Up Close and Personal with Uwe Boll!
POSTAL NATION Shares Some Nazi Gold with
'Postal' Director!

Interview By Bill "The Game Doctor" Kunkel

The first time I ever saw a Uwe Boll movie, as things happened, I was in New York on a trip with Vince Desi and came down with one of those horrible illnesses where the bad news is that it won’t kill you. I had to delay my trip home and spent several days in hell on my parents’ basement couch, puking at ten-minute intervals and trying unsuccessfully to hold down liquids with mostly the TV for company. While surfing the dial, I suddenly came across a vision; it looked like some crazed, surrealist combination of a movie and a video game. I thought I must be delirious, but the informational on-screen tag informed me that I was watching “House of the Dead” on Showtime.

I knew Sega had produced a light gun zombie shooter of that name for the arcades and, sure enough, this movie featured zombie killing. In fact, as best I can recall, it featured pretty much nothing but zombie killing (in the sense that either zombies were killing people or being killed). I remember thinking in the throes of body-wracking pain that whoever had directed this movie took “unconventional” to entirely new places.

Until I caught a preview screening of “Postal” in Tucson recently, I had not seen another Uwe Boll movie since that fevered viewing of “House of the Dead”. But I sure heard about him. To give you an idea of how dear gamers hold Uwe to their heart, he apparently made a comment after a recent NY screening to the effect that if a million fans affixed their names to a petition asking him to stop making movies, he would. As a result, some 50,000 signatures a day are reportedly rushing to the site as I write this.

Maybe if those rabid fans decide to give “Postal” a shot—so to speak—when it opens on May 23rd, they will find their world view shaken to its core. “Postal” is wildly inappropriate, hysterically funny and among the most faithful video game-based movies ever made.

So, while preparing for our “Spring Release” issue I realized that while just about anybody with a blog had already interviewed Uwe, I hadn’t. Moreover, he had never been questioned about his collaboration with Running With Scissors. So we sat down in cyberspace and talked it out:

First, I wondered what had attracted him to POSTAL as a license, given that it was so different from his earlier films. It turns out that the difference was exactly what Uwe was looking for. “{ It was the opportunity to change the genre into action comedy [that attracted me to POSTAL],” he explained.

So, how did that work out for him, given the outrageous nature of the film?

“All the actors really went out there and far over the top,” Boll attested. “Everybody involved in the project was insulted from time to time,” he confessed, adding: “But not me... I love ridiculous humor.”

In fact, to prove it, Uwe cast himself as… himself! In the film, he’s the rapacious operator of Little Bavaria, a Deutschland-based theme park. Uwe, replete with lederhosen and alpine hat (he pays off celebrity attraction Vern Troyer in gold teeth) is like the incarnation of every Boll-buster’s conception of the man. “I think it was necessary to make fun out of myself also if I bash everybody else,” Uwe told us frankly. “People should know that I'm not scared to make a fool out of myself.”

He summed up his sometimes-rocky relationship with POSTAL developers RWS, overall, as “a pleasure.” Or, as he elaborated “They hated me, then they loved me... now they really love me.”

But RWS is a company that has always controlled its own marketing and was certain to offer lots of input into that part of the movie making process. So were we a Good Thing or a Pain in the Ass?

“ Vince [Desi] is the best self promoter since Don King,” Uwe gushed. “I love him... till he gets drunk,” he added needlessly. But seriously? “It was a pleasure to work with those guys,” he assured us. “A few beers and they are fine with whatever you do.”

Knowing of his fondness for the Internet Press, we wondered if he had any message for them, collectively. Turned out he did: “They should take their faces out of their own asses,” he declared.

Following "Postal", what's next for Uwe Boll? He has two projects in process: “TunnelRats” which is “a Vietnam war movie set in 1968” and “Seed”, a film he describes affectionately as “my X-Rated horror movie about the death penalty.”

Any chance there’s a “Postal 2” in our future? “I hope so,” he assured us. “But we need [to do] five million at the box office with the first part.”

—Bill “The Game Doctor” Kunkel