Very interesting Paul Verhoeven interview

Read it here, and here's an excerpt:

Do critics still get to you?
Of course they get to you, you can't escape that. Unless you don't read any reviews, and I know there are directors that completely avoid them, don't want to hear anything about them. I always read the reviews. And of course it's annoying and painful when they trash your movie. But sometimes, and this is even worse, you know they're right. Critics can break you, at least for a while, they can shock you, make you doubt yourself. Especially if 99 percent of the critics write the same kind of review, and they can. I think it's stupid for an artist to avoid any kind of criticism. They're not lethal, you know. They can kick you down, but you'll get over it in time. Maybe they didn?t get it, maybe it just wasn?t all that good, but anyway, it won?t stop you from making another movie.

Take STARSHIP TROOPERS, great example, probably the most political statement I've ever made. Five years ago, most of the critics totally trashed that movie. They called me a nazi, saying I was idolizing Leni Riefenstahl. Now, that image has totally changed. A lot of people see now that the film is about the United States. The whole situation in Afghanistan is almost an exact copy of STARSHIP TROOPERS; the whole gung ho-mentality of bombing everything, blasting the Taliban-forces out of the caves. I put all that in STARSHIP TROOPERS! The corrupted atmosphere of propaganda, once invented by Goebbels, has now taken over the United States as well. It's extremely interesting to see how the media can besiege an entire nation with propaganda.