As a writer, van Gogh lived to insult people. There was "something pathological" about it, said Dutch author Leon de Winter. But it wasn't all pathology. Van Gogh also had a warm and compassionate side. I recently talked to him on the phone when he was on the set of one of his new projects. In his high-pitched and hurried speech, he was friendly enough to answer my questions despite being busy, yet he also managed to throw in a couple of obligatory insults about one of his colleagues. "His sole function as a member of these financing committees is to block my movies," he said. "All that mediocrity that sits on these boards."

Van Gogh made his first movie, "Lüger," in 1980, at the age of 23. In the previous year, the law school dropout tried to get in to the Amsterdam Film Academy but was turned down. He claims the approval committee told him to see a psychiatrist. No problem, he thought, I'll teach myself how to direct and raise money for films.

He collected $30,000 from friends and family and started filming. "Lüger," a thriller about a mentally disabled millionaire's daughter who's kidnapped by a greasy psychopath, was screened at the Dutch Film Festival in 1981 and caused an instant riot. The cause of all this commotion was two scenes, one in which the protagonist shoves a pistol into a woman's vagina and a second that shows two kittens spinning in a washing machine. The latter scene was faked, but editing techniques didn't stop van Gogh's opponents from criticizing him. Some of his colleagues called the film "adolescent shit" and one person spit in van Gogh's face at the festival. "Every penny spent on this film is a penny for the devil," wrote the country's largest newspaper. All the same, the festival jury gave the film a special mention.

Van Gogh had only just started. His next few films were book adaptations that were well received by critics but were hardly noticed by moviegoers. The exception was "06," about a sensual anonymous phone sex relationship spinning totally out of control after one lover discovers the identity of his partner, that was also shown in New York as "1-900." It attracted the largest audience for a Dutch film in 1994.

Van Gogh increasingly took control over his own films and refused to work with traditional Dutch film funds. He loathed the bureaucratic obstacles that slowed him down. The downside was that he had to somehow collect his own money, just as he did with "Lüger." To make "06," he took a second mortgage on his house.

But raising money wasn't always easy, a fact van Gogh owed to his habit of insulting people. In 1989, Dutch broadcasting network Veronica canceled the contract for the production of the satirical "Loos," about a washed-up lawyer who is forced to defend a shady nightclub owner after the latter has kidnapped the lawyer's sadomasochistic lover. Van Gogh offended one of the network's chiefs by calling him "a coke head who specialized in throwing secretaries over the balcony."

On the other hand, most actors loved van Gogh. His friend, author Thomas Ross, said that as a director, van Gogh couldn't care less about plot, he was only interested in acting and dialogue. Actors who were mediocre at best in other films peaked when directed by him. Although if actors didn't manage total devotion to a project, they earned van Gogh's wrath. "He was usually too drunk to learn his lines," van Gogh wrote when one of his former actors died. He also couldn't stand people exploiting their sorrow. About an actress van Gogh felt was exploiting the death of her son, he sarcastically remarked, "Now mummy can go on tour for years with his remembrance."

Some of van Gogh's colleagues insisted that the filmmaker's insults were a pose and that it was a "test of intelligence to be able to see through them," as the critic Hans Beerekamp put it. But it wasn't always that straightforward. Many people were offended when van Gogh made Holocaust-tinged jokes about Jewish writers and filmmakers: "Hey, it smells like caramel today -- well then, they must be burning the diabetic Jews," Leon de Winter, in the Wall Street Journal, recently quoted van Gogh as saying. Van Gogh's friend, writer Theodor Holman, had once called "every Christian a criminal" and van Gogh couldn't resist rushing to his friend's defense after Christians raised a public outcry. Van Gogh declared that Holman's enemies were only "the fan club of that rotting fish in Nazareth."

"Theo didn't understand much about people; he couldn't see things from their perspective," Holman said recently. "That made him blunt but curious at the same time."

But that doesn't explain it all. He also passionately believed in free speech and he took on everything and everyone that posed a threat to it. Two years ago, he told the Dutch newspaper Trouw: "I believe Islam threatens our freedoms. Let me state this clearly: I don't mean every Muslim is dangerous and it would be stupid to think so. But it would be even more stupid to deny that our freedoms must be protected."

Van Gogh didn't feel threatened personally, he said repeatedly. But he did feel the freedom to speak out was being curtailed. Earlier this year, a play in Amsterdam about the prophet Mohammed was considered "blasphemous" by a local Muslim politician. Van Gogh sardonically placed an ad in a local Amsterdam newspaper, saying, "Why shouldn't a play get prohibited? Vote for her!" This declining tolerance for criticism was what van Gogh perceived as a growing climate of intimidation. He toyed with people but was serious at the same time.

Van Gogh's former friend, actor Thom Hoffman, thinks differently: "His quarrels were meaningless. He just took the most radical stance. In the 1980s, he promoted cruise missiles when the whole country literally opposed them. In the 1990s, he took on men with beards," when the politically correct majority still denied any signs of religious or ethnic conflict in the peaceful kingdom of the Netherlands. Van Gogh ended his friendship with Hoffman in the 1980s after the latter appeared in movies that van Gogh hated. "He called me an S.S. officer with Vaseline up my ass," Hoffman said. "He sort of got stuck on Second World War idioms."

Offensive as he could be in person and as a writer -- numerous magazines and newspapers fired him after insults or fights over the contents of his writing -- as a filmmaker, van Gogh was a close reader of human behavior. His films show protagonists who passionately try to connect to each other but end up meeting somewhere in the middle. Van Gogh presented a sinister, failing romanticism, his characters always blinded by their own agendas.

Van Gogh made a total of 25 films and TV programs, and film critic Dana Linssen believed they were only getting better. In van Gogh's 1998 film, "De Pijnbank," Linssen wrote, van Gogh "showed me he was focusing more and more on the power struggle between people. Between men and women and on a more fundamental level between predator and prey, especially when these roles shift between people. He showed us victims can be as opportunist as the ones in power. Heroes become villains and the other way around." In van Gogh's last production, "06-05," Linssen saw his "different personae: the political commentator, the artiste provocateur on a mission and the humanist with a frank and unsettling view on human nature, all come together."

Recent Stories