Uwe Boll on tariffs, AI, and the end of traditional film funding

The filmmaker who boxed his critics, cursed fans, gamed tax systems to finance flops and hits alike, talks film financing, AI, and names the one video game franchise he still wants to film.

Uwe Boll means different things to different people.

• He is one of the most prolific filmmakers of his generation, with more than forty features to his name. He has raised and spent hundreds of millions in production capital, often independently.

• To gamers, he is the man blamed for ruining video game movies. A few weeks ago I showed that his early adaptations drag down the average rating for the entire genre.

• He is the director who challenged film critics to boxing matches after years of bad reviews. You can watch one of the resulting fights here.

• He is the filmmaker who asked the public to crowdfund his film and when the raise didn’t go well, told them to “go fuck themselves”, adding “I have enough money to play golf until I’m dead.”

• And in case it matters, he also holds a PhD in literature.

One this is for certain: Uwe Boll is a survivor. He has worked through changing markets, tax systems, distribution models, union policies, and platform shifts.

As the Cannes Film Marche prepares to open, and as Donald Trump threatens to impose new tariffs on runaway Hollywood productions, Boll is a useful person to listen to. He understands how films are actually financed, how they get sold, and what happens when the system supporting them begins to collapse.

I chatted with Uwe about the future of film, among other things. What follows is almost entirely in his own words. What he has to say is unfiltered, blunt, and at times bleak. It is also one of the clearest accounts I’ve heard of what is happening to the film industry.

Tariffs

I started by asking him about Trump’s latest plan to apply tariffs to Hollywood movies that chose not to shoot in the US.

Oh God. Yeah. He didn’t think it through, right? Because a film isn’t something you can pin a single price on.

When you make a film and the money is gone and you have, instead of the money, the product. Nobody knows what the value is. It can be a total bomb, with a $50 million movie generating just $2 million revenues, or a $50,000 movie, like the Terrifier, can come in with $60 million in revenue.

So the question is how do we put any price point on it?

If you put a 100% tariff on the production costs, then it’s the end of everything.

Hollywood's is the US’s biggest trade surplus. They're making money around the globe, in China, everywhere. If they get counter tariffs, then that would be the end of the Hollywood studios basically.

Think about it, let’s say for every Hollywood movie coming into European cinemas you have to pay 50% of the production cost as a tariff then most of the movies would not get European distribution as it would be too expensive.

Let's say you would have half of the US movies not even coming to Europe anymore. You get all that free spots in the movie theatres and you have way easier distribution for European-made movies.

I think the industry now wants to use this whole turmoil to get basically more and more subsidies instead of trying to make films for a price, what you can recoup in the market.

It's like a total offsetting their own risks on the taxpayers.

Old financing models have gone

This is a shift away from a model of film financing that has supported a run of his early film. In the early 2000s, Boll became known for using a generous German tax loophole which allowed investors to write off 100% of their investment.

This “soft money” effectively replaced traditional box office incentives with a system that privileged production for production’s sake, not market viability.

When I raised the money for my big movies, that was all up to 2005 in Germany where you got a 100% tax loss on it. That was basically the kicker that people invested in movies.

And then when the German government stopped at 2005, it was all over. There was no further private investor willing to invest anything.

The streamers are not paying fairly

With the tax shelter era gone, Boll had to adapt to a market that is now almost hostile to independent risk-taking.

Where once he could finance films through fiscal engineering, he now faces an industry where traditional investors have either disappeared or are what he calls “lifestyle” backers: people willing to lose money for the red carpet rather than genuine profit.

Then only if you have basically too much money, you could say, okay, you know what? I do a film because I wanna be at Cannes on the red carpet. So then it’s a lifestyle investment.

Boll sees the core business of independent filmmaking as fundamentally broken due to the collapse in ancillary markets and the predatory lowball tactics of streaming platforms. I asked him about the need for big name actors to get projects greenlit.

 Yeah, that's a big problem because what the streamers are doing - a lot of them don't have big stars. I think Apple is doing all these things with stars, but when you see Netflix, there are hundreds of shows where before I watched them, I had no clue that this actors exist.

And then they turn into stars because they were in The Rookie, Wednesday, Stranger Things. They were all basically unknown cast, and then they turned into something. So they're building their own brands with their own cheap actors and make them stars.

