Illustration: Rob Kelly

Few filmmakers get panned as consistently as Uwe Boll. Happily, the 42-year-old German director of duds like House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark has managed to retain a sense of humor amid the criticism; in 2006 he challenged five of his fiercest detractors to boxing matches, winning each bout handily. Now he goes toe-to-toe with Steven Spielberg: Boll’s latest punching bag, Postal, an apocalyptic political comedy based on the ultraviolent video game of the same name, opens Friday 23—the same weekend as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

If you don’t like this interview, are you going to beat me up?
Absolutely. I have no other choice now. I have to get everybody who criticizes me into the ring.

Are you really so thin-skinned that you need to fight poor, defenseless journalists?
That all happened after four years of constantly getting crap from those guys. It wasn’t about the bad reviews; it was about the personal insults. No matter what movie I did, I got bashed to the ground. At one point, I was fed up.

You’ve also issued a challenge to director Michael Bay. As someone who’s seen Pearl Harbor, I urge you to kick his ass.
This is the point. Every day I get 20 or 30 e-mails from people saying, “I’d pay any price to see that fight!” I want to fight him, and a journalist called and told me that Bay would do it. So I released a video promoting the fight on my website. Today I got a letter from his attorney saying that if I don’t put a press release out that there is no fight, he will sue me.

An online petition urging you to stop making movies now has 273,301 e-signatures. You’ve said that you will retire if it reaches 1 million. Are you serious about that?
Before I do that, I have to know the identities of the voters. Michael Bay may be voting against me under 20 different names.

You have publicly guaranteed that you’ll beat the Indiana Jones sequel at the box office. Are you on crack?
Absolutely. But I thought that if I do it like [Muhammad] Ali did it, people would commend that. Of course we have no chance against Indiana Jones, but I think Postal is good counterprogramming. Better to go against the biggest movie of the year than to go against four similar movies.

Similar? In Postal, Verne Troyer gets raped by 1,000 chimpanzees.
Yep. I got a letter from PETA: They got claims that I abused monkeys in Postal, and asked me what this is about. But we had only one monkey, we shot him completely alone. We duplicated him in CGI to 1,000 monkeys. And Verne Troyer didn’t actually get raped by the monkey.

Whew! There’s also a nude scene involving Dave Foley. What can you tell me about his penis?
Oh, it’s good, it’s long. I didn’t direct him to play that scene full-frontal naked. He did that on his own. But he nailed it.

It’s smart that you poke fun at yourself in the movie.
I used the Internet absurdity to portray myself as a Bavarian Nazi retard. A lot of people who hated my other movies wrote me to say that they really liked this one. From this point of view, Postal has definitely helped my career already.

Plus, in the movie you die by getting shot in the balls.
Absolutely. My last words are “I hate video games!” We did various takes where I said different stuff, like, “I just hired Tara Reid again.”

She was pretty bad in Alone in the Dark.
I think she paid for her breast implants with the fee she got from that. Because in Alone in the Dark she was normal, then a half-year later when I ran into her, I saw her with huge breasts.

So what’s next for you, a movie based on Donkey Kong?
I know. I get various absurd movie offers. A few days ago I got an offer to do Tetris. I’m like, “What the fuck are you talking about? This is totally absurd.” They said, “No, this would be a revolution in video-game movies.” I said, “Yes it would be the revolution, but it would also be completely the end of my career.”

I love that there’s a line even you will not cross.
Exactly. I would not do it.

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