I wanted to show what really happened, the gassing and the burning...

"People always come up with bullshit about me, like how I subsidise my films with Nazi gold, or that I’m a dwarf and I violently beat my actors,” says German director Uwe Boll, waving a dismissive hand as he sips a frothy Frappuccino at Starbucks. “But they never come up with sex rumours, like I fucked Jennifer Aniston. It’s too bad that I don’t get that kind of press.”

Controversial, outspoken and despised by critics and movie fans alike, Boll has had to develop a skin thick during his 20-year career. Hostile gamers have labelled him ‘The Devil’ for videogame movie flops Bloodrayne and Alone In The Dark (2005) and, over five years, 365,000 people have petitioned online for him to stop making films, a challenge set by Boll himself.

Reporters at CNN and Fox publicly denounced him as “a disgrace” for his satiric take on 9/11 in Postal (2007) – a slapstick comedy that Boll boldly claims is “the best videogame movie ever” – and film festivals in his homeland have never shown any of his movies. “I’m the only German director who hasn’t kissed the arse of our public TV corporation,” he says. “I tackle subjects that really piss them off!”

HEADING INTO BATTLE

One such film, Darfur (2009), focused on the genocide in Sudan. Amnesty International backed the film, but according to Boll, Obama’s government claimed the movie “called for more violence” in Sudan.

But his latest flick, Auschwitz, is even more controversial. Featuring a reconstructed ‘day-in-the-life’ at the infamous Nazi concentration camp where one-four million Jews and prisoners were murdered, there are no emotional distractions of plot, music or characters, and the 30-minute film is sandwiched between interviews with German high school students, who display an alarming lack of knowledge about Nazi atrocities – which is why Boll made the movie.

“You get documentaries and great movies about the subject, such as Schindler’s List (1993) and The Pianist (2002), but none of them show what it was really like in concentration camps,” Boll explains. “Having courage means making a film that hurts and gets you enemies. With Auschwitz, I wanted to show what happened; the deportation, the selection, the gassing, and the burning… it was a meat-plant, basically. At the moment, I think that half of the world doesn’t know what the Holocaust was or they deny it happened, so I felt the need to make this film, and it will become more important when the last generation of people who were alive during the war have all passed away.”

PLUGGING THE GORE

In order to attract attention, Boll has been promoting the film with a horrific, ambiguous trailer, depicting its most disturbing moments, including the extraction of gold teeth from dead bodies, and a child’s corpse being rolled into an oven. It also features Boll playing an SS Guard who’s standing in front of a door as his victims pound on the window with their fists – a part he took on when the extras struggled in the role.

“The response from that trailer was ‘Holy shit, what the hell is this?’” says Boll. “One American radio station was asking, ‘Is this guy crazy?’. But because we didn’t have the money for a big theatrical campaign, I wanted the controversy.”

On the back of the trailer, some people thought the film was a slasher flick. “A distributor in Brazil bought the film, then said, ‘Ugh, this movie is shit, I can’t sell this! Where’s the torture?’ I said, ‘What did you expect from a film called Auschwitz, a guy with a chainsaw running around?’ But hopefully, people will watch it now and discover it’s not a primitive horror movie.”

JEWISH SUPPORT

Boll takes a unique approach to a difficult subject, and claims that Auschwitz has had positive reviews from a few Jewish publications. He also says that he was due to discuss the film on national TV with the head of the Jewish community in Germany, Michel Friedman, until producers pulled the plug for “political reasons”. But the film struggles to convey the horror of the camps, and several online reviewers have said that the scenes where people are gassed in showers look empty and aren’t in keeping with the appalling eye-witness accounts of droves of prisoners being crammed in.

Boll says those scenes were difficult to shoot. “Sure, towards the end of Auschwitz, the Nazis had gas chambers for 1,000 people, but it was hard enough to find 100 extras who were willing to get naked,” Boll tells us. “And those people were extras, not actors. Of course, the reality would be more horrific. But in the early days, the Nazis were gassing smaller numbers of people.”

But the scene that Boll found hardest to film – in Auschwitz and his career as a whole – involved babies being shot in the head. “We used real mothers and babies, and the gunshots had to be added in during post-production due to the noise,” he reveals. “While guards would’ve held the babies by their ears in reality, we had to hold them under their arms for safety reasons.”

BAD EDUCATION

Yet while the dramatic recreation may lack the grim intensity it strives for, the film’s starkest moments come during interviews with high school students. Of the 15 or so teenagers featured, all struggle to provide accurate accounts of what happened during the Holocaust, and many others were left out of the final edit because they were unable to say anything about it at all.

“Just what the fuck is going on in our schools?” asks Boll, dumbfounded. “Why aren’t our kids being taught what happened? If you listen to politicians, they say ‘The Holocaust, ugh, of course, worst crime ever, everyone knows about it’, but a lot of our kids have no fucking clue what it was. And only two schools out of 15 agreed to cooperate with us, because they were scared. We’ve struggled with film distributors in the US and I think it’s because German TV has been telling people not to buy the film as it shows Germans in a bad light.”

But isn’t it possible that Auschwitz could be dismissed because of the way people feel about Boll?

“Yes, the problem is getting the attention the cause deserves, because I made the film, and that’s disappointing,” he says, with frustration. “On online forums, I often see posts that read, ‘I stay away from Uwe Boll movies, he is such a bad film director, I’ve never seen one of his films.’ I think, ‘What the fuck is that?’ How can someone criticise something if they’ve never seen it? But I’ll continue to make these films; it’d be depressing if I had an interesting idea, but didn’t go ahead with it for fear of being bashed.”