Paul Verhoeven is een levende Nederlandse film god die in de jaren tachtig en negentig in de US een aantal science-fiction films maakte die vandaag de dag nog steeds klassiekers zijn. Maar pas geleden heeft bij de film Elle gemaakt en daarom had de website Coming Soon een interview met hem, en daar kwamen een hoop dingen voorbij. Dus een must read.

CS: One of the most fascinating aspects is her profession in the movie. She runs a video game company in France. I'm wondering how close does the film represent that specific corporate culture, say like an Ubisoft or a company like that?

Verhoeven: In the novel she's the CEO of a collective group of writers, 20 writers that work for film and television. She's supervising all the projects and basically telling the writers that it's good or not good and that they have to change the character or the lengths or this and that structure. That's her profession. From the beginning we felt that was a non-visual aspect. Twenty people talking about scripts that we don't know about and characters we don't know, in a movie, seemed really wrong. By coincidence my youngest daughter, who is a painter, said during dinner, "Instead of that, make her the head of a video game company?" That was something I didn't know much about. I'm not so much into video games. I mean, I know, of course, but I've never played them myself. David Birke, the writer of the script, knew everything about it. Plays video games, knows all the language that is used there, how it functions and whatever. When I proposed that to him, saying, "What about video games?" he immediately jumped on the idea, and we started to integrate that video game into the narrative a little bit.

But it was not, as some people have suggested, using videogames because it's very male oriented and very violent. I didn't even think about that. I didn't even know about that. I heard that later, after the film was made. So I just thought, "Oh yeah, a video game." We did not have the millions of dollars that's necessary to setup a video game, so we went to a French company that made video games in Paris. They showed us different games they'd been producing and we chose two games and combined them. All the characters were there in the computer, so we could make them move whatever way I wanted without being too expensive. Now this is the one that seemed a bit... especially because of a woman being attacked by tentacles breaking into her brain. That was interesting because of "Starship Troopers," because when they sucked out his brains. That's basically what the brain bug does at the end.