Director Verhoeven: “Old white man is a fighting term”

As of: October 29, 2024 6:00 a.m

Simon Verhoeven has packed a current, contentious topic into a comedy: “Old White Man” is about wokeness, morality and different cultures. In the interview he talks about the message of his film.

Mr. Verhoeven, “Old white man” – that’s a colorful term. It can have all sorts of meanings. How did you usually find it in your experience?

Simon Verhoeven: This is an individual question, how much you deal with the term. But actually the term is initially a fighting term to point out certain grievances. For me the term has always had ambiguities. My father was an old white man and never had anything to do with what that meant. He was a very open, young heart. He certainly wasn’t a real anti-genderist, but he was still a lifelong fighter for social justice issues. As necessary as the term was originally in a debate in order to push the old white man off the pedestal as a cliché, the term is now just as inaccurate and also so unfair to many people who are included in this drawer.

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When did this analysis grow within you? And then the plan to write and shoot this film?

Verhoeven: In the last three years. But from the beginning the idea was to use the title in a tongue-in-cheek way, namely to invent a character who tries not to be an old white man. A man who is afraid of slipping on that slippery dance floor and tries to do everything right. And in doing so he also highlights many of the uncertainties and absurdities in today’s discourse. At the same time, my idea from the start was to make a very diverse film, not just a film about the old white man. That’s just a term that represents many of the drawers we have these days. Others are “do-gooders” or “climate brats”. We have certain pigeonholes in place relatively quickly, also through social media, and the film tries to play with these pigeonholes, to get people out of these pigeonholes and perhaps to let them collide in a conciliatory way.

The “old white man” we are talking about is called Heinz Hellmich, head of marketing at Fernsehenfunk AG. This opens another window, because so-called wokeness or diversity efforts can sometimes also become marketing. Does that also play a role?

Verhoeven: Yes, the film definitely makes fun of the wokeness of corporations here and there. I used to make a few advertising films myself and experienced this discussion about how cramped attempts are made to create diversity, where people then say: Do you perhaps still have an Asian, lesbian couple? Then it occurs to me that it’s not all that anti-racist. Maybe it’s supposed to come across as open and progressive, but behind it there’s actually a lot of insecurity or a fear of getting into a shitstorm. For me, it’s not that credible and not that convincing when a company, for example, hangs out a rainbow flag but at the same time does business with Qatar.

There are now even people who are taking action against such stock photography because they say: I don’t always want to represent your diversity with a picture that was taken twelve years ago.

Verhoeven: I experienced these beginnings in advertising and had a sinking feeling in my stomach right from the start – sometimes, not always. It’s always about differentiation and a sense of proportion, and I often lack that. That you say: Look, someone used a wrong expression, but it’s from an older generation and he didn’t mean it in a bad way. You have to see the context of people. You have to see the person behind the opinion, behind the word. This is becoming increasingly difficult and is fueled primarily by social media, by algorithms that are increasingly reinforcing a kind of love-hate relationship, a kind of trench warfare. The film tries to bring people together in a bit of an old-school way.

When such material appears on theater stages, there is also great discussion during rehearsals. What was it like for you on set?

Verhoeven: Just as. In the film there is a central dinner where many characters sit at a table and argue. And the rehearsals were sometimes even more hair-raising. Suddenly reality took over and continued the script. People suddenly argued and expressed their opinions. The actors became the characters, but revealed even more about themselves. That was great. It was also a bit scary at the beginning, and I had heart palpitations during rehearsals because I thought: Is this going to go wrong? Is this exploding? But in the end it wasn’t, it always ended respectfully and happily.

The conversation led Mischa Kreiskott.

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