Showgirls Director Planning A Movie With Adultery, Islam, And Psychic Powers

Filmmaker Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Total Recall, Showgirls) has never been one to shy away from a hairbrained scheme, so while if I were to tell you anyone else were making a movie about sexy psychic Muslims you might assume I was kidding, when I tell you Paul Verhoeven’s doing it, well, you know I’m not. Slashfilm caught him on Dutch television where he announced his next project, based on a Dutch novel called The Hidden Force.

Here’s how Verhoeven described it:

[The movie is about] rebellion against colonial rule, the emergence of fundamentalist Islam, the behavior between people, adultery and psychic powers. It is a story about things that we do not understand but it does happen.

Ok so it sounds a little bit like The Men Who Stare at Goats done up Verhoeven-style. But he’s actually been working on this project since the 70s. And his home country of Holland in general has shown a willingness recently to seriously piss off Muslim groups by, well, not caring about whether or not they hurt their feelings. So maybe he feels the time is right. Personally I’d be scared to death to tackle fundamentalist Islam, but then I’m a movie blogger and not a legendary, possibly crazy, Dutch director.

It may help that the film doesn’t deal with modern, fundamentalist Islam. At least not if it’s based very strictly on the book. The original novel The Hidden Force was written in 1900 and set in the Dutch East Indies where a colonial official “is undone by his wilful application of reason to a culture that is steeped in the mystical and irrational.” Reason and logic are never quite as popular as you’d think they’d be.