(continued)

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.

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

READ MORE
• Helmut Newton: Revisiting the King of Kink
• Meet Matt Sanchez: G.O.P Darling, Former Gay Porn Star
• Today's Top Stories