But as an independent film guy, when you make movies and try to sell it to the streamers or you sell it to distributors, you are totally dead if you don't have names.

And because then to get any attention, you need a name. You cannot just make films with good actors, but nobody really knows them. Then you have a real problem. And that's unfair.

I think the centre of the indie film problem is that you're not getting a fair pay by the streamers against your production costs. The streamers handling license fee deals like 10 cents on the dollar deals, and they don't ask where we should get the other 90% from if there's no more DVD and Blu-ray. There’s basically nothing, besides streaming.

So that's the real question Hollywood has to answer.

People like Ted Sarandos have to pay more fair for independent movies. My Rampage film was on Netflix. 3.8 million hours watched and they paid $75,000 for a year to license it. Is that fair?

Paramount+ paid $150,000 for one year for First Shift. First Shift had no stars so I cannot be totally whiny about it.

But then when it went like 20 weeks in the top 10, I'm not getting more money. You should get more money if you get more and more views. We should get more money if a show on a streamer out performs.

Uwe’s solution to the film financing crisis? Change the way people are paid

Even as the platforms profit off audience engagement, there is no longer any backend or upside for the filmmaker. Investors outside the streamer system, meanwhile, are out of touch or, as Boll puts it, being quietly conned by outdated projections and slick pitch decks:

I get these pitch decks and whatever, like John Travolta is attached and it’s a $15 million budget, and they say you will double your money and they’re sending it to everybody.

But when I read stuff like this, I feel always that’s fraud. Because it’ll not make $15 million. It will maybe not even make $2 million back. And that’s the problem.

The only way to make projects on the level of low budget (or to get them finished at all) is for everyone to essentially work or defer for free:

The only way to make films on a lower budget is for everyone for who is invloved to partly invest their work. And then it’s all about how you distribute the risk to everybody. Like the post-production has to partly invest, get some money, but partly invest. Actors have to go down with their fees and defer some fees. Everybody, the equipment house, must defer fees.

In essence, Boll sees little future or logic in the current business unless you’re either an entrenched streamer, a legacy studio living on subsidy, or a dreamer willing to lose it all for the privilege of the process. He sums up:

I had a line producer on the Zoom recently, and he said, every single show in LA is union because they come and flip you. There are no more independent movies in Los Angeles.

And then they're all whiny that a lot of business went away.

20 years ago you would mix it up - You get a TV show, you get paid properly, then you have an independent movie where you and your buddies get $100 a day.

But all of this is gone now. This indie world doesn't exist there anymore. And now a lot of people, thousands of people just sitting at home like, what can I do? What can I do? What can I do?

And that's the thing. It's the unions who are important, fight the wrong people.

If you are a streamer, a studio, a network, a cable channel production then of course you should follow all the union rules. But if you have a real independent film with private money, you should be left alone by the unions.

Because if you can’t shoot union then the movie can’t exists - that’s the situation we’re in right now.

He didn’t hold back when talking about the recent writers’ strike, either.

I had mixed feelings when that strike happened because when you see in a writer's room, you get $12,000 a week. They were all whiny about this and you feel like you're aware it's $50,000 a month and you are not happy?!

And I think that was the absurd thing, that they came from a very high pedestal. Like it's their birth right to make so much money.

The industry is blind to the problems

Uwe feels as if the studio system continues to act as if nothing has changed.

Hollywood is just in this balloon where the studio executives plus the top producers, directors, and actors think their fees are God-given or something. To keep their lifestyle they need to make between $10 million and $50 million each year. That's their world. So we’re at the Golden Globes, at the Oscars, we go on the red carpet. That's their life. So it's a completely given for them.

And they don't get it, that all of this could crumble away because no-one need a studio system anymore. Like it's because you can make X amount of movies for $3,000.

He pointed to the sheer absurdity of current high-end TV costs, citing a stunning example from inside Hollywood’s prestige TV machine.

Take the great show The Last of Us - they spend $28 million per episode. And you feel like for a TV series you spend can $28 million per episode?!

They are never getting that money back. There will be no DVDs or Blu-rays, no box office, and it's just running through Sky and HBO.

Or take Lionsgate. I cannot really remember a year where Lionsgate actually made a profit. But they’re able to shell out $20 million to $30 million a year to their CEO.

