Sick of Uwe Boll, the near-pathetic German B-movie director that movie geeks loathe so much they’re calling for his permanent banning from filmmaking?
Too bad, Boll has more to say and more people to slam. This time filmmakers Gus Van Sant, fellow German Tom Twyker (“Run Lola Run”), Austrian neighbor Michael Haneke (“Funny Games”) and Michael Bay (a second diss).
To recap (again), movie fans of crappy video-game adaptations started a petition asking Boll to quit filmmaking. He said he’d quit if a million people signed up. People obliged him and the petition numbers skyrocketed (2o0,000-plus and counting). Then Boll fought back, slammed Michael Bay and Eli Roth for no particular reason in a YouTube clip (other than using the lame defense, “hey, they’re at least as shitty a director as I am!, why not pick on them!?”). Michael Bay dismissed him, and then Boll encouraged his “fans,” to start a petition in favor of him sticking around (a meagre 4,ooo have signed it, there’s also another poll with 9 signatures) and dismissed the anti-poll, claiming that people were juking the stats by writing in 10 or 20 times each (Suuuuuure, they are; PetitionOnline captures the IP addresses of those who sign the petition, so it’s easy to see if there are indeed duplicate entries. ).
Well, anywhooo, MTV caught up with the easy-to-find German director and he randomly went off again with his whole, “hey, these filmmakers did shitty work too! Fire them!” thin-as-paper argument. Too many filmmakers get a free pass apparently.
On Tom Twyker: ” ‘Perfume’ is a piece of sh-t, let’s face it, yeah? So… he has a free after ‘Lola’ because people liked the movie. There are a lot of directors like this — they’re getting hype [but] everything [they do] is boring and nobody wants to admit it.”
On Gus Van Sant: “How many good movies did [he] do? A few good movies but also a few bad movies. But if you have this kind of reputation you get invitations to film festivals or whatever.”
On Micheal Haneke: “‘Funny Games’ was a good movie original, but to reshoot that here, was stupid. And everybody thinks the movies are kind of important or something. So, that’s the thing.”
On Michael Bay (again): “I think he’s really bad. And I think the point is, if you get $250 million for every movie you do, how you gonna make a bad looking movie, with bad sound, bad special effects, whatever? But everything dependent on directing is bad in his movies. And so I think it’s kind of absurd, how some people are getting counted like they are geniuses or whatever. But the reality is that in a lot of these $150 million movies, the real credit deserves to the special effects people. Or the second unit crew.”
Boll insists if he had that kind of mega-budget for his films he could easily make movies just as banal and subpar as Bay’s uber-spectacles. “Absolutely, yeah, that’s the point.”
Boll’s next film, “Postal,” comes out on May 23 and he thinks that release date is genius counter-programming against ‘Indy 4.’ Best of luck with that.
Uwe Boll on G4’s “Attack of the Show”
