EISB.net One on One with Uwe Boll...No, Not in the Boxing Ring

With In the Name of the King opening this Friday, Uwe Boll has proven that 'like him or not he's still a pretty tenacious filmmaker.

ImageMaybe he's the director you love to hate, but Boll has proven that he's not about to take anything sitting down. IESB talked with Boll about In the Name of the King, the upcoming Postal and Seed as well his feelings about some of his critics and what he'd like to be doing in the future.

IESB: Can you tell us, in your own words, what the film is about?

Boll: In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale is an epic kind of adventure/fantasy movie with not much Lord of the Rings' It's a little more realer story which you can compare to parts of Gladiator where a man is losing his family and he wants his wife back and he has to fix the whole kingdom to get his wife back. But it's a fantasy kingdom 'the kingdom of Ehb' where you have a good wizard, John Ryhs-Davies, and the bad wizard who wants to control the kingdom, Ray Liotta. Ray Liotta has also has basically an army of orcs 'or we say Krugs, but they are kind of Orcs' fighting for him. We follow all these different character arcs through the movie. We have Ron Pearlman as the neighbor of our farmer and he goes with him on the adventure trip. We have Leelee Sobieski as the daughter of the villain. We have Kristanna Loken as the tree woman together with tons of actors from the Cirque de Soleil and there are spectacular scenes with an army, basically, living in the trees. Matthew Lillard plays the king's nephew who wants to be king and, as the king himself, we have Burt Reynolds.

IESB: What attracted you to this story?

Boll: For me it was an opportunity after a lot of more harder movies 'R rated movies and horror movies' to do something what is attractive or interesting for the whole family. To do a PG-13 movie where you can attract a bigger audience with, also. I always liked fantasy and adventure movies and here was the opportunity to do one.

IESB: Is there something specific that draws you to adapting video games?

Boll: It was, basically, an offer that came to me by accident and it wasn't really planned when I made a movie and the movie made money. I have to go out and raise money from private investors and so, for me, it was a thing to acquire video games that I personally like. I saw that there was a very good possibility to raise more money for movies if I make genre movies based on video games compared to making genre movies based on original scripts. It was a clear business decision. On the other hand, I think that with my movies I show the range of video games that there are not only horror and brutal 'but I think that video games can even be comedies like Postal, for example, which comes out next year.

IESB: Is there a video game dream project for you?
Boll: There was Metal Gear Solid but it's not looking that this goes through. Of course, Halo is a super-interesting property but I don't think that I can make this one. Right now, there are always games I really like that I'm interested to do but nothing I can really say. I really wanted do a movie like Hitman that is in the theaters right now. That was a dream project. I liked the property and I had Jason Statham ready to take it and I wanted to get that right but it didn't end up with me.

IESB: With Bloodrayne, you've started to do sequels. How do those compare?

Boll: This was the whole point what I always liked on Bloodrayne was to do a trilogy and to move each part hundreds of years forward. You have the original Transylvania'¦ in the first one. It's sort of sword and sorcery piece. Then, in the second, it's hundreds of years forward in the wild west. It's a vampire western and it was an opportunity to make an homage a little to Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone. IF you listen to the music of that movie you will see that it's almost like Ennio Morricone music. I tried to do a lot like Sergio Leone did in the west. Huge, tight close-ups where you see only the eyes on-screen.

IESB: You have plans to going back to original scripts as well?

Boll: Yeah, what I did with Postal and with Seed, both coming out in 2008 'smaller releases, not so big like In the Name of the King' both I wrote on my own and both have a lot of personal statements in them. Seed is a very bitter-hearted horror movie and Postal is an absurd comedy in the style of a Monty Python, basically. Like Meaning of Life or Life of Brian.

IESB: Are there video game franchises that have been already been adapted unsuccessfully by others 'like Doom or Wing Commander' that you'd want to go back and redo?
Boll: Not really, to be honest. I'm in total not a big fan of remakes. I like to start fresh in something new. This was the reason I produced only and did not direct Alone in the Dark II because I didn't really like 'the first one was my weakest movie in a way. The second one is different but not different enough. With Bloodrayne it was a different thing. With Bloodrayne, here I can basically jump from genre to genre. Bloodrayne II was a western and Bloodrayne III will be a second world war movie. So it's a very different approach.

IESB: You've been very vocal with your critics right down to actually fighting them. How does it feel to have people say that they don't like a film?

