Tales From The Hollywood Trenches: The Gospel according to Verhoeven

Showgirls and Robocop director Paul Verhoeven is girding his loins for a fight in conservative America to get his controversial book about Jesus made into a movie. Verhoeven has been obsessed for almost two decades researching Christ for his book Jesus of Nazareth, in which he counters almost everything Christians hold sacred in the New Testament accounts, including the immaculate conception and the resurrection. Verhoeven also posits that Jesus might have been the product of his mother being raped by a Roman soldier, which he says was commonplace at the time, that Jesus was a radical prophet who performed exorcisms and was convinced he would find the kingdom of Heaven on earth, and did not know he would be sentenced to die on the cross by Pontius Pilate. “It’s not about miracles, it’s about a new set of ethics, an openness towards the world, which was anathema in a Roman-dominated world,” he says. “I believe he was crucified because they felt that politically, he was a dangerous person whose following was getting bigger and bigger. Jesus’ ideals are about the utopia of human behavior, about how we should treat each other, how we should step into the shoes of our enemy.”

Yeah – good luck getting that distributed, mate.

Verhoeven plans to direct the movie himself and it will be written by Roger Avery who won the Best Original Script Oscar with Quentin Tarantino for Pulp Fiction.