Neil Patrick Harris confirms a bizarre Starship Troopers story involving director Paul Verhoeven. Released in 1997, Starship Troopers was a massive box-office flop that has since become a revered cult classic. Verhoeven, a Dutch director, was already a well-known quantity in Hollywood by the time Starship Troopers was released, having directed hit films like Total Recall (1990) and RoboCop (1987). Despite the film’s box office failure, Starship Troopers would ultimately see the release of two sequels, Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation and Starship Troopers 3: Marauder.
Starship Troopers takes place in a fascist, militaristic future in which humans wage war against an army of giant alien bugs. To create the bugs, Starship Troopers used mostly CGI, which was still quite rudimentary, in addition to some animatronics. Phil Tippett, who had also worked on Star Wars, RoboCop, and Jurassic Park, served as visual effects supervisor on the film. Marking one of his first major movie roles, Harris plays Dr. Carl Jenkins, a psychic general and a scientist at the Ministry of Paranormal Warfare. Despite surviving the events of the film, Harris’ Carl would not return for any of the Starship Troopers sequels, nor would Verhoeven.
In a recent appearance on Hot Ones from the First We Feast YouTube channel, the interviewer asks specifically about whether Verhoeven would chase the actors around with a broom, shouting at them that he was an alien bug during battle scenes. Harris says that the story is “100% true,” and that Verhoeven, who wasn’t familiar with working with CGI, often got creative when it came to getting performances from actors, since no creatures were actually present on set. Check out Harris’ full comment below:
100% true. Paul was such a cool director, but he knew what his strengths were. And if he didn’t have a strength in it, he would absolve himself from it. So he didn’t know the CG stuff. There was a guy named Phil Tippett, who is really famous, who did all of the bugs and the CG. It was one of the first big CG bug movies – now there’s a lot of them. So, yeah, he would just say, ‘Look up there, look in the corner! Right, ah! It’s the bugs, the bugs!’ I wasn’t in most of those scenes because I just came marching in at the end of the battles and said, ‘Carry on, everything’s fine here.’
At the time, CGI was still mostly in its infancy, making it no surprise that Verhoeven wasn’t familiar with it. Although digital effects had been used for decades, including on all of the original Star Wars movies, it was largely Jurassic Park in 1993 that showed just how effective the technology could be to create lifelike creatures. Despite Starship Troopers having been released 25 years ago, techniques for getting performances from actors who are interacting with CGI elements on set haven’t actually changed that much, with actors usually having to imagine everything that will be added in digitally during post-production.
Despite the quirkiness of his directing style when it came to the CGI bugs on Starship Troopers, Verhoeven remains a revered director to this day. RoboCop and Total Recall are now widely considered science-fiction classics, and Starship Troopers has developed its own strong reputation. Although Verhoeven would devote most of the rest of his directing career to non-sci-fi movies, his unorthodox approach on Starship Troopers was evidently effective.
