That’s really smart, though. That’s something I’ve never thought of before. I’ll ask you more questions about the making of the movie, but first, I want to ask some more Showgirls questions because now I’m kind of obsessed with the movie myself. It’s so ridiculous and hilarious. I love it. So, what’s your favorite scene from the movie if you can name just one?
It’s really hard to answer when I’m asked this because it’s really the first six minutes, but that’s not a specific scene because it’s so crazy. There’s a switchblade, two car-crashes, fortunes won, fortunes lost. It’s so insane, and it sets up the entire rest of the film so perfectly, but if I had to pick one scene that encompasses all of Showgirls, the answer would probably the Spago lunch/Doggy Chow scene. It’s just a perfect encapsulation of the whole film. Here you have these two interesting characters and actresses (Gina Gershon and Elizabeth Berkley) sitting across from each other and then hearing the layers about it. It’s fascinating to hear Adam Nayman’s take on the visual cues of what Paul Verhoeven was doing, breaking the 180 degrees. That adds a whole other layer of appreciation for me. Then the fact that they’re talking about eating dog-food.
Yeah, and it’s such a non-sequitur too. There’s nothing beyond it. I love it. So, going forward, you have some scenes from other Paul Verhoeven films. I thought it was excellent to show his obsessions that he has spread out over all his films. So I was wondering—you must have done some research–what’s your favorite Paul Verhoeven movie other than Showgirls?
I really love The Fourth Man. If you haven’t watched it, I would definitely check it out. It’s the closest film out of his European work to Basic Instinct. That would be my favorite of his early work, by far.
“Everyone has their own opinion about what was going on in everyone’s heads.”
Speaking of Paul Verhoeven, do you think that when he made this movie that it was going to be campy, or do you think he meant to take it in another direction?
That’s one of the fascinating things about Showgirls. Everyone has their own opinion about what was going on in everyone’s heads. It’s so hard to think about what his actual intent was. I wanted to go back and look at everything that had been written, the interviews, and how people were talking about it at the time because that was the closest…a lot of the interviews were taken before the film came out and the response was the way it was so I found that interesting but what was the question, I kind of went off on a little tangent.
Do you think he intended for it to be so campy?
I would have a hard time believing he intended it to be campy. From what it sounds like, everyone was playing it pretty straight—not playing for laughs. With Basic Instinct, what he and Joe Eszterhas had done earlier, that was a huge hit, so he had a lot of frustration in cutting it down to the “R” rating that he was required to deliver. With Showgirls, he was allowed to deliver and NC-17 film, so I think just based on that, it was probably really exciting to know, “oh, we can get away with whatever we want.” That probably led to some questionable choices.
