Dave Addey
@addey.com
498 followers 397 following 144 posts
Curator of Typeset In The Future. Author of typesetinthefuture.com/book, from Abrams Books. Mashes up songs at @mashupsandbangers.com. 'Terrifyingly, wonderfully geeky' – Gizmodo.
Curator of Typeset In The Future. Author of typesetinthefuture.com/book, from Abrams Books. Mashes up songs at @mashupsandbangers.com. 'Terrifyingly, wonderfully geeky' – Gizmodo.
![working with the Dutch military, lead into that kind of propaganda filmmaking for Starship Troopers?
Certainly that did. When I was young and drafted in the Navy, which was obligatory at that time, I made propa-ganda: a very tough, almost James Bond-like documentary [Het Korps Mariniers] about the Dutch Marines.
And I think that experience, from before I made narrative movies, is certainly visible in some scenes in Starship Troopers. So yes, that contributed to my style, to have made documentaries that were already propaganda in the first place.
In Starship Troopers, I also used a lot of elements and even images from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will
[1935]. That was made in 1934, in the party congress of the Nazis. Hitler had come into power in 1933, and Leni](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:j5xwexfyxhfnzevq4pv35zhm/bafkreifgi2ujrt2g2hfkrulm2lx6aoa7vdco5yltcfw4sdi7gubvpovz3a)
![made Triumph of the Will in 1934, about the rallies in Nuremberg. Hitler appears out of the sky; it's very symbolic. Many images, many shots that you see in Leni's work, I used in the propaganda reels and newsreels in Starship Troopers.
I was trying to tell the audience-but it didn't work so well-that these people were living in a fascist utopia. And then, of course, the movie itself was accused of being fascist. But what I tried to do, which at the time was not very well understood, was to say, "These people-[actors] Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Dina Meyer-these heroes and heroines are basically, by the way, also fascist. They live in a fascist utopia."
And are seemingly unaware that they live in that kind of culture.
Sure, that was the fun. I hoped that the audience would be aware, but the actors and actresses... like happens](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:j5xwexfyxhfnzevq4pv35zhm/bafkreiecmmnw22oho4lpojoiqgje5habyx6hjfzmtczt54t4oa26zalhja)
![Yeah. You could say it's prophetic, but l really feel that it is based on events we saw already in American society, that were already there. Notably, we took some stuff from Texas, where [George
W.] Bush was at that time the governor.
When Ed Neumeier and I wrote it, it's not that we really thought this would happen; it was more that this could happen. I was amazed this year that it seems to be happening much more precisely than I had anticipated. You take elements out of the now and extrapolate them in a hyperbolic, over-the-top way, and then you find out that these tendencies that you noticed after a certain amount of time became a reality.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:j5xwexfyxhfnzevq4pv35zhm/bafkreif7s2dh5octkqtqsofjbtfmtgwkgrs5xhddmuirtqbzx52bsbj2ta)
