How Alfred Hitchcock inspired the career of Paul Verhoeven: “All of my movies are unconsciously influenced”

Posted On November 7, 2024November 7, 2024

Known for making confrontational films chock full of violence and sexuality, Paul Verhoeven certainly capitalised on Hollywood’s increased love for nudity and action when he first traded Europe for America, enjoying mainstream success in the 1980s and 1990s with the likes of RoboCop and Total Recall.

The brash style and satirical flavour of Verhoeven’s movies were evident from the outset of his career, with his first feature, the 1971 comedy Business is Business, blending the aesthetics of softcore porn with raunchy, in-your-face humour. It’s unsurprising that he continued pushing boundaries even when armed with a blockbuster budget, most infamously the famous leg-crossing scene featuring Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.

Verhoeven’s potent blend of sensualism and action became his most identifiable cinematic trait, establishing him as one of the industry’s foremost auteurs at the apex of his career. His work was easily recognisable, but whether he even realised it or not, he’d always been operating in the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock.

He knew how to do suspense, he certainly knew his way around onscreen voyeurism, and he was no stranger to inciting controversy with button-pushing themes or salacious storyline developments. They may have been of different eras, but there was always something undeniable Hitchcockian about Verhoeven’s output.

Not that he did it intentionally, though, admitting to Index that “perhaps all of my movies are unconsciously influenced by Hitchcock because I studied him so thoroughly in my 20s,” with the filmmaker acknowledging that he’s seen his favourite flicks from the master dozens of times each.

With both films set in and around San Francisco, featuring eerily similar blonde femme fatales and a neo-noir style, the influence of Vertigo on Basic Instinct is palpable. Indeed, Verhoeven himself claims that if Hitchcock had been alive in the ‘90s, “he would have immediately bought that script and made the movie.”

Modest, as always, but not inaccurate. However, it isn’t just Basic Instinct that bears a passing resemblance to a member of Hitchcock’s oeuvre. When questioned about the inspiration behind his 1990 sci-fi spectacular Total Recall, Verhoeven was quick to pay homage to Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest, stating, “Arnold Schwarzenegger is on an adventure that’s not his own, and he’s mistaken for the wrong guy.”

Schwarzenegger appears in Total Recall as construction worker Douglas Quaid, a man who, bored with his menial existence, undergoes a procedure to implant false memories wherein he plays the more exciting role of Martian secret agent. In a similar case of mistaken identity, North by Northwest features Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive who finds himself swept up in a deadly cross-country chase when he is mistaken for a spy.

“At the end of Total Recall, when Ronny Cox and Arnold are standing opposite each other in the alien oxygen provider, they kind of rotate around each other,” the director explained. “That’s identical to the scene in North by Northwest where Cary Grant enters James Mason’s villa. Mason and Grant rotate around this imaginary axis; the figures are always circling left or right.”

Many of Hitchcock’s most famous movies focused on outsiders, interlopers, or loners, which saw him pick up another trick from the ‘Master of Suspense’. Citing him as a stylistic reference, Verhoeven pointed towards how he “used sudden low camera angles in several movies to emphasise a moment of alienation or weirdness,” something that filtered into his own aesthetic.

Despite Hitchcock’s influence on Verhoeven’s career, the latter’s style remains distinctive and unmistakably his own. With his unusual balancing of thoughtful social critique with mindless violence, Verhoeven handles complex themes like non-conformity and sexuality with characteristic entertainment and wit, consolidating his unique place in directorial history.

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