Flesh and Blood (1985 film)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Flesh and Blood, released in August 1985, arrived in American cinemas on the 16th of August of that year, opening only in Los Angeles and New York City. It earned a mere 100,000 dollars against a production budget of 6.5 million. Paul Verhoeven, then the highest-profile Dutch filmmaker in the world, had staked his international ambitions on this picture. It was his first English-language film, and it broke him. Within weeks of its release, he packed up and moved to the United States, determined to understand why American audiences had rejected his vision of the medieval world.

  How did a project Verhoeven had carried in his mind since 1970 end up as a box office disaster that also destroyed his friendship with his most trusted leading man? What happens when a filmmaker refuses to soften history into fantasy, and the industry pushes back? And why, decades later, do scholars and the creator of one of the world's most celebrated manga series still return to this film as a touchstone?

• 2. A Project Born in 1970

  ›

  Gerard Soeteman handed Paul Verhoeven a fifty-page outline sometime around 1970, a story called The Mercenaries, or God's Own Butchers. It told of a group of mercenaries dismissed by their financial backer, a Duke, after they had done his dirty work. One of the mercenaries kidnaps the Duke's son's betrothed, and the son sets out with another mercenary to get her back. Soeteman had worked with Verhoeven before, on the Dutch television series Floris, which had also been Rutger Hauer's debut. The outline drew its energy from The Wild Bunch, Vera Cruz, and The Crimson Pirate, with The Wild Bunch as the dominant inspiration.

  Verhoeven's own description of the original story centers on two men, not a woman. Jack Thompson was to play the lieutenant, Hauer the sergeant. After a city was conquered, the two were divided by circumstance and forced to fight each other. Verhoeven recalled that the drama was rooted in two people who liked each other, loved each other, and yet could not escape their destiny.

  Orion Pictures agreed to finance the film, committing seven million dollars. But Orion wanted a love interest added to the story. The result was a structural shift that Verhoeven later identified as the project's central wound.

• 3. The Compromise That Changed Everything

  ›

  Orion's demand for a romantic element pulled the story away from the Hawkwood-Martin dynamic and placed Agnes at the center of a triangle. Verhoeven was candid about what this cost him. He said that instead of the interesting Wild Bunch theme, the film ended up with a triangle where a girl manipulates two men. He called it a lesson he carried forward for the rest of his career: never again compromise on the main story line of a script.

  Casting the role of Agnes produced its own complications. Orion was comfortable with Rutger Hauer in the lead, but proposed Nastassja Kinski or Rebecca de Mornay for Agnes. De Mornay reportedly would only accept the role if her then-boyfriend Tom Cruise was cast as Steven. Verhoeven instead chose Jennifer Jason Leigh, whose work in Fast Times at Ridgemont High had impressed him. For the role of Steven, he cast Australian actor Tom Burlinson, for whom it was his first international film. Burlinson later described the picture as very different in content and style from his previous work, and not really his kind of movie.

  The script's setting was fixed as 1501, in early modern Italy, and the story's spiritual and moral dimensions that the director would refine across his career were already present. Verhoeven's biographer later wrote that the fight between logic and spirituality in the film is one very familiar to the director, with those same elements still fighting for priority in his own mind.

• 4. Agony on Location

  ›

  Filming took place in Spain, at Belmonte in Cuenca, as well as in Caceres and Avila. What unfolded there was, by multiple accounts, a production under siege from all directions. Verhoeven, in his own words, described it as agony all the way. He said he had never felt so unhappy as during this shoot, and that the computer in his head became completely overloaded. Actor Brion James described the production as probably the worst experience of his life, citing Verhoeven's direction, persistent bad weather, and illness that spread through cast and crew.

  The film was an international co-production drawing on multiple financing sources, each pushing the project in a different direction. Verhoeven had also deliberately chosen not to storyboard the film, hoping to achieve what he called a looser visual approach. That improvisational style produced delays and disagreements. Members of the cast and crew reportedly came and went as they pleased, some leaving to spend time at a nearby beach.

