Paul Verhoeven

From the Netherlands, Verhoeven brought more sex, violence and satire to Hollywood than it usually allows. A man buys an implanted memory of a trip to Mars in Total Recall, and a San Francisco detective plays a dangerous game with the crime novelist he suspects of murder in Basic Instinct. Showgirls was laughed at on release and has been reappraised since. He went home for Black Book, about a Jewish woman in the Dutch resistance, and to France for Benedetta, set in a seventeenth-century Tuscan convent.

Signature

• Satire smuggled inside blockbusters (Total Recall).
• Women who use sex as power (Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Benedetta).
• Graphic violence played at full volume.
• Wartime compromise with no clean heroes (Black Book).