The media industry is like you have a construction company but you don’t live on actual revenues you live on projections and line of credit. They’re living from this idea of the future, and then they’re getting a salary based on their projections not on their real success

If you are the real owner of a company, an entrepreneur, and you make a $300 million loss and then the next year $100 million, everybody in the movie industry would say ‘Yay, only a $100 million loss!’.

You have so many companies like this. They’re not cashflow positive in any way. They’re living on loans.

The AI revolution will change everything

Boll is convinced that the coming wave of AI tools will fundamentally erase whole categories of film work, and he predicts this revolution is arriving much faster than most in the industry are willing to admit.

What once required vast crews, expensive equipment, and weeks of post-production, he believes, will soon be automated and instantaneous.

My prediction is in two years you will have, you can put a script into an AI system and to get the movie out. That's what I think is in two years already happening and maybe in three or four years, it's absolutely, made in such a way that you cannot see that it's AI at all.

In a way you create your own stars. You can do the same kind of, you build your own Tom Cruise, but it's completely AI and you put him in good movies and you build him up that people actually want to pay for this guy.

Right now you still shoot movies, but thanks to digital and AI technologies, you need fewer and fewer crew to shoot movies. You don’t need actors for voices, ADR, dubbing - all of this can now be done if you push a button.

He predicts that explosions, car crashes, dangerous stunts (all the traditional centrepieces of costly action movies) will be created by algorithms, not expensive film crews.

All the ‘money shots’ will be AI. For example, the film with Armie Hammer Citizen Vigilante which is now in post-production, he almost drives into a car, the car gets away, flips over. We did that for real with the stunt team, but I assume that in two years we can do stuff like this completely with AI.

Soon you will just show the guy shooting the bazooka, but you never need to actually shoot an explosion with people flying through the air or a building collapsing. You just do that later with AI and it costs them almost nothing.

So how can indie filmmakers finance their productions?

Boll doesn't see many options left. The days of German tax shelters and DVD sales are gone. Streaming pays a fraction of what physical media once did, and crowdfunding has failed him too. He tried raising money for Postal 2 but couldn’t mobilise enough fans:

I looked into why nobody invest in Postal 2, because it would have a lot of fans, but I couldn’t reach them with the crowdfunding.

It’s a lot of work with crowdfunding to get anybody excited. You have to push and push and have the social media like working for you like crazy.

For most people, he believes, it comes down to self-funding or treating film as a passion project. The idea of a sustainable career in indie filmmaking is disappearing. Without subsidies or soft money, few projects get made.

I’m just lucky that I made so many movies and that my library creates money. I made 40 movies with Oscar-winning stars like Sir Ben Kingsley and action stars like Jason Statham, so that creates me money and with that money I can shoot movies.

Of course, that’s the only reason I continue. Film is my passion. I don’t need a Lamborghini or whatever, but I can spend a million bucks on First Shift.

I’m in film because I love making movies. I don’t play golf. I don’t need a yacht. I don’t do private jets - I flight coach. So that’s the thing. I feel okay, that’s my business. And if there are no more investors and the library creates revenues, I use that money to make more movies.

Bonus - The Uwe Boll that hasn’t yet been made

Before we finished, I asked Uwe if there was a video game franchise he’d love to make into a movie. He was quick to answer and spoke with enthusiasm about the prospect.

Grand Theft Auto.

I have the humour. I'm used to the violence. Postal showed that I know where they're coming from and that would be perfect.

The worst Grand Theft Auto film would be a studio PG 13. That would be the biggest mistake they could ever ever do.

They need like a harsh, R-rated, violent kind of political incorrect comedy. Right now I think the hardest humour comes from stand-ups and the movies are scared to do real brutal, honest, funny stuff. A totally unwoke movie.

I'm very curious how the Naked Gun turns out with Liam Neeson. It would be very interesting to see how far are they willing to go with the reboot. The thing is, the raunchy stuff like The Hangover and American Pie are kind of films where now everybody is even too scared to do.

They were, for me, very important because this is then adult entertainment, where as an adult you think it's funny. Now what's out there is more a kids entertainment. When I watch Jumanji with my kid or whatever, I think they're good movies, they're funny, but it's not what I grew up with. I used to watch Kentucky Fried Movie and Airplane. I want those movies back.

Epilogue

I’m very grateful to Uwe for his time, his thoughts, and for not challenging me to a fight.