I want to tell you I made out with a girl while watching In the Name of the King on opening night. What is the craziest story you’ve ever heard about someone watching an Uwe Boll movie?
[Laughs] I get e-mails a lot of times from more cult movie geek guys and they do Uwe Boll night. I got various e-mails from a group in Houston. They said they watch House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne in a row, movies that got absolutely no good reviews but they are getting completely hammered and watching the movies. They actually really like them then. I get e-mails like this from people basically all the time. They do Uwe Boll festivals or they cut my name out of movies so that nobody had a clue who was the director, then they showed it to their friends. People wrote me about Rampage, they did that. Then people said, “Wow, this was the best movie of the year” and then they said it’s Uwe Boll, and then they said, “Oh yeah, f*** it. I made a mistake. I take my opinion back.” Stuff like this I get through e-mail but I don’t have any more crazy stuff.
I had a crazy Postal screening in Tucson, AZ where various people came actually with guns to the screening. I was in front of the audience and I first had to say, “Look, whatever offends you in my movie, I’m still there for the Q&A after the movie but don’t shoot me.” This was for me a crazy thing that happened to me where I felt actually kind of uncomfortable, where I said, “Oh f***, these guys really have a gun in their belt.” And I mean, Postal is an offender so if you’re a super Christian, and the chance was high in Tucson, AZ, they would maybe flip completely out on me. So this was the situation there.
They were real guns with live ammo?
Yeah, real guns with live ammo, like normal people with a license to carry a gun. They had a belt on with a handgun sticking out. I was like, “Is this a joke or what?” Because Tucson, AZ was where the video game company comes from, Running with Scissors, they said, “No, it’s true.” I said, “Oh sh*t.” I had discussions with Postal all over the world with sometimes an aggressive audience, but you talk a little different if you know these guys actually have guns now and they can just shoot you. So it was a little problematic, let me put it this way.
What did you think of Steven Soderbergh’s State of Cinema address?
I read it actually. What should we say? Steven Soderbergh, I think he’s a good filmmaker and he made a lot of movies I like. He also made movies I absolutely dislike but he’s definitely somebody who looks out for the interesting product. He nailed it in regard to what movies are getting greenlit and what movies are getting made. I think he’s completely right and it’s sad. It’s a sad story.
Maybe only my taste is off, but for me The Hobbit was just totally boring, as an example. I didn’t connect to any person in The Hobbit compared to Lord of the Rings. It was, for me, an absolute failure and look at the reviews. The Hobbit 5 out of 5 everywhere and you think, are these people all crazy or are these people actually right and I’m wrong? I felt Avengers is like a daily soap with superheroes.
I don’t know, but a lot of the movies coming out every week and getting the full support of the studios are in my mind boring, redundant and totally not interesting. Of course they’re all made well, with a lot of money and they buy good actors to do it but overall, it’s kind of boring. That’s what Soderbergh also said, I give him the credit for it, it looks like the studio’s doing it right because the people, the big box office goes for the big tentpoles. The box office is giving them basically an ok that they promoted that movie and maybe not another movie. I think it’s scary. It’s less and less decisions pro interesting story or pro-filmmaker.
I mean, look at the Oscar movies. They’re also getting softer and softer, and weaker and weaker. For me, the only surprising good big movie I saw in the last six, seven months was Django Unchained from Tarantino. I really like that movie because it was not told in the same sh*t way like all the studio movies where you know after five minutes how the movie will end. But there are not a lot of movies like this getting made at all and I think the ‘80s or ‘90s were better movies made, grittier movies and so on.
Well, they’re catering to where the money is. I don’t know how to teach people to spend their money elsewhere.
Yeah, I know. It would be a good experiment that a studio will never make. Let’s say a studio would make an experiment to take a very, very good movie but a smaller movie or whatever. You pick one of the smaller independent movies and you actually spend $100 million to release that movie. So let’s see what the box office is. It would be a very interesting experiment. The fact is that the smaller independent movies are never getting this, so you can’t really compare because you never know what would happen to that movie if somebody actually would put massive money behind it. It’s too bad nobody had the money to gamble on a movie like this. If you’re Bill Gates you can do it, but as a producer or normal film company it would be like bankruptcy if it doesn’t work.
Steven Soderbergh at least gets financing for a movie still and he makes major movies in between. He’s at least in business. I know thousands of people who are out of business and they cannot make any movies anymore. They’re in a totally different world than Steven Soderbergh. He still has a good income and I think he is also not poor.
Similarly, what do you think of celebrities like Zach Braff and the producers of Veronica Mars going on Kickstarter to raise money?
I don’t really believe in Kickstarter stuff to be honest. I don’t think it is a way to finance movies. They proved me wrong but on the other hand, now it’s really professional filmmakers with other possibilities to finance their movies. If they now go on Kickstarter, then they take any advantage away or any possibility away from the smaller filmmakers to finance their movies with Kickstarter because then they would all focus in a way on the major movies now getting financed by Kickstarter and the audience would only go to that site and give money for that product, and the original idea of Kickstarter goes down the drain based on this. Hangover IV, financed by Kickstarter. I mean, what the f***? I think they should keep Kickstarter for first time filmmakers or something like this.
