№ 4
Going Postal
Maligned filmmaker Uwe Boll channels his anger into toxic comedy
—CBC Arts Online, May 22, 2008
Uwe Boll — writer, director, producer, doctor of German literature, amateur boxer and online cause célèbre — stands unbothered and unattended at the doors to a downtown Vancouver multiplex. It’s the Canadian premiere of Postal, the 42-year-old German’s latest video-game adaptation, and his first comedy.
There isn’t a hint of Hollywood glitz or glamour in the air. Boll mingles casually with the audience. The door prizes seem lifted straight out of a fraternity house: beer and video games and graphic novels. A life-size Krotchy doll, Postal’s soft-core mascot/plot device, accompanies the filmmaker and the premiere’s host, a Kitsilano video-store operator, who applauds the doll’s anatomical accuracy.
“If you are a little older and more conservative, sit on the aisle – it’s easier to go,” Boll announces to the half-empty theatre in a booming, unvarnished German accent.
Boll isn’t naive; he knows how offensive this film will be. Yet this quip could also be taken as an allusion to the growing infamy of his work. Boll was recently the subject of two high-profile features, in the New York Times and GQ. Each of their titles was a variation on the same theme: Uwe Boll, the worst film director in the world.
Postal – a political satire that fuses, among other things, 9/11, apocalyptic religion and the war on terror – is Boll’s crass, clunky and deeply R‑rated line in the sand.
“I was extremely pissed at my career,” he explains to me later, adding a few choice vulgarities before noting the universally savage reviews for his previous films, from House of the Dead in 2003 to last year’s In the Name of the King. “So I put all my frustrations about myself into Postal. About bin Laden. About Bush.”
Boll took an extremely violent video game (“You shoot children and piss on dead people,” he says) and produced a storyline so toxic – and often so incoherent – that few may actually see it. Postal hasn’t been picked up by a single major distributor. So far, Boll has found just nine North American screens to run it (three in Canada, six in the United States). Britain and France have shut out Postal completely. Boll hopes to make back half of the $13 million US budget in DVD sales.
“I only wait for the call that they tell me that Wal-Mart is not taking the DVD,” he said later. “This will be the next level of this kind of censorship.”
Whether it’s shtick or some grand delusion, Boll is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. He’s mad at everyone, real or imagined, who questions (or sabotages) his work: Hollywood, video-game purists, censors, U.S. policymakers, movie critics. When an online petition, Stop Dr. Uwe Boll, and website devoted to attacking him sprung up, Boll crafted a YouTube response. If the petition garnered one million signatures, he pledged to stop making movies. Soon, a pro-Boll petition appeared, Long Live Uwe Boll. By mid-May, nearly 279,000 had signed on to the anti-Boll site; approximately 5,200 stood behind him.
In September 2006, Boll famously challenged his critics to a boxing match. Four took up the offer – they were flown to Vancouver, Boll’s North American home base, for the event – and were summarily beaten. Boll, a boxer in his youth, trained hard for the bouts. One writer/opponent, thinking it was all in good fun, wound up vomiting afterward, his face glued to an oxygen mask.
In the end, however, Boll’s motivations aren’t complex. The man who calls himself the last great independent filmmaker, and the only genius in cinema today, just wants a little respect – and a lot of publicity. “Look, I know In the Name of the King is not Lord of the Rings,” he says of his last film, an elaborate “dungeon-siege” fantasy. “But why everybody compares it to Lord of the Rings then trashes it … instead of, say, comparing it to The Golden Compass or BC 10,000 [sic]. If you say that Golden Compass is five stars out of five and In the Name of the King is one star out of five, then you’re out of your mind.”
So take Boll’s films at face value, then. What’s the verdict? His video-game debut, House of the Dead, is pure shlock – but he’d tell you it’s good-value shlock. Zombies. Zombie-killers. A rave. A scary island. Slow-motion brawls and, as one critic wrote, lots of “running-through-the-woods trouble.”
In Postal – a film he compares to The Blues Brothers, Naked Gun and Monty Python’s Life of Brian – Boll is out to offend everyone. Feces or stray body parts are never far away. Cats are used as gun silencers. The opening scene shows the 9/11 hijackers arguing about the number of virgins they’ve been promised in the hereafter.
When Boll and I meet, at a south Vancouver production facility the morning after Postal’s premiere, he loses the severe, thin-skinned mien that marks his public persona. He’s immediately likable. Out of the spotlight, he’s charming, quick to smile. And on the surface at least, he takes the long view. Why video-game adaptations? Simple. He always wanted to make movies – big, grand productions. The video-game angle was an opening, a way in. “It was our chance to raise more money,” he says.
Boll ended up in the movie business after graduate school (where he earned that German Lit PhD). His first English production, Sanctimony (2000), was largely done in Vancouver and after earlier, unsuccessful attempts at generating work in Los Angeles, he decided to stay in Canada. He’s now a permanent resident, spending part of each year in Vancouver, filming largely in and around the Lower Mainland. For years, a rumour circulated that Nazi gold financed his movies – something he parodies in Postal. But thanks to Germany’s tax laws (which offer a 50 per cent write-off for film investors), Boll’s movies are funded almost entirely by German money. His biggest budget, $25 million for the 2005 vampire flick BloodRayne, was financed by 800 small investors, half of whom were dentists.
Of course, Boll pines for larger budgets. Give me $200 million, he says, and just see what I can do. “There’s no excuse for a movie like Pearl Harbor. For this alone you shouldn’t make movies anymore,” he says, attacking one of his favourite targets, director Michael Bay.
For a moment, Boll envisioned Postal hitching onto the huge success of Borat. Sacha Baron Cohen was even offered one of the leads: Uncle Dave, a dope-smoking evangelical conman – a part eventually taken by the Kids in the Hall’s Dave Foley.
But Boll hasn’t had success nabbing rising stars like Cohen. The likes of Michael Madsen and Meat Loaf are more in his range. Incredibly, they were joined in BloodRayne by Ben Kingsley, in an ill-advised performance that found the Oscar-winning actor addled and as pale as an Elizabethan royal. Boll transforms downturn stars into true B‑movie oddities: Christian Slater as a paranormal detective in Alone in the Dark, or Burt Reynolds as a medieval monarch in In the Name of the King. Consider Postal’s quirky casting: Larry Thomas (Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi) as Osama bin Laden, David Huddlestone (The Big Lebowski) and Seymour Cassel (a John Cassavetes and Wes Anderson mainstay) as a lawn-chair chorus and Verne Troyer (Austin Powers’s Mini-Me) as himself.
Boll doesn’t claim he’s producing masterworks, but he says his films have gotten better – even if the reviews have stayed the same: “I’ve realized it’s about me, not about the movies.” Still, it can’t be easy when you’re tagged the worst director in the world. “This prejudgment is in a way what is annoying me, because I have to defend myself,” he says. “It’s a lot of working hours to dig myself out.”