After a robust career in the Netherlands as the country's most successful director, Paul Verhoeven (b. 1938) built an impressive career in the United States with such controversial blockbusters as RoboCop , Total Recall , Basic Instinct , Starship Troopers , and Showgirls before returning home to direct 2006's Black Book . After a recent stint as a reality television judge in the Netherlands, Verhoeven returned to the big screen with his first feature film in a decade, a highly anticipated French-language production, Elle , starring Isabelle Huppert. Verhoeven, who holds an advanced degree in mathematics and physics, boasts a fascinating background. Traversing Hollywood, the Dutch film industry, and now French filmmaking, the interviews in this volume reveal a complex, often ambiguous figure, as well as a director of immense talent. Paul Verhoeven: Interviews covers every phase of the director's career, beginning with six newly translated Dutch newspaper interviews dating back to 1968 and ending with a set of previously unpublished interviews dedicated to his most recent work. He experimented with crowd-sourced filmmaking for the television show The Entertainment Experience , which resulted in the film Tricked , as well as his latest feature Elle . Editor Margaret Barton-Fumo includes "Sex, Cinema and Showgirls," a long out-of-print essay by Verhoeven on his most controversial film, accompanied by pages of original storyboards from this and some of Verhoeven's other films. Finally, Barton-Fumo allots due attention to the director's little-known lifelong fascination with the historical Jesus Christ. Verhoeven is the only non-theologian member of the exclusive Westar Institute and author of the book Jesus of Nazareth .