Uwe Boll is back! CineGore interviewed one of the most original, most divisive directors.

Our editors Zoo_Lee and Fixxerx had a two-hour informal conversation with Dr. Boll – thanks again for your time! The interview will be published in three installments due to its length – and will end with a giveaway, the winners of which will receive a personal message from Uwe Boll himself in the form of a postcard!

Uwe Boll’s work doesn’t need to be introduced to anyone. The 55-year-old director has directed 33 films in his career so far, which many praise, many argue about – but few remain neutral about. Many viewers tend to judge him after the Alone in the Dark or House of the Dead movies, few know that the studio (and the script) tied his hands completely at these.

However, those films where he had a complete freedom (such as Tunnel Rats, Postal or Rampage films) were especially good and unique. The fact that he tends to be vulgar, unrestricted, to speak back to those who criticize them – or to “fix” his critics one after the other in a boxing match ( a story that has earned him the nickname “Raging Boll” ) also plays a major role in the fact that there are mixed opinions.

A series of hard criticisms culminated in his 2016 retirement from the film industry, after which he turned to fine dining, opening a (very successful) restaurant in Canada called Bauhaus, but the coronavirus – as we asked at the beginning of our interview – affected this business badly.

Uwe Boll: “We all thought we’d catch it at some point anyway. if you felt cold, sick, you just stayed home … “

A few minutes later, we learned that Uwe had moved home with his family to Germany (Frankfurt), where things were slowly starting to return to normal. Unfortunately, he had to close his Canadian restaurant and is currently suing the owner of the building – the court is confident the situation will be resolved.

UB: “Unfortunately, the situation is that I had to constantly fight with the owner of the building because he hadn’t renovated the property as promised before, while I put a lot of money into opening the restaurant to make a quality fine dining place. This eventually led to the point where I filed a three-year lawsuit against him, but when the coronavirus struck, he threw him out of the building, even though it was a completely illegal pull. I rescued everything I could, wines, liqueurs, kitchen utensils, tableware, and then sued him for intentional damage. I think he was not fully aware of the long-term consequences of the epidemic, and he thought he could rent it to someone quickly, but now he can’t find a new tenant, because so many restaurants are in crisis. Now we need to think about whether we can open the Bauhaus elsewhere or wait for the lawsuit to end, which could have such consequences that I was get the whole building because the upper flats were uninhabited and I was responsible for the only valuable investment in the property for years.

But there’s something good about that, because the thing is, I’ve been feeling like I want to return to filmmaking for a long time since I did Rampage 3, which was my last movie, three and a half or four years ago. Maybe this whole restaurant calvary was a sign of fate for me to go back to directing movies. In any case, working in the restaurant industry had a great difficulty looking back: if the owner is not the chef at the same time, it is terribly difficult to make a profit … There is a lot of skill in the world of restaurants, and I think the most successful are always those where a couple own it all and say the woman is cooking, the man is managing the business part or vice versa. It involved a lot of work and was very different from the world of movies, where when the movie was done, you were done, you could skip to the next project. 

…. all in all, it’s not such a disaster that we had shut it down, I save huge amounts of money, at least I don’t have to pay rents or anything to the owner. And if I win the lawsuit, maybe I can turn the money smoothly into making a new movie. ..”

That’s right, at the beginning of the interview, the “bomb exploded” – Uwe, who retired in 2016, plans to return!

Fixxerx: “Can you tell us exactly what kind of movies are you planning, a sequel to the series Rampage or In the Name of the King for example (as we heard about it in a kickstarter campaign- ed.)?”

UB:“So much has happened with the In the Name of the King that we came up with an idea for a series, and at one point I was very confident that Netflix would support us in its realization, and I have another idea for a medieval fantasy series based on a comic book series that is currently only available in Germany and takes place during the rather bloody wars of the 1300s-1400s. “

“As for the Rampage – well yes, people really like the Rampage, but (spoiler), the protagonist is dead, and I can’t resurrect him, it would be a very cheap trick, and I’m afraid the value of the original trilogy would be hurt by that. The truth is that we’ve come up with a small entertaining preview for a possible sequel, which is likely to be available soon, and in which I plan to have a successor as the protagonist, as fans have already appeared in the trilogy who have also put on their armor, to continue the fight. “

“The only question is who would fund the project? Rampage was available on Netflix, which weighed a lot on the lat, but they didn’t pay too much for it. I want Amazon, Netflix or Hulu to provide me with the budget to shoot a film of this caliber, but I can also keep the rights for at least a couple of years, because the DVD and Blu-Ray markets are currently dead, there’s no chance of making a normal profit on them, and I like to make a little more radical movies like the ones I’ve never seen on TV in Germany. I want their support – but they all want films for people under the age of 13. In contrast, my films are bloody, violent, radical and I don’t want to change my voice, my style just to accommodate TV, but I trust that now, as younger and younger generations will take control of these institutions, they may dare to take on a little rougher things. “

Fixxerx: Can you tell me a couple of series, movies that you liked lately?

“I especially like Gomorrah, Ozark, Narcos, El Chapo and similar series, which are mostly up on Netflix, but also Taboo with Tom Hardy, which are all rougher, wilder, and that’s why I trust stream providers to be better partners for me too. Because they just don’t care so much about age, classifications, they take on R rated things, so I’m confident that I can contact them in Germany and maybe start working on a few series around 2020-21. “

ore interesting stories and further plans are coming in the next part – stay tuned!

Fixxerx és Zoo_Lee