Director's Portrait:
Michael Verhoeven - Progression And Persistence
M. Verhoeven
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Michael Verhoeven was born in 1938 in Berlin, the son of German actor and director Paul Verhoeven and the actress Doris Kiesow, and is married to the actress Senta Berger. In the 50s, Verhoeven gathered experience as a cinema and theater actor. He then studied medicine and completed the state medical examination to become a qualified doctor. In 1967, one year after completing his medical studies, he directed his first feature film, Paarungen, an adaption of Strindberg's Totentanz. Since then, he as continuously worked in film and television, and occasionally for the theater, as a screenwriter and director. He received his first German Film Award in 1971 for o.k. - the film that initiated the controversy in 1970 at the Berlinale. He received further awards for The White Rose (Die weiße Rose, 1982), The Nasty Girl (Das schreckliche Mädchen, 1989/90) and My Mother's Courage (Mutters Courage, 1995/96), including a Silver Bear in Berlin for Best Direction, a New York Critics' Award, and a Golden Globe and OSCAR nomination for The Nasty Girl. My Mother 's Courage won the Bavarian Film Prize and the Award of the City of Jerusalem for Best Film. His most recent film Enthüllung einer Ehe (2000) won a FIPA D'ARGENT in the feature film section and a FIPA D'OR for Best Leading Actor at the FIPA television festival in Biarritz. Verhoeven is currently working an a new cinema project, a film adaptation of Laura Waco's novel Von Zuhause wird nichts erzählt.
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In many aspects, he is an exception to German cinema: Michael Verhoeven first studied Medicine and became a doctor, just like the lyricist Gottfried Benn or the songwriter Georg Ringsgwandl. In the 60s, when young German filmmakers demanded innovation of the German cinema, they considered themselves a fatherless generation. Michael Verhoeven's father, Paul Verhoeven (not to be confused with the Dutch cineast of the same name), had been a recognized actor and director since the 30s. And his son stood in front of a camera at an early age, in Kurt Hoffmann's Das fliegende Klassenzimmer and Julien Duvivier's Marianne de ma jeunesse. Was Michael Verhoeven then less "fatherless" than his colleagues? "I too belong to the fatherless generation," says Verhoeven, "the films my father made were not the ones I would have wanted to make. For my colleagues, I was not only the son of a director, I was also already married to a woman who had a contract with Columbia - at a time when 'Hollywood' was a negative concept."
With the Strindberg adaptation Paarungen, which was his cinematic debut, Michael Verhoeven, who felt a sense of belonging to the 1968 generation of student revolt and film d'auteur, seemed to be walking on comparatively sure ground, as his father, alongside Lilli Palmer, took on a leading role in the film. "At that time, when most filmmakers were filming their own stories, no one understood it. But my film had a lot to do with the present. I was concerned not only with a failed marriage, but also with a sham existence - that was a current theme."
His Vietnam film o.k. also contributed to his status as an exception. Shown in the official competition at Berlin in 1970, this was the film that lead to a break within the competition. The film caused quite a controversy among the members of the jury, and when George Stevens (then jury president) pressured the festival direction to ban the film from the competition, other directors pulled their films out of the official running, resulting in a complete cancellation of the festival.
Michael Verhoeven is one of the few German directors to have received an OSCAR nomination, for The Nasty Girl - a film that brought its director and author a series of other awards, including the Critics' Award in New York, a Golden Globe nomination and the BAFTA Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Verhoeven is also one of the very few directors who began his career in the 60s and has been able to continually work up to today. In the meantime, he has made 13 films for the cinema and more than 20 for television. From the very beginning, he has had the courage to address uncomfortable topics and has proven a social conscience: "With my work, it has always been important to me that political concerns become private ones, for the two cannot be separated." As a result, such films as A Terrific Exit (Ein unheimlich starker Abgang, 1973) appeared, a passion play about a broken young woman, or MitGift (1975), a wicked satire about a murderous society with a superficial shine, or Killing Cars (1985), "a green action thriller that came out too early because, at that time, no one gave any thought to whether or not other types of energy were more environmentally friendly."
Again and again, Michael Verhoeven looks for the critical analysis of National Socialism and its consequences: The White Rose, The Nasty Girl and My Mother's Courage are but a few of his exceptional works.
Often Verhoeven puts women in the foreground of his films: "That probably has to do with my experience that in life, very often the women carry the burden. I don't expect a film to change society, but I do believe that the sum of activities of individuals can make a difference. A film can only be a building block."