by Dov Kornits
“What triggered me was that there were so many violent crimes in Europe, and a lot of migrant crimes don’t even get prosecuted,” says Uwe Boll from Mainz near Frankfurt in Germany. “The authorities turn a blind eye. They say, ‘oh yeah, he’s traumatised’ and then goes to a medical centre but not to a jail.
“I was very upset about this, but that was only I think 50%. The other 50% is that I was very upset about the film industry and that it was never tackling any of this. If you would file any script where a migrant is the gangster, the criminal, whatever, you would never get any money from Netflix and others. I felt that’s propaganda, to fake the truth…
“So, I wanted to make a very blunt movie where you say, ‘look, if you continue down that road, people like Citizen Vigilante will be the only hope. If you continue what you’re doing, we will all live under Sharia Law, and basically, the later you stop it, the more violent it will be.
“But on purpose, I also used Armie Hammer, who was canceled. He was perfect for the movie as an ice cold, non-sympathetic protagonist. The character is rich, looks down on the people that work for him, he looks down on the population in general. He’s not a hero. He’s someone that you don’t want to meet alone in the park.
“That was important because it’s not like his son gets killed and now he goes on a revenge. That would be a Jason Statham movie.”
How did you reach Armie Hammer to offer him the role in the first place?
“Armie was a blessing. He doesn’t have a job, he’s a great actor. There was nobody to contact because they all dumped him. So, I went on Instagram and wrote him messages where he basically at one point answered and because I said ‘look, I’m really Uwe Boll. I have a serious thing. Let’s chat. I can only imagine how many messages he got like this in four years not working. A lot of people would want to have him in his zombie film or whatever. But then we started talking about it and that was good that he was available, affordable, and the perfect actor.”
But what about the subject matter? Was that an issue for him at all?
“We had long political discussions, and then he said, ‘we have to do this merciless and not apologise’. It has to be ice cold, and then it will have an impact. And that’s the thing. I think Rampage and Postal are my two biggest cult movies. They have a real following worldwide over the years because they were so in your face, insulting, brutal, uncompromising, uncomfortable.”
Did you give the actors freedom to make the characters their own, including Australia’s own Costas Mandylor who puts on a cool Greek accent?
“Yeah, I think my best movies like Postal, Rampage, Attack on Darfur, were done with 50 page scripts where I leave the room for the cast. With Armie, I was on Zoom calls and we went through the script, he changed his lines and I’m totally open. And in regards of in the moment doing a sequence, I like it too. I’m not like Christopher Nolan where you have the plan and we do it exactly the way I planned it. For me, it’s more based on the location. As an independent filmmaker also, of course, no location ends up to be like this in reality, like what you wrote. It means that you have to adjust. And for the camera, I mean with Mathias Neumann, I think he shot 38 of my 40 movies. And we don’t even talk about it anymore because he knows I like two cameras, mostly handheld, to get the feeling like we are in the middle of the action and we just witness this. And I don’t try to tell a story like a philosopher or something. I say things how they are and I want to show things how they are, and that’s my style.”
You cop a lot of flak from critics, but we see you in the tradition of exploitation cinema, which has a great tradition in film history.
“No, I agree with you. Imagine if you took all the Roger Cormans out of the world?
“It’s very tough to make any money with this kind of movies now. Now you have $20 – $30 million kind of exploitation movies.
“I do everything to serve the story and not to get an invitation to the Venice Film Festival. I feel like a lot of filmmakers of this older generation, Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, they did exploitation movies and they totally didn’t give a shit. When you do The Wild Bunch, it’s all about the story. And in a way, I felt also a very deep connection between Citizen Vigilante and The Wild Bunch because they were also murderers. They were not the nicest guys, but then they had the guts in the end to go basically full on Alamo and they know they will die. That’s one of my favourite movies because it’s in not making these people super sympathetic heroes. They are gangsters too, but they have honour.
“I think that there’s a general misunderstanding about movies now in the new world of streaming also for the people working in the streamers picking movies. They’re very artificial vogue left people and they love this half arse storytelling as long as they’re not hurting their feelings or something. I’m not influenced by Yorgos Lanthimos or whatever. All these people who make movies nobody understands, and then they’re getting all the big A-list stars super excited to be in those movies.”
Citizen Vigilante was refused classification in Germany, can you discuss?
“We had three screenings, and on the last screening I was there and was allowed to talk to the jury after the end credits. And when you see the jury, you had eight or nine people there, I think two men, seven women in their 40s working for government institutions. You know already that they will hate that movie and that they’re only looking for a reason to not give it a rating. In various German interviews, I said, ‘Look, if you have seven neo-Nazis raping a migrant girl, I would be nominated for the Berlin Film Festival’. That’s the fact, because the violence level of the film per se is an R rating, not more. In earlier films like Seed, Rampage and BloodRayne, they also didn’t give me a rating. But then you got like, ‘okay, you want an R rating, you cut these scenes’. With Citizen Vigilante, there was no option to cut anything, they thought that the movie overall is a threat for democracy and the law.”
You’ve already announced Citizen Vigilante 2…
“Yes, it’s in the works. We will do it in America. I’m not doing the same movie again, but it will be in a similar style. If a movie like this can really go to the number one spot, like Amazon, Apple, for a week, we were number one in America against the Michael Jackson movie or Hail Mary, that shows that the audience was underserved with this kind of content. A lot of people, they don’t want only Marvel stuff and they want something more concrete where they say, ‘look, that’s something we talk about every day at the breakfast table, and now there’s a fiction film about it. And I felt good that this worked because [previous film] Run didn’t work financially. And now it was not hard to get investors for a second part because you saw they saw it worked.”
Citizen Vigilante FREE on X for 24 hours from midday Wednesday, 2 September. If like us, you don’t do X any more, it’s also be available to Buy or Rent on Digital in Australia from 2 September.
Main photo: [from left] Uwe Boll, Armie Hammerm, Costas Mandylor and Executive Producer Michael Roesch. photo by Axel Stock
