My guest today is the German filmmaker Uwe Boll. Born in Wermelskirchen he decided he wanted to direct films at the age of ten, after seeing Marlon Brando star in Mutiny on the Bounty. It wasn’t until he was in his mid-thirties, however, that he directed his first major motion picture, Blackwoods, a psychological thriller that a critic for the New York Times described as ‘smart and diabolical’.
It was, however, his adaptations of video games for which he made his name. House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne, Far Cry and Postal were just some of the games he adapted to film. Not all of them lost money, but most were derided by reviewers.
My guest did not shy away from engaging his harshest critics, however. In 2006 he challenged five of them to a boxing match. Ten years later he announced his retirement from filmmaking. Nevertheless, since then he has announced several new projects, including First Shift, a police drama set in the New York, that released in the summer.
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