UWE BOLL RANTS ABOUT HIS AUSCHWITZ MOVIE

Uwe Boll's Auschwitz came out of nowhere. The German director, widely reviled for his video game adaptations, once again faced the wrath of the internet when he stuck a teaser trailer online the other day, featuring himself as a Nazi guard standing in front of a gas chamber.

The general consensus is that the film will be tasteless and exploitative. Critics don't like Uwe Boll. I've never seen any of his films but wanted to know what he was doing with Auschwitz, so last night I got in touch on Facebook, called him up, and we talked for half an hour. Or, I should say, he talked. He was angry.

Vice: Hi Uwe, it's Alex.
Uwe: Hi.

So I saw the trailer yesterday, which went viral pretty quickly.
What's pissing me off is if anybody else made a movie like this it would be in the running for an Oscar. I do it and I get bashed by everybody. Especially people who totally ignored the last six, seven movies I did. Rampage or Stoic or Tunnel Rats are really realistic, political, fact-based movies. So is my new Max Schmeling movie. But when people write about me, they still center on House Of The Dead and Alone In The Dark, and they completely ignore the 15 movies I made after them. They would never do that with any other filmmaker. You cannot judge a guy based on two movies shot six, seven years ago. Ron Howard said my film Darfur was a masterpiece. Amnesty International said it's the best film made about Africa. I just don't get it any more. If people have eyes in their head and saw these movies, they could not say "Uwe Boll is a trashy filmmaker, the worst filmmaker on Earth," whatever, it is completely absurd. Rampage and Darfur went to 30 film festivals and were sold to 100 countries. WHAT THE FUCK! Why do I get counted as an idiot, I'm a Doctor of Literature! I studied economy! I'm not Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino in a fucking coffee shop and only have knowledge about film journalists. The public opinion about me is completely on the wrong track. Sorry that you're getting all my frustration, because you're the only guy I've had a conversation with about this.

It's OK.
Everything I make gets completely ignored. Fifty percent of people don't even think the Holocaust happened, and I make a movie about it and I get criticised for it. Half of my crew for 22 movies have been Jewish! My best friend where I live in Vancouver, Jonathan Shaw, is Jewish. It's completely absurd! They put me in a corner, saying it's an insult to the Jewish community, it's totally bullshit! It's the opposite! I could be celebrating how much attention the movie's getting, but really it's pissing me off, people are just not getting what I'm doing, they just don't watch the movies, and they're not aware of what my agenda is. Look, I'm not a subsidised filmmaker. I did a movie, Heart Of America, about school violence, and it made no money, and again Ron Howard said it was a great movie, everybody should see it. The next movie I did, in 2003, was House Of The Dead, the worst movie I've done. But it made over $30 million and it cost $7 million. So is it a big surprise that after that I made more video game-based movies? No! It's absurd that the worst movie I ever did made the most profit. That's when the Boll-bashing started, and I became known as the worst filmmaker of my generation. But then I started writing my own movies again, Postal, Seed, Tunnel Rats, AND THESE ARE ALL GOOD MOVIES! But the Boll-haters slam every film I do, and normal journalists close their eyes and follow in their footsteps. I'm a film enthusiast, I know what a good movie is, and my movies like Rampage and Stoic and Darfur are not good movies, they're great movies! Darfur is better than The Hurt Locker! People watching it at film festivals were crying!

Right.
Every single movie about the Holocaust concentrates on one character, stories of survivors, heroes, whatever. And I wanted to show the Holocaust for what it was. In Auschwitz, more than fifty percent of people who went there were dead in two hours. Four thousand babies got shot in the head in front of the gas chambers. So for me, it was time--when not only the Iraqi President but a lot of people are going sloppy on genocide issues, I think it's important to make the movie. And much of the movie is documentary--I did a lot of interviews with school kids about the Holocaust, and that's the start of the movie. It starts with that, and then we go on a normal day in Auschwitz, where you see what I showed in the teaser, you see the killings, and it's super shocking, but this is how it was, in reality. We see the selection process, when the train comes in, and so on. And then I go back to the interviews. In German schools, I interviewed people who had no fucking clue what Auschwitz was! In German schools! So you can imagine in other countries it's already forgotten. And that's also part of the movie. The trailer is shocking, but I wanted to show what the purpose of the movie is. And I only played the guard because in Croatia, where we filmed, we couldn't find German speaking actors for the smaller parts, so I said I would do it. And the sequence ended up in the teaser not because I wanted to feature me, but because it's a heavy shot.

