Paul Verhoeven: Rebel for hire

The director Paul Verhoeven has never been scared of controversy. But, he tells Neil Young, he's finding it hard to make his kind of films after 11 September

Of all the people I expected to see at an Amsterdam film festival, cinema's most famous Amsterdammer was some way down the list. Paul Verhoeven is now so well known for his Hollywood highs (Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers) and lows (Showgirls, Hollow Man) that many people don't realise he had an enormously successful career in his homeland in the Seventies and Eighties. Three of his six domestic features have just been reissued on DVD – his debut Business Is Business (1972), the Oscar-nominated sex-a-thon Turkish Delight (1973) and Golden Globe-winning war epic Soldier of Orange (1978).

He remains the Netherland's most successful cinematic export, but his career-long predilection for sexual and violent material means he's never been anything other than a deeply controversial figure at home, and he departed for Hollywood in 1985 under a thunderous cloud. At the airport waiting for his plane, a TV documentary crew recorded his parting comments: "At the moment there is too much negative feedback in the Netherlands. You waste so much time and energy setting up a film in the teeth of the moralising prejudices of all the committees you have to face in this country in order to get your money..."

Verhoeven has made very few public appearances in the Netherlands since then, but a few weeks ago he was back in his home town to receive a lifetime achievement award from the 18th Festival van de Fantastiche Film. Perhaps he's mellowed – or perhaps it's also a case that, nearly two years after the disappointment of Hollow Man, he realises he's no longer assured of his place at Hollywood's top table.

Gossip over his next project has kept the internet very busy in the past year: at various stages, we've been told to expect sequels to his blockbusters Robocop and Basic Instinct; the long-gestating Arnold Schwarzenegger epic Crusade; and biopics of Jesus Christ, Adolf Hitler, Rasputin, Harry Houdini (starring Tom Cruise) and the 19th-century American spiritualist Victoria Woodhull (starring Nicole Kidman).

Then there were the Euro-based productions: adaptations of short stories by French authors Aureole and Guy de Maupassant, and Official Assassins, the story of how the American and Soviet governments clashed over the fate of Werner Von Braun and other key Nazi scientists in the ruins of 1945 Berlin.

In the flesh, the 64-year-old Verhoeven has the slightly crumpled, lived-in look of a once-hep, now-jaded professor, complete with his trademwasark open-necked towelling shirt – like all his clothes, the same sandy shade as his salt-and-pepper mop of hair. But when I ask about his next movie, his Hollywood-bright teeth start flashing with enthusiasm as he nails the phantoms of speculation. "Rasputin is out! The Woodhull project is written, but I've not been able to find financing – I'm waiting to hear from Nicole. Official Assassins has been frozen because it's very critical of the US government and I had to stop casting because nobody wanted to do it."

He blames the events of 11 September for the sudden drop in temperature, but he soon found an alternative. "I was in Moscow at the time, looking at the tanks. My daughter Claudia was studying there and she told me about Azazel, by the detective writer Boris Akounine, very famous there at the moment. It's the first of nine novels about this character Fandorin, it's set in St Petersburg and London in 1876, against a background of Russian terrorism." Verhoeven describes Fandorin as a Sherlock Holmes figure, "with maybe a little bit of an Indiana Jones touch. He starts off in his early 20s [Verhoeven looks around wide-eyed, miming a Candide figure], and by the end he's pow-shppow! [mimes firing guns left and right]." Elijah Wood, Heath Ledger and Colin Farrell are in his sights because, as he says, "You have to be sure that the cast is there, so the studio will commit to releasing it in the USA. But there are great roles for people like Meryl Streep or Catherine Zeta Jones – the characters are very clearly written."

So is this a definite "go" project? Verhoeven shrugs his shoulders. "It's my wish to change gears. As we all know, you can work as hard as you want, as we did with Arnold on Crusade. And the project still might fail, and disappear forever." He's experienced enough to have a back-up, however. "FilmFour have just bought Batavia's Graveyard for me to direct." Chronicling a dark episode in Holland's 17th-century "golden age" of empire-building, Mike Dash's book is described by the director as "an adult Lord of the Flies – there's a shipwreck on a coral reef, and a couple of hundred survivors make it to these islands. One group goes to the main island, and that becomes a fascist state, which is where the horror starts. This is a fantastic story, because it gives us an ultra-villain, let's say a proto-Hitler."

It sounds like the terrain of Starship Troopers, though that film's sophisticated subtexts were lost on many reviewers. "After being accused of being fascist myself, a correction has taken place. And fortunately so; it was very disappointing the way I was attacked. There was an editorial in the Washington Post which discussed the film as being done by a Nazi, and this was used by all the European papers – not the Independent, may I say – even before they could see the movie. But people now seem to have largely understood that it was about American politics.

"It has always been my pleasure to work in the B-genre, and elevate that, use it as a vehicle for other thoughts. It's a normal thing, in art, to use the 'mediocre' and the 'banal' to make a statement. That kind of sophistication is rare in film-making, because everything has to be immediately understood. With Robocop the ironies were about urban situations, but Starship Troopers is more to do with American foreign policy. It's about propaganda versus reality, and the way this reality can be 'spun'. There's a lot of parallels with what happened after 11 September, of course. Not just in the obvious ways of Americans shooting rockets down tunnels at the Taliban, just like the attacks on the 'arachnids' in the movie. In some ways it's a pleasure that it all became true, but on the other hand there's not much pleasure that it came true in this way.

"Now, I'm really struggling with my position in the United States. Of course, I'm as guilty as everybody else, by participating and paying my tax there. I'm as much to blame by staying there instead of raising my voice or whatever. It's not just the Afghanistan situation; my anger and resistance to American politics have much more to do with their support of Israel than anything else. The pumping of enormous quantities of money, technology and military into Israel every year has now, unfortunately, created a fascist state," he says, banging the table for emphasis.

And even if recent events have made Crusade seem all the more topical, Verhoeven acknowledges they have also made it a less feasible Hollywood project than ever. "The studios are already being asked by the government to be as patriotic as possible, and participate in the 'fight against terrorism'. The story of the Crusades is the murderous attack of the Christians on the Arabs and the Jews. The Pope instigates this complete slaughterhouse, which ultimately had only one goal: to destroy as many Arabs as possible. I doubt that the funding will come from the United States, especially not from anyone connected with the Catholic Church," he grins, mulling the possibilities, "perhaps Saudi Arabia..."

But surely, I venture, Verhoeven's track record makes him the ideal director to make a film that seems patriotic and flag-waving, but which is in fact subversive? "Well, if I didn't already do that with Starship Troopers, I don't think so. It would be very difficult to make a critical movie, and it I was going to do it, it would have to be extremely critical."

'Business Is Business', 'Turkish Delight' and 'Soldier of Orange' are available on DVD from Tartan, all at £19.99