Not counting the experimental crowd-sourced Entertainment Experience (2012), 78 year-old Dutch iconoclast Paul Verhoeven hadn’t directed a film since Black Book ten years ago. He’s back to his old tricks with Elle in which Isabelle Huppert plays a French businesswoman, who after being brutally raped in her home stalks her assailant. The graphic and politically incorrect psychological thriller generated the controversy familiar to many Verhoeven films when it was screened in Cannes, the same festival he debuted Basic Instinct in 1992. The director spoke to the HFPA at TIFF: “I have been trying to explain that I am never looking for provocation, but I am really looking what basically I think I want to do. And then basically I feel sometimes that, but not always, that it might be provocative, because it breaks rules and it’s against the norm, but I don’t care. (…) What happened with (Basic Instinct) in Cannes was really making Sharon Stone into a star. Isabelle Huppert is already a star. That is a different situation. Here it was basically, the film was much more important than let’s say the discovery of a new star who was Sharon Stone. I would say in the 24 hours that the film came out in France, she became a star for the next 20, 30 years. But here this is different. I hope the film becomes a star, I hope.