The Dutch provocateur chats lesbian nuns, alternate realities and his undying love for Quentin Tarantino.
Interview by JUSTINE SMITH Illustration by MICHAEL DUNBABIN
In Conversation
Except for maybe RoboCop, Benedetta represents Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven’s closest attempt at fulfilling his lifelong wish of bringing the story of the historical Jesus to the screen. Based on the trial transcripts described in Judith C. Brown’s ‘Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy’, the film revisits many of Verhoeven’s life-long obsessions: unstable realities; sexual desire; corrupted power and the divine. Set during the 17th century, an Italian nun (Benedetta Carlini) blessed with divine visions is declared a mystic and a living Saint by the Vatican, only to be accused of sapphism and put on trial for her crimes.
LWLies: What is it about the line between reality and illusion that fascinates you? Verhoeven: If you look at Total Recall, I made a movie from the perspective that there will be two realities: the reality that Arnold would be the saviour of Mars and the reality that he’s still in a coma. Gary Goldman [one of the co-writers] suggested that [the film] is not ‘this’ or ‘that’, but ‘this’ and ‘that’. You can call it post-modern if you want to use a fashionable term. The most important movie that inspired me was Rashomon, and in that movie, there are four realities! When I was a young man in my twenties, when the film came out, it hit me, of course. Everybody has his reality, that he sees through his own eyes and is shaped by the way his brain has developed.
Rather than cast doubt on Benedetta’s fantasies, you recreate them. In Brown’s book, it’s clearer that Benedetta has a mental illness. What motivated this choice? In her brain, Benedetta creates a Jesus that is saying what she wants anyway. In the beginning, Jesus says, ‘Stay with me.’ Then, later, it turns out that Jesus was not a good guy. There’s the scene with the snakes, and later, she picks up something from the mercenary she saw when she was ten years old and makes him Jesus. He’s a bad guy. Jesus is a false God. She invalidates Jesus and stays away from him. There are other scenes where Jesus is on the cross, the “real” Jesus, who tells her to take off her clothes. There’s no shame, meaning it’s okay for you to get naked and have sex. Her Jesus is somebody that always changes to fit the direction she wants to go in. He sanctifies her decisions, makes them sacred. It comes from him that she can have sex, which at the time was forbidden. At that time, that kind of relationship would be punis
