Going Postal – Penny Blood

Uwe Boll is not a man who shies away from controversy. The German director’s 2003 movie about the Columbine shooting, Heart of America, raised eyebrows (as well as protests) over its treatment of a scene in which a mentally handicapped girl is raped; his string of video game adaptations have caused gamers everywhere to froth at the mouth in outrage. Recently, his response to internet criticism of his movies was to call out the critics, bring them to Vancouver, and get into a boxing ring with them – Boll, a former semi-pro boxer, defeated them all easily.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that his latest film, Postal, is so geared towards causing offence. The game on which Boll’s movie is based was banned in ten countries and blacklisted in the US for being so violent; a lawsuit was brought against it (though it was eventually dropped) by the United States Postal Service for copyright infringement. It seems that controversy is a large part of what drew Boll to making the movie; of this decision, he says “I loved the game, but I loved also the opportunity to make a political incorrect comedy. I think it’s more interesting to go far over the top, but like, even with the violence, we go so over the top that it’s funny.” It’s the first of Boll’s movies for a while to eschew fantasy elements and instead just be a straight shoot-‘em-up; it’s also his first English-language comedy, so it’s difficult to know quite what to expect.

On set, everything seems to be somewhat larger than life. The set, almost an hour’s drive from downtown Vancouver, is an almost entirely custom-built trailer park, complete with authentic piles of garbage everywhere, broken-down electrical appliances and car-parts littering the front gardens, and one terrifying window filled with mannequin heads advertising cheap haircuts. The background extras for the day (including several journalists and internet film critics here for the “Raging Boll” boxing match) are transformed into bona fide trailer trash by the liberal application of caked-on gaudy makeup for the girls, and dirt, rat-tails and wife-beater shirts for the guys. While they’re being readied, a scene is being filmed just around the corner in which a man gets gunned down at a payphone, and the entire make-up tent has to be moved back ten feet partway through to avoid being in shot. While the cameras are rolling, traffic in either direction has to be stopped; but real life takes precedence over film when an elderly woman on a motorised scooter-type contraption needs to get through the alleyway to her home. Several bits of set dressing have to be shifted out of her way and filming paused while she passes; it’s impossible to fathom what she must have made of the set.

While his assistant directors and various other crewmembers handle the background work, Uwe Boll wanders around, talking animatedly into his BlackBerry. He’s wearing a shirt that reads “Say no to drugs, say no to alcohol, say no to tomacco” (a reference to The Simpsons) on the front, and “Say no to Uwe Boll” on the back; he’s clearly not a man that could be accused of taking himself too seriously. The main scene of the day sees the Postal Dude, played by Zack Ward, returning to his trailer only to find it rocking wildly as – presumably – his wife/girlfriend/female acquaintance of one sort or another has wild sex within, which sparks the Dude into a rage that sends him on a killing spree. Or so it seems – no one on set quite seems to have a grasp on what the plot of Postal is going to be, though the party line is “It’s like South Park, if it were a movie.” (At least three different crewmembers are overheard saying this; none of them seem willing to acknowledge that there really already is a South Park movie.)

Not that the plot matters overly much – Postal is, more than anything, an exercise in offending everyone in the world. Boll explains, “I think Postal is a movie where the right of free speech gets out there, I think this is very good that a movie like this gets made.” A quick glance through the script confirms that, yup, Postal manages to get in digs at almost every minority group you can think of – and a couple of majorities, too. Boll continues, “a lot of movies are actually, in a way, pussying out, because they keep one side straight and easy, and they give only shit to one side, and I think Postal gives shit to everybody. Every nation, every religion, every political party.” The trailer park scene seems mostly to be getting at impoverished Americans – Boll has background extras beating their wives, opening scratching their genitals, rooting through rubbish for beer bottles, and barbecuing roadkill, none of which seems particularly controversial – but the script reveals a scene in which a Muslim threatens someone with flying a plane into their mother if they’re not careful, and, possibly more contentiously, a character named Mohammed. It wasn’t too long ago that there was a furore over a Danish newspaper printing some cartoons that featured caricatures of the prophet Mohammed – is Boll not concerned about causing that much trouble? It seems not: “It’s only a guy whose name is Mohammed,” he insists, “I mean, like, whatever, every Arab number five is Mohammed. I know so many Mohammeds, so this is the thing, why a man should not have the name Mohammed in a movie; it’s not the prophet. It’s only Mohammed.” Well, fair enough.

As the unseasonably hot day continues, the shooting is apparently well ahead of schedule (and the guys pushing the trailer are noticeably flagging, while if Zack Ward has to yell “Oh, come on!” one more time he’ll probably destroy his vocal cords for good) so a crewmember announces that they’re moving on to another scene, one that wasn’t originally on the call sheet. In this new scene, the Dude and his female accomplice hurtle screechingly into the trailer park in a van, followed by some Mafia guys. The trailer trash background extras will retreat into their trailers only to re-emerge with guns, nervously bounty-hunting the Dude – posters announcing a reward for his capture have been hastily stapled up all over the place, listing amongst his crimes “killing a baby” and “wearing a brown belt with black shoes, and wearing white after Labor Day.” The print is probably too small to show up on screen, so cinema-going audiences might never catch that detail, but it’s the little touches that count.

Or it would be, if the scene could get off the ground. Several different crewmembers are giving the background extras conflicting direction, and everyone seems to have forgotten that most of these guys aren’t actors of any calibre; they’re journalists, and tired ones at that, who have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing. After one take that seems to go disastrously wrong, Boll steps in to tell everyone how unhappy he is with the scene – except unfortunately that still doesn’t seem to fix things. It’s debatable whether anyone other than Boll himself knows what he wants, and so there are a couple further doomed takes before panic grips the set: one of the guns that was handed out to the extras has gone missing. Which shouldn’t be that much of an issue, were it not for the fact that this isn’t a prop gun – it’s the real thing. Shooting grinds to a halt until the gun is retrieved, and the scene is eventually abandoned.

While the ADs work on getting some close-ups on the Dude, Boll sits behind a monitor and laughs uproariously at some of the rushes in which a racist policeman shoots an elderly Chinese driver in the head. (Perhaps the scene will play better in context?) The sun is now starting to set, so everyone starts packing up. An AD apologises profusely to the background extras for shouting at them and acknowledges it wasn’t their fault that no-one told them what to do, which is generous of him, though it still won’t make up for not having managed to film the scene.

As much insanity as there is in Postal, there’s something missing which only those following Boll’s career obsessively closely are likely to notice: Canadian actor Will Sanderson, who’s been in every Uwe Boll movie since 2002’s Blackwoods, isn’t going to be in Postal. Judging by Sanderson’s gentle mockery of Boll on the House of the Dead commentary, and Boll’s admission that he’d sold Sanderson a broken down computer during filming Alone in the Dark, they’d seemed to be pretty good friends – so why isn’t Will in Postal? Boll explains, “it’s too bad. Because he goes for immigration in US – he is married to an American woman – so he cannot leave Texas.” But wasn’t he originally attached to the project? “In Postal, there was only the idea that he kills me because I ruined his career, and now we switched that to Vince Desiderio, who wants to try me to kill because, let’s say, bad directing of the video games movies.” That settles that one, then. Again, Boll demonstrates an ability to laugh at himself and, more importantly, his critics; he talks about his projects with so much enthusiasm that it’s almost impossible not to get caught up in it and root for him in spite of everything. It’s difficult to imagine what he’ll do next, after offending everyone in the world and creating a minor frenzy in the media over the critic-boxing event; whatever it is, though, it’s bound to be interesting.

This article was originally written in 2006 for Penny Blood magazine.