Our nearly two-hour interview with Dr. Uwe Boll has been broken down into three parts due to its length, at the end of which you can also expect a very special prize draw. You can read the first part here, in which Dr. Boll talked about Covid, his adventures and future plans in the restaurant industry and his future plans. In the current, slightly longer part, Fixxerx and Zoo_Lee discussed some of Uwe’s early works, Cinegore’s favorit (Tunnel Rats) – the more positively received, „politically incorrect” action films, the famous Postal adaptation – and we also touched the political landscape in the US a bit.

Fixxerx: One of my personal favorites from your previous films is Tunnel Rats, in part because it showed both the abundance of blood and the spiritual trauma that comes with war, and without the American film cliché elements. Were you thinking about possibly continuing the path you started with Tunnel Rats and making more war dramas as well?

UB.: “I really like the Tunnel Rats, I think it worked very well and I liked the concept from the start, as these Vietkong tunnels were one of the main reasons the Americans couldn’t win that war. The Vietcong could get through everything and then attack again. In my film, I also tried to show that the Vietcong fought for their lives, while a significant portion of the enlisted Americans didn’t even want to fight, and yet they ended up in a nightmare in the depths of a jungle that completely drives them insane.
I love war movies like Platoon, Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. I grew up with these films, and to tell you the truth, I want to make another movie like Tunnel Rats one day. A lot of war movies are pretty flat anyway, they try to force morale, a lesson, which I don’t like so much, so when I shot Auschwitz, for example, I focused primarily on murder, brutality. […] I recently saw the third season of Norsemen on Netflix, I love it, and they dared to take do this genius idea where the characters don’t openly consider their slaves to be humans. While it is clear that slaves are at least as intelligent and speak just as they do, they are slaughtered without much distraction.
The dehumanization of people is essentially a historical practice that has happened over and over and over again. This idea is very interesting to me that how you can convince a person that what he sees looks like another person, but is not really a human being, his pain doesn’t matter, at most it should be seen as an obstacle or a tool. Early in my film career, I tried to highlight in my third production (Run Amok) that I don’t think people are good, but neutral by nature, driven by feelings and ideas, and able to do the most horrible things imaginable at any time. And throughout history, even though it would have been clear with a little thought that there would was a more logical, reasonable solution, they have almost never chosen it.”

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“And under Donald Trump’s presidency, it’s like we’ve entered an era of chaos where the U.S. president is literally shitting words out of his mouth. We all heard him explain that no one needs masks for four months and that he thinks the coronavirus is a hoax, doesn’t even exist, and then he suddenly started claiming that he always said that the coronavirus is the most horrible thing, everyone should wears masks, and this is where I see a huge difference compared to Europeans. In France, for example, if Marine Le Pen said we can’t afford a complete shutdown, everything will remain the same as for the Swedes and let the natural immunization happen, or whatever, he would justify these decisions, while Donald Trump proves it every day that it is as if we are still living according to the laws of the Wild West, where if someone is imprisoned, he annuls the verdict the next day, like in the Roger Stone case.”

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“There is only one thing I find positive about Trump: Trump doesn’t want to keep doing the war in the Middle East. He assessed that it was too costly, which I think was a more meaningful approach than what Obama and Clinton and everyone before them who had allowed these insane Middle East wars did. Riots, revolutions, the first war in Iraq, the second war in Iraq, and ultimately, none have yielded any positive results for anyone. Hussein was killed, the Islamic State came instead, which is better? There are things in which independence from political parties is the winning attitude, I personally keep in mind the problems and challenges we face, I have never drawn to either the right or the left, but at the same time I have some opinions that suit one and some that suit the other better. For example, about the fact that the rich will only get richer in America, I supported Bernie Sanders that the condition in America is unsustainable, that 60-70% of the population lives almost month-by-month, has no health insurance, and on the other side there is Jeff Bezos, who gained twenty billion in revenue in a single quarter! This is crazy! When I was young, super-rich people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett had fortunes of six to seven billion, for example. In the last ten to fifteen years, on the other hand, we are talking about wealth of one hundred to one hundred and twenty billion, as if there were no longer a ceiling, they keep getting so rich that the richest would slowly have greater wealth per person than entire countries. “

Fixxerx: The funny thing about Trump for me is that even before he was elected president, he almost played president in the second or third part of Sharknado, which I think is an impressive little detail considering what happened later. And I know you’ve played a president at least twice in your films, too.

UB.: ” I don’t know if I can read what’s on my T-shirt (TRUCK FONALD DUMP). In Vancouver, by the way, I had a cap with the caption Trump-Putin 2020. And once, while I was walking in that cap, a woman spat in my face. It was quite disgusting, but I was more shocked that she didn’t understand the joke that because of the Putin part, it was essentially an anti-Trump cap. Because the cap was red and looked like “Let’s make America great again!” campaign caps, she thought I supported Trump. She was an older woman, that was her luck, too, because if a young guy had done the same, I’d have kicked the shit out of him, so all I said to her was, “Read the caption you fuck! “

Fixxerx: I’ve heard it critics should be careful with you, since you were an amateur boxer in your youth and the stories about “Raging Boll” are legendary on the internet. And while we are already talking about politics, my colleague Zoo_Lee also has a few questions about your movie Postal.

Zoo_Lee: Yes. Postal was perhaps your most positively received game adaptation. Why do you think this was compared to your other video game movies?