Boll: I don't have a problem with someone who doesn't like my movie and he writes a solid negative review. I don't get upset by that and I love to read negative reviews but, in my case, I think it went far over the top at one point and it got totally personal and insulting and people didn't even look at the movies anymore. This was, then, for me, a little too much. I thought, 'If you want to physically destroy me then do it. Let's meet in the boxing ring. I invited only people who bashed me in really unnecessarily over-top ways. I think that no matter what you think about my movies, if you see how the movies are made and what quality the movies have from whatever the technical standpoints; the music and the CGI and the actors that are in it and you still say the movies are completely trash and garbage worth any $50,000 shot on video movies, then you do not have the 'as we say in Germany ' we cannot help you anymore, basically. Then the eyes are closed and the brains are dead. This is what I mean. I see tons and tons of movies and I get like, every month, 50 to 100 DVDs from various companies approaching me also with product we should distribute here in Germany. I know exactly what I'm talking about. 95% of the movies made worldwide are under the quality of even House of the Dead in everything. This is the reality. Of course if you compare Alone in the Dark with Alien then Alone in the Dark is a disaster and Alien is a masterpiece. This is the thing where comparison always comes up. I think that what's trendy or nice or honey for the people is to write like, 'Boll is like Ed Wood and makes the worst movies ever.' But the people should add in, 'He makes the worst A-List movies ever.' It's a totally different approach then. If my movies are getting in 100s of territories in the theaters and they sell millions and millions of DVDs and there are stars in the movies running around, this movie has from the beginning a totally different appeal than the 500 movies I have here right now stapled in front of me. Direct to DVD titles where you don't know one actor and they're shot on HD video and no special effect really works, the sound is shitty, there's no symphony orchestra playing and you don't believe one line of any actor. If I am to be as low-rated as these people, the guys who are voting me to this point are doing it as personal fun. That's personal fun and it has nothing to do with the reality. I think it's time that real film journalists start saying this. That it has nothing to do with reality.

IESB: When did you get the idea to spin it to your favor like you did with Postal?

Boll: I was tired of it and I made fun out of it. I said if you all think I'm a Nazi, okay, I'm a Nazi and an idiot and I play a retarded Nazi who's using gold teeth from Auschwitz to finance his movies. With Postal, the dirty joke that goes on about me, I gave it back, basically.
IESB: You mentioned Sergio Leone, who are some of your other influences?

Boll: I grew up in a small city and we had only two TV programs the first 10-13 years of my life. I grew up with the classic western movies, for example. Rio Grande, El Dorado, Howard Hawks, John Huston. This was big influence for me and then all the classic movies. Orson Welles. In a way, I was lucky because on that TV channel, they were only running the really good movies. From Spartacus to Ben-Hur, all the really big Hollywood classics and this infiltrated me a lot. Later, when I was old enough, I could drive to the bigger city and go to the theater. If you're like 12, 13, 14 it's always great to go to the theater and see the scary stuff. Halloween, Friday the 13th. I saw Maneater. The original Texas Chainsaw. All in the theater when they came out. They really put a stamp on me. John Carpenter movies. Snake Plissken, The Thing. That also made me kind of an outsider in Germany as a filmmaker because I liked genre movies and I liked American movies. I don't like European art movies. From time to time there are great European movies but overall, the US movies are way more entertaining.

IESB: You have these tremendous casts in all your movies. How do you go about getting actors?

Boll: In the Name of the King we were really lucky because if you send the script to CAA or ICM you get a reader's report. This reader's report for Bloodrayne or Alone in the Dark or House of the Dead was not really very positive. It was at least medium warm. Then it's tougher to get actors. For In the Name of the King we got really good reader's reports. They really liked that script. Then they pitched people to me. I talked with Kevin Costner on the line and Pierce Brosnan. Jason Statham was the right age. He could do all the action on his own. This basically, then, made me go with Statham. He had just done a movie with Guy Ritchie that Ray Liotta was in so Ray Liotta approached us and said he really liked to work with Jason and wanted to work with him again. Then I made an offer to Ron Perlman and he heard who was in the movie so he was in. One after another, they came. Ron Perlman's manager was also representing Burt Reynolds. For all the actors together, we didn't pay more than 8 million bucks.
This is also what people write about me; That I overpay the actors. It's the opposite. I always underpay all the actors and never pay the fees they're getting from the major companies. It's funny to read now people writing, 'This is the end of the career of all these actors because they're all so stupid' but they should start asking, is it not possible that they're in the movie because they think that Boll is a good director and it is a good project and there is something real there in the movie? Why is Jason Statham, who costs now 7 million bucks per movie in the movie? Because he wants to get from me money? I think he did it because he likes the script. All my movies, they never went over time. They never go over budget. There was never any scandal and all the actors I can still call at home and they like me. If I was completely retard and did everything wrong on-set, that would be one thing.
That for me is the big question, why nobody is asking this. People only think this because idiots on the internet are flipping out and writing this about me. Why doesn't anyone do a little background and say, 'Let's face it. This is the reality. Boll made 11 movies in 7 years. And he raised the money. And he took care of distribution.' Who else does that outside of the Hollywood system? But of course I'm only 'a stupid idiot' and get 'gifts from German tax shelters' and other bullshit. It's unbelievable In the Name of the King is running in Germany already and it's been three weeks in the top ten. We're number one in Russia. We're number one in Hungary. It's already performed outside of the US and it's done good so I have hope that it will at least even out. I never got very positive reviews in Germany but on Postal and King the views were more positive than negative.

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale opens this Friday, January 11th.

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