[Above: Zack Ward and Dave Foley in Postal]
Writer/producer/director Uwe Boll (BloodRayne, House of the Dead) came to Fantastic Fest on Saturday to screen his newest assault on taste. Paste spoke with the German film maker about the film, Postal, and his forthcoming 2008 movie about Vietnam.
Paste: There’s a lot of shooting in the movie.
Uwe Boll: I get shot in the balls, actually, and I play myself like a little lederhosen Nazi guy. I think, basically, Postal makes fun out of everything. It’s an all-time offender. The whole point was to make a comedy in the style more like Naked Gun and Airplane. All the movies in the past few years were like date movies, and I wanted to do something more radical.
P: I was reading the Fantastic Fest description of the movie: “One of the most coarse, vulgar and offensive comedies ever put to celluloid.”
B: (Laughing) I think it’s true. It was time to do something like this, to pull out the big hammer and make fun out of everything. We have Bin Laden, we have Bush, and no one gets out.
P: The character Uncle Dave is played by Kids in the Hall’s Dave Foley?
B: And he’s full frontal naked in one scene.
P: How does a film like this play in Germany as compared to the U.S.?
B: The humor that plays good in North America plays, normally, very good in Australia, the U.K. and Germany. In Italy they have a different kind of humor, and in France.
P: Your next film—are you going to do something similar?
B: I did a movie about the Vietnam War, Tunnel Rats, that will come out next year. [It will be] 40 years since Bobby Kennedy got shot, since Martin Luther King got shot, the Vietnam war. I felt that the Vietnam war is more like an icon of the last hundred years and it changed a whole generation…with music also. We’re trying now to get music, like Sly & the Family Stone, from that generation into the movie. It’s tough because of the [legal] rights thing but I’m optimistic that we will get a few very good songs.
Dai-Nipponjin (Big Man Japan)
The boundaries of mockumentary filmmaking are stretched to the extreme in this unconventional import from Japan about an unassuming citizen who transforms himself into a giant and defends Tokyo against monsters he calls “baddies.” The casual documentary style and excellent performance by Hitoshi Matsumoto, along with great character-generations make this one of the best films of the festival. Magnolia Pictures distributed last year’s innovative, South Korean creature flick, The Host, and has now acquired the rights to Dai-Nipponjin, so expect a release in the next year.
The Un-Gone
In this inventive and well-filmed short, a couple uses a matter transporter (a’la Star Trek) to take a trip—a seemingly standard procedure in the future. But a malfunction leads to a drastic, and lethal, remedy.