it should be said that the film has developed a cult following in recent years.
Despite this slip-up, the Dutchman should still be considered a directing dynamo. His films are extremely provocative, often laden with sex, violence, and taboo. His desire to challenge audiences is probably what drew him to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, another auteur who enjoyed leaving audiences slack-jawed in their seats.
“What I admire so much about Hitchcock is that he is able to seduce you and push reality to the side,” he told The New Yorker of his British idol. “[He convinces you] that this is all true.” Verhoeven spoke of his favourite Hitchcock movie, revealing that, for the longest time, it had been Vertigo. “But, in the last couple of years,” he admitted. “I’m more inclined to put as number one: North by Northwest. The famous scene, the plane that is trying to kill him – of course, if you think about it, what I would have done is take a gun and drive by him and shoot him! Instead of doing that plane. But the scene is so well done that you accept it.”
“I think of the lightness of Cary Grant in the movie,” he continued. “And the fact that Eva Marie Saint is fully promiscuous, isn’t she? She has an affair with James Mason, and she is in the train with Cary Grant. He had to manoeuvre [because of] censorship, of course, but you don’t even notice. My scriptwriter Ed Neumeier, who did RoboCop with Michael Miner and also Starship Troopers – we’re working on a Washington thriller, and what we feel is that it should have the lightness of North by Northwest.”
The similarities between Verhoeven and Hitchcock’s respective works have not gone unnoticed. He once told Index, “Perhaps all of my movies are unconsciously influenced by Hitchcock because I studied him so thoroughly in my twenties.” He also once listed Vertigo among his ten favourite movies, although that may have been before he had his North by Northwest realisation.
Verhoeven’s most recent picture was Benedetta, a 2021 film about a real-life Italian nun who defied sexual norms in the 17th century. “[Nudity and sexuality] has not only disappeared in Hollywood movies; it has disappeared in general,” mused the director, who was in his mid-1980s when the movie came out. “There is a fear of sexuality and the portrayal of sexuality, though we are well aware that without sexuality there would not be a species.”
When asked if he used intimacy coordinators on the film, Verhoeven replied, “I didn’t even know at that time that such a thing existed in the United States.” He continued, “All the scenes were storyboarded, and all the storyboards were given to the actors so that they knew exactly what it was about, and if they would have problems they could change it… When we were doing “Basic Instinct,” I did the same thing. I gave the storyboards to Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone and Jeanne Tripplehorn. They discussed it and pointed out some stuff where they felt that the angles should be a bit different or a bit closer. We shot it all as a choreography.”
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