B-movie bomb thrower Paul Verhoeven is back with his sexiest, most outrageous film to date. And, oh, it's about the Holocaust

WAR PIG? Black Book director Verhoeven

A merica is up to its eyeballs in crotch shots, and we have Paul Verhoeven to thank for it. The Dutch director will long be remembered for bringing Sharon Stone's sliver to the silver screen in Basic Instinct (the actress displayed her appreciation by giving him her panties as a keepsake). Noting that his signature camera angle has suddenly become trendy, he jokes, "I should ask for a percentage! I just saw that movie Babel where the Japanese girl [flashes her crotch]. And then there's Britney Spears. There are a lot of women who go around without panties these days. You must have noticed that. To your amazement sometimes."

"There are a lot of women who go around without panties these days. You must have noticed that. To your amazement sometimes"Of course, strategically uncrossed legs are not all Paul Verhoeven is known for. In his 46 years as a director, he has brought mainstream attention to killer robots (Robocop), tri-breasted prostitutes (Total Recall), and lethal ice picks (Basic Instinct). In the early '90s, after Verhoeven and blustery wunderscribe Joe Eszterhas explored their baser instincts with Stone, they embarked on a big-budget passion project that would become one of the most legendary flops in Hollywood history.

"I liked Showgirls!" he says now. "I see it as a hyperbolic experience." Not a lot of viewers were seeking this particular sort of experience, though, and the splat the movie made when it landed in theaters still echoes in the American psyche. His next film, Starship Troopers, a sci-fi satire in which soldiers battle enormous insects, met a similar fate. "I always felt that the movie was, to a large degree, misunderstood," Verhoeven says with a sigh. It seems audiences took the film's fascistic worldview at face value. When it was released, Washington Post writer Stephen Hunter went so far as to call it "Nazi to the core." Rarely do movies about giant bugs elicit blurbs like that.

PIÈCE DE RÉSISTANCE Carice van Houten does her part for Holland

With such an oeuvre, what do you do for an encore? A Holocaust movie, natch. Black Book, a Dutch-language feature shot in Verhoeven's native Holland, tells the story of a Jewish woman's attempts to survive the final days of World War II after her hiding place is bombed by Allied forces. And despite its period setting and deadly serious subject matter, it's a Verhoeven flick to the core. Along with his favored touchstones—full-frontal nudity (both flavors, in extended Jew-on-Nazi sex scenes), brain-splattering executions, torture, and enough moral ambiguity to make Henry Kissinger blush—the director treats the audience to the unprecedented image of a waterfall of shit poured over heroine Rachel's half-naked body. Life Is Beautiful, this is not.
Photos: Catherine Ledner; Sony Picture Classics

AGENT PROVOCATEUR The artist at his home

And yet, somehow, it works. The film has dominated European box offices and was selected as the Dutch nominee for best foreign feature for the Academy Awards. Despite early derision from many American distributors—said to have dubbed it "Schindler's List Meets Showgirls"—Black Book opens this week from Sony Pictures Classics.

All of which leaves Verhoeven a tad nervous. "I'm always amazed at what becomes a controversy," he says. He's had his fair share. From the gay activists who threatened to shutter Basic Instinct (for its negative portrayal of bisexual women) to the parents' groups that raised an unholy stink about Showgirls, just about everyone has found something to object to in his work. "They even created an anti-Spetters committee in Holland," he notes proudly, referring to his 1980 film about amateur dirt bikers.

But, to be fair, Verhoeven finds a lot of things to object to in Western culture, as well. Our prudishness, for instance: "Sexuality is nearly nonexistent in American cinema," he declares. When a TV version of Showgirls was released in which the dancers were outfitted with digital underwear, the director angrily withdrew his name from the cut. "Jan Jansen' directed that one," he says with a chuckle. "I felt that having my name there would be an injustice to me."

Then there are all of those noble myths we've created around World War II. "I was there," he points out. Though he was only seven when the war ended, he recalls many horrific details, a number of which made it into Black Book. During the later days of the war, for instance, his entire quarter in The Hague was bombed by the Allies, who'd mistaken it for a V2 launching pad. "The destruction I saw was mostly caused by the Allies," he muses. "That's a strange thing to grow up with. From the beginning, as a child, you put yourself into a question mark."

Verhoeven has now put that question mark into Black Book. With its sympathetic Nazis, anti-Semitic resistance fighters, and revenge-hungry heroes, it shows a moral uncertainty that's uncommon for a World War II movie, to say the least. "I feel it's the pleasure of the audience to make up their own mind about a film," he explains.

DOUBLE DUTCH Van Houten and Verhoeven

Now that he's taken on the Second World War in his own signature style, perhaps it's no surprise that he hopes to tackle the life of Jesus for his next film. He became obsessed with the subject in the 1980s after reading a newspaper article about the Jesus Seminar—a consortium of academic heavyweights like Harold Attridge, dean of the Yale Divinity School, and Walter Wink of Auburn Theological Seminary, that's on a mission to determine the facts of Jesus's earthly life. Verhoeven asked to attend a session; two decades later, he's a voting member (the group casts ballots on the likelihood that various events depicted in the Gospels actually happened as written).

That's not to say the director who created the first widely released NC-17 movie will be bringing the Good News to a multiplex near you. Recalling Martin Scorsese's 1988 God-sploitation classic, The Last Temptation of Christ, he deadpans, "That was a nice movie compared to what I would do."

Photos: Catherine Ledner; Getty Images