For the second year in a row, this editor has been invited to the Aruba International Film Festival (AIFF), which is marking its fourth edition. On Tuesday, the fest got off to a promising start with two very well-attended opening-night screenings, one of which sold out two auditoriums at the Caribbean Cinemas at Palm Beach Plaza—an encouraging sign after the sparse attendance for some of the 2012 screenings. (It's not easy to get people into theatres when beaches and other tropical pleasures beckon.)
AIFF's strategy this year is to showcase more films from the Caribbean and Latin America, a smart move since by far its most popular offerings in 2012 were of local origin (most especially the doc Children of the Wind, about champion windsurfers from Bonaire, which returns for a special encore showing on Sunday). But AIFF is also maintaining its connection with Aruba's mother country, the Netherlands. And so the biggest name attending this year is Holland's best-known director, Paul Verhoeven, the man behind RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers and the infamous Showgirls.
The fest opened with Tricked, Verhoeven's first feature since his return to Holland with 2006's
outrageous World War II thriller Black Book. What sets Tricked apart is the way it was made: Screenwriter Kim van Kooten wrote the first five minutes of a domestic tale involving a wealthy businessman, his wife, son and daughter and the other women in his life. The filmmakers then invited the Dutch public to submit script pages for the next five minutes of the story, part of a continuing process that eventually resulted in a 53-minute film. Thousands of scripts were ultimately submitted, and Verhoeven and his team cherry-picked the best ideas, while still mindful that it all had to come together as a coherent whole.
Lo and behold, this short comedy is better-constructed than many a current example of the genre. In an interview here in Aruba, the effusive, 74-year-old Verhoeven told me he was amazed that it all turned out so well, to the point that you'd never guess the unique, "crowd-sourced" way the film was devised.
Verhoeven chronicles that process in a behind-the-scenes documentary preceding the mini-feature, which pads the program out to feature length but limits it even more to a specialized audience. Indeed, as Verhoeven noted during a Q&A after the movie, if he'd known the experiment would lead to something this good, he would have planned on a longer running time.
The challenge wasn't easy: Production on each five-minute chapter would be put on hold for six to seven weeks as the team sorted through the new script submissions, so the shoot needed constant re-energizing (and it wasn't easy to corral all the actors after such long breaks). Also, as Verhoven told me, "I was worried that we were potentially adding more plot developments instead of using what was there to finish the story in 50 minutes."
No worries. Despite its unconventional origins, Tricked is quite the deceptively seamless effort. And, true to Verhoeven's irreverent spirit, the movie's best and biggest joke is a shock moment involving a pregnant woman.
The cheerfully blunt director also participated in a Wednesday afternoon public career Q&A with
Hollywood Reporter executive editor Stephen Galloway. He defended the notorious Showgirls as "a very elegantly shot movie...with camera moves inspired by Renoir and Fellini." But, of course, its reputation as one of the all-time "so bad it's good" camp classics "made life more difficult," he admitted. The solution to a fiasco like that? "Make another movie."
Other tantalizing tidbits: Verhoeven was offered The Silence of the Lambs but thought the material was "too dark" to be a box-office success. Michael Douglas and producing studio Carolco didn't want Sharon Stone for Basic Instinct; Douglas in particular wanted a much bigger star like Michelle Pfeiffer to help share the burden of the expected controversy around the film's edgy sex scenes. Verhoeven feels the current crop of big-budget superhero movies is "not so much for me," though he does keep up with all the expensive blockbusters to see what is being done on the technological end.
Verhoeven recently published a novel about Jesus Christ which treats him as a revolutionary along the lines of Che Guevara rather than as the literal Son of God. And at one point, Mel Brooks planned to produce a film of the book but, according to Verhoeven, withdrew after receiving "thousands of threats" from fundamentalist Christians who got wind of the project. Verhoeven is also developing two film noir scripts which could bring him back to Hollywood filmmaking after a 13-year absence. But, he admitted, it's not as easy to get financing for downbeat noirs as it used to be.
Let's not forget to mention the other opening-night film in Aruba, the one with the two sold-out houses—and no wonder. According to several sources, Abo So (Only You) is the first feature-length film produced in Aruba, and the packed house soaked in this musical about two young people who fall in love but are split apart by family prejudice. (He's of Hispanic origin, and her mother still seethes over the Latina babes who stole her husband.) Director Francisco Pardo made the film in ten days for $20,000 and the low budget shows. But it's also quite nicely photographed, the two leads are appealing and charismatic (and can sing!), and the soundtrack features lots of catchy songs written by beloved Caribbean veteran Padú del Caribe (who has a cameo and attended the screening). Sometimes a simple love story and a local connection is all it takes to make an audience happy.
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