Biography

[talking about Total Recall (1990)] Verhoeven has moments. He's talented and he does have some grand sci-fi visual things to see from time to time, but he's a very flawed director and Total Recall had a lot of pitfalls for him and he fell in most of them. In particular, whenever he started to flounder and didn't know what to do, he would start throwing in violence. He'd say bring in all the rubber body parts and the blood hoses and everything and we'll start ripping people to shreds and squirt blood everywhere. And he'd keep shooting that until he overcame his nerves and got his feet on the ground and would start directing in some reasonable way again. So you'd end up with these intermittent scenes of absurdly excessive maimings at sort of intervals, and usually what he was substituting for were scenes that involved humor in the original [script]. And I realized, 'Oh, he's not good at humor. He doesn't know how to tell a joke onscreen.' Too bad, because some of the important stuff he did very well on Total Recall. It had grand moments.

The one that was certainly best directed, far and away above the rest, was Alien. Ridley Scott's directorial thing there was absolutely wonderful. I haven't had another director equal it.

[talking about Lifeforce - L'étoile du mal (1985)] The performances too could have been computer generated, it probably would have been a great improvement. We had the one and only Tobe Hooper at the helm which is approximately like having Bozo the Clown at the helm.

It's been said over and over again by writers of scary stories that a writer can't scare a reader unless that writer scares himself or herself first. So, you can't excite anyone in the audience unless you're excited writing the script! You're taking yourself for a ride before you take the audience for a ride!

With "Alien", I figured out quite simply that, as an audience member, what you DON'T see scares you more than what you see. In horror films, the scares that really grab the audience and build the tension for them don't come from the monster jumping out of the shadows! The terror comes from the slow times in between those pay-off scenes in which the characters are talking and planning -- waiting for something to jump out at them!