Rutger Hauer (67) is back. He is playing beer magnate Freddy Heineken in The Heineken ontvoering (the Heineken abduction), which premiered on Thursday. He talks about it to the Volkskrant.

It’s been thirty years since Hauer appeared in a Dutch film (Spetters, 1980) and he likes it: ‘It’s so Dutch. Colourful. I asked why not do it in English but no, the makers wanted a really Dutch film. And the way those boys, the kidnappers, talk, it just wouldn’t work in another language’, Hauer says.
Hunt
‘Men hunt man then man hunts men’, is how Hauer summarises the plot of the film in which Freddy Heineken is grabbed, kept, freed and then hires a couple of security men to keep tabs on his kidnappers.
‘I never met Heineken in the flesh’, Hauer says. I played the footage there is of him hundreds of times and talked to people who knew him. Ivo Niehe interviewed him once and I watched that interview before every scene. He seems curt, and a little stiff in his movements but of course I don’t know if he was the same in his private life or when he was being held.’
Method
Hauer even found the screenplay character of Heineken a little flat. ‘It was a little cliché: the rich boss. He didn’t really come to life. That had to happen on set.’
The actor did not have to go method in order to play a man being cooped up for weeks in a small space. ‘I don’t need to spend a week in a room by myself to convey what it would be like. I imagined that he composed music perhaps, and came up with the idea to make bottles with a square base. (Heineken hoped that people in poor countries would them to build huts with).
Humour
‘Heineken had a sense of humour. That comes out in the film but there could have been a few more funny moments. I think Heineken probably realised after a while that they weren’t going to kill him. But several people told me that he was always apprehensive afterwards. That is what it does to you, it’s a kind of terrorism.’
Reputation
The release of the film has been surrounded by some unusual publicity. One of the convicted kidnappers, Willem Holleeder who is presently in prison for extortion claimed the film would damage his reputation and tried – in vain- to get he film banned.
The makers claim, however, that the film character is a mix of Holleeder and another kidnapper and is not meant as a straight depiction of him. Two of the other kidnappers have criticised the veracity of the film.
‘True crime’
Crime journalist Peter R. de Vries meanwhile is trying to get an American ‘true crime’ film version made of the kidnapping based on his book De onvoering van Alfred Heineken (The abduction of Alfred Heineken) Hauer says he would probably not accept an offer to play Heineken in the film. ‘Peter R. de Vries is saying publicly that the makers of The Heineken ontvoering may have pulled one over on him. That is just ridiculous.
The Nos suggested that part of the proceeds of the American film, like the book, could end up in the hands of the criminals. If that is really the case I don’t think the Americans will have anything more to do with it. But we shall see. Ours is a fictional version, not a documentary.’