UB.: “On one hand, it was also political satire, and many of the viewers didn’t even hear about the game – they saw and liked the film. Plus, the Postal game is also a completely insane, anarchist madness, and I think I perfectly captured its spirituality, which didn’t happen with my other game-based films. In addition, with other game adaptations, there were always problems with the circumstances. In the case of the House of the Dead, I received not only the rights from Mindfire, but also the pre-written script, which has already been approved by SEGA. I couldn’t come up with any own idea, I had everything in my hands that the makers of the game had already nodded to, only the result had everyone furious and disappointed in the end. At least it turned a good profit. Then when I made Alone in the Dark, the plan was that Atari was in full swing making a new sequel in the game series that would have had the same story as the movie, but then they stopped the development halfway through and my movie came out and had nothing to do with the previous games. Postal broke this cycle, plus it was my only game adaptation for which I was able to write the script.“

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“The most interesting thing about Postal, though, is that every time I go to some film festival, movie con and meet fans who want to sign DVDs by me, they bring Postal in half the cases. I’ve shot thirty-two films in total, yet every second person brings Postal, and Postal has some of the most loyal fans. If you remember, it was no coincidence that we tried to bring a sequel under the roof, but not enough money came together on Kickstarter, and you can’t shoot a Postal 2-caliber movie out of $ 100,000 to meet expectations. Though a Postal 2 would now have every right to exist, as we practically live in Postal world right now. The film is twelve years old, yet I don’t think there has been another similar movie made since then, which would show the madness of our current world as accurately or better. Bush is running hand in hand with Bin Laden in the thick of the nuclear bombing in the end, isn’t that exactly what’s happening in reality now? Tomorrow we could wake up to Trump and Kim Jong-Un being best buddies and taking on the world. With Trump, it is as if everything depends on what Twitter message he reads first after waking up.”

Zoo_Lee: As a matter of fact, you half answered another question of mine, which would have been that if you could make Postal 2 now, how much crazier would it be?

UB.: “It’s a difficult question, isn’t it? You can feel that the bar it would need to jump has risen. But I wrote an opening scene for it a long time ago, or several ideas in fact that could have led to a script. In one of my possible openings we would have seen a drone control station in the US Army where workers fly drones and kill random people with them. But they get a new control program, say, made by Google for them, which pushes pop-up ads into their faces with no pause, like when you search for a new grill, you see them on every ad surface. So they completely lose control, don’t even see the target, and accidentally kill completely innocent people, including school children, en masse, while the program pushes the screen full of ads from various porn sites. And that would have been just my opening scene!”

“It’s upsetting, yes, but if you remember, I started with a parody of the 9/11 attacks in the first Postal. So the second one would have to open at least as drastically, but at the same time in a way that it could actually happen. I wouldn”t be surprised if such accidents were currently occurring while soldiers are dying from boredom at Afghan checkpoints. My other idea would have been to shoot my own version of Osama Bin Laden’s assassination for the film. Because if you think about what actually happened, the soldiers killed an innocent grandpa in a building full of kids, that’s the reality. But the Marines were celebrated for it as if they were the saviors of the world, while they also managed to crash a helicopter during the action! How stupid do you have to be to crash a helicopter? Then they somehow lost the body as well. Why? [To the best of my knowledge] why hasn’t anyone seen Osama Bin Laden’s body so far? And in Postal 2, of course, he would be alive and thrive, because really only an innocent grandpa was really killed in his place, I would have even brought back the same actor who played him in the first part. In my version, the soldiers would go to the house after the helicopter crash, change into food carriers as a disguise, but then it would turn out that they had missed the order and Obama and everyone in the White House would just shake their heads, like damn they ordered pizza, our guys have Chinese foog, action is blown. Then after about three weeks, they repeat, but successfully, they shoot everyone in the building while Osama is watching porn – which also actually happened because I read it that they found quite a decent amount of porn on his hard drives, and I think that’s pretty funny.”

“I love scenes like this, but stuff like that isn’t cheap – you need a ten million dollar budget, otherwise it won’t be that funny anymore if you don’t really have two helicopters for the scene or authentic Islamic-Arabic scenery, I trusted Netflix or Amazon to have a budget for something like that, they could be braver and take on something like that, instead there are more and more movies on Netflix where you watch it for like thirty minutes and you just stop, because what’s the point of that? Neither beginning nor the end, and especially many Netflix movie ends up as a total failure in my opinion. Boring, there was also the thing that Michael Bay and Ryan Reynolds did, I think it was awful, 150 million was thrown out for a two-hour car chase.”

Zoo_Lee: So you think originality is lost from these too?

UB.: “Two or three years ago, Netflix had excellent relationships, bought independent movies, bought a lot of movies from me, but I don’t even hear from them anymore, only Brad Pitt-caliber people go to lunch with their producers and they give him hundreds of millions to do what you want. Terribly, they began to focus only on the big names. […] Netflix has much better series such as the Ozarks, Money Heist, Marcella, or their more radical docu series, but their movies are just awful. A famous actor nods at your script, Netflix starts throwing money at you. The same mistake that Hollywood studios made years ago when they mass-produced aimless, redundant, irrelevant films.”

Zoo_Lee: I have one last question about Postal, about a specific scene where you’re practically playing your own parody and get attacked by Vince Desi, the creator of Postal games. Did you came up with that scene when you wrote the Postal script or how exactly came that to be?

UB.: “Vince insisted that he wants to be in the film when I got the rights. I felt it would be the perfect scene for him to appear in disguise as the Crotchy doll. […] The point is, Vince is a great guy, they continue to make Postal Games from Tucson, Arizona to this day.”

Soon the final part of the interview will be up too.

Fixxerx & Zoo_Lee