By James Mottram
Dutch-born director, Paul Verhoeven, has a strange relationship with America. After helming a series of scandalous, in-your-face cult favourites in Holland (Soldier Of Orange, Spetters, Turkish Delight, The Fourth Man), the director hauled his wares to the US, and did exactly the same thing there, stirring up high voltage controversy with sexy, bloody, perverse films like Flesh + Blood (1985), RoboCop (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and Showgirls (1995). But despite having enjoyed huge success there, Verhoeven hasn’t made a film in the US since his disappointing 2000 horror flick, Hollow Man. But he nearly got there with his latest film, Elle, which he ultimately ended up shooting in Paris with the great Isabelle Huppert.
Ironically, the veteran actress had actually been circling the project before Verhoeven became involved. “I knew that Isabelle wanted to do it from the very beginning,” the director smiles, acknowledging that he actually met with Huppert about Elle. Verhoeven, however, thought that this would be the perfect project with which to make his creative return to the US. He worked on the adaptation of French novelist, Philippe Dijan’s Paris-set book with American screenwriter, David Birke (13 Sins, Freeway Killer), but when he started to shop it around Hollywood, Verhoeven ran himself right into a brick wall.

The dark, unsettling, and blackly funny tale of a successful businesswoman who gets caught up in a game of cat-and-mouse as she tracks down the unknown man who raped her, Elle was deemed way too outré and politically incorrect for today’s cinematic climate in the US. “We wanted to make an American movie, and we wanted to do it with American stars,” Verhoeven tells FilmInk at The Cannes Film Festival. “The script was written for Seattle and Chicago. We transferred everything from Paris to the United States, but they saw this ‘amoral’ tale, where there is no revenge. If it was going to be a revenge movie, the Americans might have said done it. But, of course, it doesn’t go into revenge. It goes another way. That made it impossible for American stars to participate. We started to realise that we had the wrong idea. Our producer, Saïd Ben Saïd, actually called me from Paris and said, ‘We made a big mistake! We should go back to Paris, and we should go back to Isabelle Huppert!’”
And that’s exactly what they did, fronting up to Huppert, who had even had talks with Philippe Dijan and Saïd Ben Saïd when the project was in its earliest stages. “So, on our knees, we went to Isabelle’s house,” Verhoeven smiles. “We said, ‘Sorry, this adventure in the United States didn’t work so well. We were going to make it into an American movie, and by the way…do you want to do it still?’ And she said yes. She was probably very happy, and I was too. It was only after working with her that I was able to see that she had brought something to the movie that I had no idea had existed.”

Bringing Elle back to Paris meant that Verhoeven was thrust intensely and immediately into the unknown. “Six months before I started shooting, it was such a headache,” the director sighs. “I was confronted with the language. I knew French culture…I lived in France for a year when I was younger, but the language was not mine anymore. I’ve been living too long in the United States and Holland, and so, to make a movie, and to talk to the actors and the crew in French was really difficult…I feared that. It gave me a headache, and it disappeared only when I realised that I could do it, and that I could handle the whole situation.”
Was it similar to his experiences making his first movie in America with RoboCop? “Yeah, sure, although I didn’t have a headache there,” Verhoeven laughs. “I was much younger! I could handle it then! But I had big problems with the English language in America, yes.”

And after faltering with Elle, would Verhoeven return to the US, the site of so many of his cinematic triumphs? “If there was something innovative that would come to me, then yes,” the director replies. “But that hasn’t happened in ten years! But it’s difficult to be innovative, even in science fiction. We have nearly seen everything, especially with superheroes. It would have to be a project where I would think, ‘Okay, I haven’t done this! Nobody has done it! Let’s do it!’ But I haven’t, in all honesty, with all the reading that I’ve been doing, found in nearly the last seven or eight years, perhaps more, projects that I really was enthusiastic about in the United States. I’ve been typecast after Showgirls! I think I’m seen as somebody that you can perhaps trust with a science fiction movie, but certainly not with reality,” Verhoeven laughs.
Elle is released in cinemas on October 27. Click through for an interview with leading lady, Isabelle Huppert, and for our review of the film.