10 Things You Didn’t Know About Starship Troopers
Director Paul Verhoeven is a modern day Voltaire. His films have been entertaining us with their graphic violence and nudity but always in a way that is drenched in satire and tongue and cheek humor that only gets better the more that you watch it. The movies can be viewed in so many ways; when I watched Starship Troopers on my 13th birthday I thought it was the second coming of Aliens but now I see it for what it is. It’s an opportunity to talk about Nazis and show naked breasts in the same film. Let’s check out 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Starship Troopers.
1. The little ferret at the beginning of the film was horrible to work with. It had three handlers on set for the short amount of time that they used it and the actors had to deal with them screaming instructions at the animal the entire time. Casper Van Dien and Neil Patrick Harris called it the “ferret from hell”.
2. Denise Richards recommended Patrick Muldoon for the character of Zander Barcalow after the filmmakers had a hard time findings an actor to cast for the role.
3. Dina Meyer was supposed to read for the role of Carmen Ibanez but decided that she wanted to read for the character of Dizzy after reading the script.
4. The first bug attack on Buenos Aires uses footage from the fires in Malibu in 1991.
5. The live fire exercise that sees the character named “Breckinridge” get shot in the head, is a bit of a joke to the cast members on the commentary track. Paul Verhoeven points out that during the live fire exercise there are people running around everywhere directly behind the shooting range.
6.Speaking of the live fire exercise scene, Breckinridge (Eric Bruskotter) was killed by an actor named Tami-Adrian George, who would later be married to Eric Bruskotter.
7. The Klendathu planet scenes were filmed when it was 104 degrees outside. They were shot in The Badlands in South Dakota.
8. The filming of Rico killing the tanker bug caused actor Casper Van Dien to be injured in multiple ways. He chipped a couple of teeth from falling from the upside down boat hull they used as the tanker base and later cracked a couple of ribs after falling onto his rifle. He spent three days essentially coughing up blood before finally getting the scene finished.
9. Paul Verhoeven never even read the novel the film is based on. It wasn’t until the movie was released that he finally talked about how he got so bored with the philosophical book and quit reading it after only a couple of chapters. 
10. Captain Dale Dye, who has worked on a number of military movies, took many of the main cast and some extras off for 11 days and put them through a mini-boot camp. He was on set for most of the film and butted heads with the crew many times over the way the soldiers talked and the way that some of the officers were portrayed.
