Sure, he’s confronted his critics — and Michael Bay — in the most unusual ways. And yes, he’s turned a some of your most beloved video game titles into big-screen clunkers (none of which have yet broken 11 percent on the Tomatometer*). Heck, the man who gave us such stinkers as Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne, and Dungeon Siege: In the Name of the King has even agreed to retire if an online petition asking him to simply “stop” reaches one million signatures. But we bet you never expected Uwe Boll to pick veritable classics of cinema as his favorite films of all time…
Read on for Dr. Uwe Boll’s five favorite films, as told to RT.
*Boll’s latest film, the political satire Postal, currently has a career-high 29 percent Tomatometer.
One of my all-time favorites is Apocalypse Now, because it shows the craziness of war, and you have the feeling that the shooting also was a big adventure. And this is what I like.
What is lost, if you see war movies today — not like Pearl Harbor, that’s one of the worst movies of all time — but like Mel Gibson‘s Once We Were Warriors or Soldiers or whatever (2002’s We Were Soldiers), all that stuff, you feel it’s all fake. You feel they go in the evenings to their hotel rooms and it’s all good.
But in Apocalypse Now, you feel like these guys were f—ed!
I love a big adventure; it’s one of the reasons I like Dances with Wolves, also on the list. Because I feel that this was also a big adventure [to film] and I like the very realistic feeling, what Kevin Costner did with that movie. I love that movie. It’s emotional, and it’s real, in a way. I really like it.
[Editor’s note: check back for next week’s full interview with Uwe Boll as he tells us how he almost got Kevin Costner to join the cast of Dungeon Siege: In the Name of the King!]
A Clockwork Orange would be [on the list]. Clockwork Orange and Citizen Kane, because they’re both all-time favorites, and I think Orson Welles did with Citizen Kane so much interesting stuff for the year that he did it, what nobody else did before. The same with Kubrick for Clockwork Orange. They broke a lot of filmmaking rules and the subject matter is, for me, very interesting.
Citizen Kane is, like you see now, P.T. Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood. It’s a good movie; it’s the same kind of thing. You follow a crazy character who gets really successful, and in a very bitter way. So I really love those two movies.
It’s still one of the biggest crimes of Hollywood that they didn’t finance Orson Welles’ movies after a while. To have a genius like him, sitting there and trying to get his last 5,000 bucks together to make another movie after he did a movie like this… (Welles’ follow-up to Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, was notoriously completed and re-cut without his input.)
Number five…like I said, it always changes. There are a lot of good movies out there [that are] from time to time favorites. I would do The Searchers, from John Ford, with John Wayne. I’m a big Western fan, and this was a great Western.
John Ford is interesting; if you are younger, you don’t appreciate John Ford so much. I liked more Howard Hawks and William Wyler Westerns when I was younger, and now, later, if you get a little older, you like John Ford more and more. It’s the same with some writers. There are some writers you love when you’re 20, and when you’re 30 or 35 you think it’s completely silly bulls–t what the guys wrote (laughs), but you appreciate other writers.
Tune in next week for our full interview with Uwe Boll, in which the Postal director shares the secret of how exactly he makes money on flicks like Alone in the Dark and Dungeon Siege: In the Name of the King, and answers your submitted questions!
