Fortunately my name wasn’t mentioned. I’m still living at home, thank you very much, and hope to keep it that way. THEO VAN GOGH, SPEAKING ON LOCATION WHILE MAKING HIS LAST FILM, 06/05 1. On the morning that Theo van Gogh was shot, he was cycling toward his office in the south of Amsterdam to do some postproduction work on 06/05, a Hitchcockian thriller about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, the populist outsider who almost became prime minister. The movie was a departure for Van Gogh. Thrillers hadn’t been his thing. But he had long been obsessed with Fortuyn, whose murder on May 6, 2002, provoked an extraordinary outburst of shock, grief, anger, and quasi-religious hysteria. The man who would soon become prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, not a man blessed with great imagination, reached for appropriate words to describe the situation. All he could come up with was “un-Dutch.” Van Gogh’s movie spins an elaborate conspiracy theory involving the secret service, led by a fat gay man wearing lipstick, American arms dealers, far right politicians, and a sexy animal rights activist of Turkish descent.