Stanley Kubrick abandoned the Holocaust film he was making because he said to make an accurate film about the Holocaust it had to be unwatchable.
I agree. And I think my movie will be almost unwatchable for most people. But personally I think it's necessary to show this stuff. An Auschwitz movie like this would never get any financing, I made it because I was shooting Bloodrayne: The Third Reich in Croatia, and put a few hundred thousand on top of that budget to make this because we already had all the set-ups, the concentration camp, the train station. It was an opportunity to make something that nobody would ever finance, but is necessary to make. To make people ask how people can do something like this, planned, organized, calm killings. The really scary part of the movie is that it all went down like a normal day in the office. Only 15 or 20 minutes of the movie are the killings, 60 minutes are organizing things, who picks people up off the train, what's the selection process, and it's all done calmly because there was no way out. It was like a meat factory, it's the same procedure. There were no big revolutionary fights, no big goodbyes, it just happened. You come in and then you're ashes. The main reason I made the movie was to show the craziness of what humans are capable of. I saw a British documentary with interviews with SS people who worked in the concentration camps, people in their 90s, and they weren't regretful, they slipped through the net, so they didn't get put in jail, and when the BBC asked why they killed Jews, they had no clue. They didn't know why Jews were supposed to be bad, they just thought it was a fact. They didn't question orders.

Is the film an idea you've had for a long time?
Yeah. I've had it for years. But I never had the opportunity to do it, especially as a German. And I'm not loved in Germany either. But to be honest, what is Germany doing? If you make a Sophie Scholl movie or an Anne Frank movie, you get subsidies, you get into the Berlin Film Festival because everybody's happy that you're showing that there were Germans in the resistance. But that is bullshit! The reality is that everybody went with it. Only 40 percent voted for Hitler, but then 90 percent went with it and didn't question why Jews were getting deported. And after the war they said they thought the Jews were in working camps or being sent to the front line. Everybody had an excuse. And if you make a movie now you only get support if you show Germany in a positive light. The real hate I'll get will come from Germany, because I don't show any Germans in the movie who have any doubt, who think they shouldn't be doing this. You see how it was. I wanted to show a totally normal day in Auschwitz, which was completely unemotional, like a butcher basically, who has no bad feelings about cows or pigs getting killed. This makes it scary, but that's the point of the movie, to show what humans can do.

But inevitably people will call it torture porn and say it's exploitative.
But it's not true. If you see the finished movie, you'll see there's only 20 percent where you have that violence in your face. Eighty percent is the daily routine in the camp, and the documentary and the interviews. So it will not satisfy Hostel fans.

Well that's where the trailer is possibly misleading then, because it only projects that part of it.
Yeah, you're right, it is a little misleading, but it was important for me to make a point with the trailer. This is the strategy of the movie, there are no heroes, it's not one person's story, it's really like a documentary. And it needs to show what happened for real. There has never been a movie with a camera inside a gas chamber. In Schindler's List there is for two seconds maybe. But this is how it was. I have, for example, a very good scene with a father and his six year-old son. And the moment they get separated, there's no screaming, no big music, no saying goodbye, it just happens in one second in the crowd during the selection process, and then it's over, and the son gets gassed and burnt. I think it's the opposite of torture porn, it will make a lot of people cry because it's so unemotional. I'm sad that people don't give my movies a shot, they're worth it, I put my money and heart into them, and I hope I'll get the same chance as other filmmakers.

What sort of reactions did you get from people in Germany when you started talking about making the film?
I never talked about it. Nobody had a clue until I put the teaser up. And people are flipping out in Germany. The distributor working on the release of my Max Schmeling boxing movie, which is coming out in October, said the Auschwitz trailer is a disaster for them. They said, "This has ruined your reputation, we had such good press for Max Schmeling, and now you've released this Auschwitz trailer." But Auschwitz is a way more important movie than Max Schmeling. And it's way better. And people on websites have complained that I'm doing this to make money--if I wanted to make money I would have kept my money and not spent it on this. It's totally absurd to think a movie like this is for box office. It's the opposite, we all know that it will be really tough to get any cinemas playing it.

Are you concerned about upsetting Holocaust survivors and their families?
No. Because we talked to Holocaust survivors, and we talked to [Israeli Holocaust memorial center] Yad Vashem to get stock footage for the documentary material. They know that it's good to make sure that nobody forgets what happened. So even if it's disturbing and shocking, it's better that it exists than it doesn't exist. So I think they will hopefully step up and support the movie when it's done.

When will it be done?
I think November, and I will try to get it into the Berlin Film Festival. But I don't think they'll take it.

ALEX GODFREY

Click here for an old interview we did with Uwe.