In news that surprises absolutely no one, Uwe Boll has taken to social media to rant about Hollywood. The German director unloaded a fiery (and unpunctuated) screed on Facebook, venting his frustrations at an industry he claims never accepted him because he “would never sell out.”
The post details an incident on the set of “In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale” involving producers Randall Emmett and George Furla — a duo Boll calls “Hollywood shit producers.” According to Boll, they had the audacity to sit behind him at video village and put their shoes up on his chair. This, naturally, resulted in Boll going full alpha and telling them to “fuck off and leave.” They smiled. He counted to ten. They left.
Boll then turned his ire on A-list royalty — De Niro, Pacino, Bruce Willis, and Nicolas Cage — accusing them of selling out their legacies for Emmett/Furla money. “Fuck all of them,” Boll declares, before diagnosing the “problem” of Hollywood as a toxic cocktail of “sex, greed, show, and anxiety.”
Boll cites “Tropic Thunder,” “Maps to the Stars,” and “The Studio” as rare examples of Hollywood self-awareness, then closes with a rant about how “woke psychos” with “no real taste” have ruined everything for people like him.
To Boll’s credit, he’s consistent: perpetually angry, defiantly unfiltered, and proudly outside the Hollywood system. Whether that’s due to principled rebellion or the fact that no one wants to give him money anymore is up for debate.
Boll is best known for his notoriously ill-received video game adaptations of the 2000s, all of which were critical and commercial disasters. He retired from filmmaking in 2016 to become a restaurateur but has since returned. His films “House of the Dead” and “Alone in the Dark” both proudly sit on IMDb’s “Bottom 100” list. At one point, he referred to Ain’t It Cool’s Harry Knowles, one of his most vocal detractors, as a “retard.”
A few years ago, Boll proclaimed himself to be “the only genius in the whole fucking [movie] business” and declared that directors like Michael Bay and Eli Roth are “fucking retards.” And really, how could he not have that kind of confidence? Especially after releasing 2011’s “Auschwitz,” which he called his “masterpiece.” It was the most serious and sober film of his career—a peculiar, 73-minute Holocaust movie that only a filmmaker like Boll could make.
One thing’s for sure — Boll’s greatest performance might not be behind the camera but in these gloriously unhinged Facebook rants (and in Radu Jude’s “Don’t Expect Too Much From the End of the World”).
Bassim Tariq was the first one in the chair. The "Mogul Mowgli" director spent two years building out the Mahershala Ali vehicle before exiting in 2022, and he's now letting the air out on this one.