  Among the most serious difficulties was a breakdown between Verhoeven and Hauer. Hauer had played the replicant Roy Batty in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner in 1982 and was protective of his image. He wanted to be seen as a heroic lead rather than a villain. Verhoeven's intention was precisely the opposite: to portray the moral ambiguity of every character and to depict the Middle Ages as what he called a stinking time in which to live, in deliberate contrast to typical medieval fantasy. The rift between them became bitter, and after filming wrapped in December 1984, Hauer told a journalist that Verhoeven used his charisma and personality for smut, calling the result two-dimensional.

• 5. A Friendship Destroyed

  ›

  Verhoeven and Hauer had first worked together on Floris and had built a collaboration that ran through Soldier of Orange and beyond. Flesh and Blood ended it. In 1991, Verhoeven acknowledged that their relationship and friendship was ruined during the picture, and that they had hated each other so much by the end that it would take years to repair things.

  Hauer, for his part, later said he had thought the script was a weak, pornographic medieval adventure that should have been done differently. He had been promised better scenes, he said, but those improvements never materialized because the wife of scriptwriter Gerard Soeteman fell ill. He described the aftermath as having become very malicious.

  Verhoeven offered a more balanced reading of the falling-out in retrospect. He acknowledged his own insecurity at being on his first American production, and noted that Hauer could reasonably have said that Paul was so insecure he could no longer direct him. Verhoeven wanted Hauer to play Martin as buoyant, in the spirit of Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate. What he got, he felt, was always heavy and straight.

  Jennifer Jason Leigh found herself at the center of a separate conflict over the film's rape sequence, portions of which were censored. Leigh opposed the cuts. She described the scene as brutal and ugly, and said that she knew it would upset people, but maintained that the film was extraordinary and that Verhoeven was so gifted.

• 6. Reception and Aftermath

  ›

  Flesh and Blood's limited American theatrical run on the 16th of August, 1985 produced minimal box office returns, and by 1986 the film had moved to HBO, which was a business partner of Orion Pictures. Verhoeven hypothesized that the film was too cynical and downbeat to find an audience. Douglas Keesey, a professor of film and literature at California Polytechnic State University, suggested that the film offered no hero to root for and no happy fantasy element to lighten its unpleasant realism.

  The financial failure accelerated Verhoeven's departure from the Netherlands. He moved to the United States in September 1985. His previous Dutch films, including Spetters from 1980, had already drawn protests from members of the Dutch public, and it had become difficult for him to secure financing at home.

  Yet the film's reputation did not stop there. Arnold Schwarzenegger admired it, and along with RoboCop it was a key reason the actor sought to work with Verhoeven on Total Recall. The film now holds an 82 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 22 reviews, with a weighted average of 6.1 out of 10. Audiences polled by CinemaScore at the time of release had given it a C on an A-plus to F scale. Noel Murray, reviewing the film for The A.V. Club, wrote that Verhoeven had from the start of his career mostly focused on violent, sexy genre pieces, often punishing, often absurd, and always placed in the context of a moralistic pessimism.

  The musical score, composed by Basil Poledouris and conducted by the London Symphony Orchestra, received renewed attention when La-La Land Records released an extended CD in 2013, with nearly twice as much music as the original 1985 release on LP and CD by Varèse Sarabande.

• 7. The Shadow Cast on Berserk

  ›

  In 2003, manga artist Kentaro Miura won the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize's Award for Excellence for the year 2002 for his series Berserk. In an interview given at that time, Miura revealed that he based the design of Berserk's protagonist Guts on Martin as portrayed by Rutger Hauer in Flesh and Blood. Guts went on to become one of the most recognizable characters in the history of the medium, which means that the mercenary Verhoeven and Soeteman first sketched in 1970 left a mark on global popular culture that the film's original box office performance gave no hint of.